I tend to say I’m the most stable person I know, I tend to stay emotionally separated from the situations I’m involved in, at least in the moment that they’re happening. This week has made that more difficult. This week has seen tragedies, frustrations, and discussions of past tragedies and frustrations. There are only two of us in the house at IWPS now, so the stress level is high and neither of us really has the option to check out and choose not to participate. All week I’ve been holding back tears of sorrow and anger, and all week I’ve been wondering how Palestinians continue to live this way, tragedy on top of tragedy, and remain calm, collected, and on top of everything, nonviolent. Where does the anger go?
Last week I had a conversation with Abu Rabia (our landlord) in which, for the first time, I heard a complete account of the story of his brother Issa’s shooting and paralysis. For the first time I heard about the tear gas the army was constantly throwing into that part of the village during those weeks. For the first time I heard about the system of gathering the people and taking them to safety when the army showed up, and despite that, about Um Rabia’s 8-month pregnancy that she lost. For the first time I heard that Abu Rabia had slept on the roof the night before Issa was shot, and that another brother of his had called him to say, “Don’t sit up, the soldiers are pointing guns at you.” For the first time I heard about how Abu Rabia climbed down the side of the house in the morning and went to work in Salfit, only to get a call a few hours later that his brother had been shot and that soldiers would not let anyone (including cars or ambulances) approach him. For the first time I heard that Abu Rabia thinks the bullets may have been meant for him.
The soldiers had been scattered in the olive groves, and Issa was trying to help the kids get out of the street so no trouble would arise. Suddenly two soldiers came walking down a different street on foot and shot directly at Issa. He fell, and the soldiers essentially left him to die, not letting anyone approach him. He lived, but was paralyzed from the waist down, unable to continue his career as a strength trainer. He remembers going to the doctor once or twice in his life before his injury, and now goes a few times a month. His wife has been transformed into a nurse, his son who was born only a few months before is now 4 years old and does not remember nor will he ever remember seeing his father walk.
I sat on Abu Rabia’s couch listening to him speak, unable to open my mouth for fear the tears would just start flowing. I wanted to ask how they’re able to continue with their lives. I didn’t have to.
The next sentence out of his mouth was, “When I think back about that time, I don’t know how we continued with our lives and with our nonviolence.” And yet they continue. The next day I went down to visit Abu and Um Rabia again, only to find a tearful woman in their house asking Abu Rabia for help. Her husband has been dead for years, and the older of her two sons (who had some mental disabilities) was shot and killed by an Israeli soldier in 2002. Last week, on the day I saw her in Abu Rabia’s house, her younger son, who also has mental disabilities, had gone to his older brother’s tomb to visit. When he reached down to place a flower on the spot, a dumdum bullet that had presumably been left there by soldiers (intentionally or not) exploded and entered his hand and his leg. He was rushed to a hospital in Qalqilya, where the doctors began operations that are going to cost far more money than this woman has. She had come to Abu Rabia for help because of his connections with the Palestinian Authority.
A few more days pass, and we come to the biggest tragedy of the week. I was outside our house, saying goodbye to Issa as he was getting ready to leave for an appointment at the hospital, and trying to understand as a woman took me aside and told me a member of the family had just been arrested at the entrance of Hares. And then Abu Rabia called: “There were people shot in Deir Ballut,” he said. Deir Ballut is a beautiful village in the Salfit district, widely known for its variety of crops and its wonderful people. The Wall is currently being built through their land, and they’ve held demonstrations against the Wall, but there had been no demonstration that morning. “People were shot?” I asked. Through phone calls and a visit, we began to piece together the story, at least from the perspective of the Palestinian witnesses: Apparently, several families (all part of the same larger family) were working on their land. Five of the men walked down a few meters from where their families were, and they could see the bulldozers destroying their land below, as they do everyday. The men yelled up to the guards, who were standing on a hill at least 300 meters away, something along the lines of, “This is our land, why are you destroying it?” The private security guards opened fire, and four of the five men were hit – in the chest, shoulder, butt, and leg. They range in age from 24-58. Everyone swears there was not one stone thrown (not that it could have reached so far anyway), and people were completely in shock that these guards, most of whom they knew from previous days, had fired directly at them. There were no soldiers or police present at the time. [As I write, two days later, the village is demonstrating, and as far as I know, all four men are still alive, two in hospitals in Israel, and two in hospitals in Ramallah. The fact that two were taken to Israel means that Israeli authorities know they did something wrong.]
We showed up on the scene to find a few of the older women wailing, others trying to comfort them (or, at times, force them to stop – it seemed they didn’t want to show any weakness in front of the soldiers who were now there). Some of the women had made it to the rocks below, or hadn’t left since the incident happened a few hours earlier, but the soldiers were blocking everyone else from going down to that group. They were playing games, telling people to move back from one rock to the next, to be 5 meters away, 10 meters away, and so on. If someone wanted to go down below, the soldier in charge would say, “If you get one person to come back, you can go down.” One of the women said, “What are you doing here? This is our land.” One of the soldiers, who seemed to be having a good time and was actually laughing most of the time the women were crying, responded, “No, this is our land.” “The government says it’s our land, so it’s our land,” said the soldier in charge. “I do what my government tells me.” “You can think for yourself,” I replied. “When I take off this uniform and put down this gun, I can think for myself,” he responded. “Not now.”
“What will you say to your wives and children when you go home?” screamed one woman in desperation. Another yelled, “If our sons die, they will be martyrs, they will go to heaven! If you die you will go to hell!” Most of the soldiers didn’t speak Arabic, and most of the villagers didn’t speak Hebrew, so when the soldiers wanted to communicate with the people they would pull aside one of the Hebrew-speaking men and ask him to translate for the group. This man, the brother of one of the people shot, was himself covered in blood from having carried his brother to the ambulance. He looked dazed and exhausted, and when the soldiers told him, “If you care about these people, tell them to move back,” he did as told.
When I finally made my way down to the scene of the shooting, I found women praying, kissing the ground, sitting and crying. At first I didn’t see the blood. Then Anna pointed to a rock, and then another one, and suddenly everywhere I looked I saw drops of blood, or puddles of blood on the scarves and jackets the women were clutching. I started to feel sick, wanting desperately to know where the security guards were now, what they were thinking, what they had been thinking as they opened fire on the small group of unarmed Palestinian men.
A few minutes later the press showed up – people from Reuters, AP, and French Press. All the journalists were Palestinian, and apparently they had been held up for a few minutes at the top of the hill by soldiers who told them, “You’re Palestinians first, then you’re journalists.” They were finally allowed down, and the women picked up the blood-soaked clothing one more time for the photographs. We headed back to the village, people still waiting to hear news from their family members, and Anna promised she’d be back later to sleep in the village that night.
If there’s any positive story I can tell this week, it’s a bittersweet one. It is positive in its current implications, but a commemoration of a tragedy: the massacre at Deir Yassin. On April 9, 1948, members of two different Jewish Zionist terrorist groups broke into Palestinians’ homes in the middle of the night and killed between 110-140 people. This was not the only massacre of the time, and probably not the biggest, but it was the one people heard about, the one that caused so many thousands of Palestinians to flee their homes in fear, not realizing that 57 years later, they still would not be allowed to return.
Zochrot, one of my favorite Israeli organizations, planned this trip to Deir Yassin with a group of refugees called Deir Yassin Remembered. Most of the village’s land has been taken by the modern Jewish religious neighborhood Har Nof, and the remaining buildings have become part of a hospital in the neighborhood. We walked towards the land, with survivors, organizers from the sponsoring groups, and Mordecai Vanunu (the Israeli who disclosed Israel’s nuclear weapons program and spent almost 20 years in jail) leading the crowd. We carried white flowers, one to represent each of the 93 victims’ names that are known. The names were written in Arabic and Hebrew on placards. At first I thought there were only a few Palestinians in the crowd, but as I started hearing Arabic spoken all around me, I realized I had only been counting head scarves. The crowd was a mix of Israeli citizens and internationals, and the Israeli citizens were a mix of Jews and Palestinians.
We were watched by the young orthodox Jewish children from their playground as we approached the area set aside for us. Speeches began, and singing – mostly songs whose lyrics were Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry. Translation was constant, Arabic to Hebrew and vice versa on stage, and then Hebrew to English in the audience for a small group of us sitting in the back. One survivor of the massacre was there, and she began to tell stories, personal stories about many of the killings. She talked about the good relations the Palestinians and Jews had previously, how they had been friends, how she doesn’t know what the Palestinians could have done to the Jews to make them do this to her family. She talked about pregnant women being sliced through the stomach and killed; old men thrown off the roofs of houses; seven young boys sleeping in bed who were rounded up, taken outside, lined up, and shot; a few members of her family (herself included) who were given the choice of whether they wanted to be shot or stabbed to death, only to be saved at the last minute by one soldier who said, “Don’t kill them, let them go.” This is how she escaped, along with the other survivors of the village who were put on a truck and shipped out, away from their village where they’d been for so many centuries. Still they cannot go back. Even as we looked down towards what was Deir Yassin, the modern-day hospital was enclosed by a fence that we could not go through.
The survivor sang a song, and the lyrics went something like this: “They put a mountain between us… I wish it could become sand and disappear…” Between whom? I wondered. Jews and Palestinians? Palestinians and their family members? Both? “We need everyone in the world to know what happened in Deir Yassin,” she closed by saying, and added that she still had the newspaper articles from the time about her family members who were killed. She said this with such urgency, trying to convince a world that has deliberately remembered certain massacres and forgotten others, that we can forget none. That the way to peace is not to forget the past and move on, but to acknowledge the past and move on. As if to spite her, the group of Israeli kids from Har Nof, instructed by an adult, had begun to tear up the booklets that said “Remember Deir Yassin.” I tried to take a picture and one said, “Are you going to put this in the paper?” He then covered his face with a torn booklet, put his middle finger up in front of it, and said, “Put this in the paper.” [It’s not in the paper, but you can see it with my other photos online.]
I was sad to see the boys’ reaction, to see them laughing at others’ pain, to see them denying the biggest catastrophe that has ever happened to the Palestinian people. At the same time, I think it’s good that they were exposed to this, good that they saw Palestinians who were from the place where they now lived, who not so long ago were kicked off their land by some of these kids’ grandparents. As disappointing and disgusting as the boys’ reaction was, the fact that so many Jewish Israelis were there to remember and acknowledge the sordid history of Zionism was just as incredible. First the tragedy needs to be exposed, then acknowledged, and then hopefully, someday, dealt with justly. If any people should know the importance of this, it is certainly we Jews.
Friday, April 08, 2005
Saturday, April 02, 2005
Tidbits of Creativity
Things have been somewhat calm around us this week, and the creative energy continues to flow. I wonder if the slight lightening of the occupation in this area gives people the space to be more creative and hopeful. I used to think only desperation would breed the kind of resistance needed to end the occupation, but it seemed to me last year that as bad as things got, the people in the West Bank continued to repeat the mantra, “At least it isn’t Gaza,” or sometimes, “At least it isn’t Iraq.” There was always the fear of losing even more. It’s probably impossible to analyze social change in the present and with such limited experience as I have, but whatever the reason, I myself am seeing more creativity than I have in the past.
The situation has not improved everywhere. In Hebron and the surrounding areas, fanatical settlers continue to hold the city hostage with their presence and their violence. Last Wednesday, Palestinians discovered poison pellets spread around their land adjacent to an Israeli settlement. Several sheep and other animals have died, and dozens more are sick. The police took a report, but it is unlikely that they will actually try to find the people who did this. The next day, international workers who are in the Hebron region to provide a protective presence for villagers were attacked by a gang of settlers, one of whom was sporting a Halloween mask with a cranium on it. The internationals were subsequently arrested for being attacked, while the settlers went home. The upshot is that the following day in court, the judge let the internationals go and stated that international presence in the region is especially important because of the settler violence.
Moving north into the Ramallah area, the village of Bil’in continues to struggle against the Wall, and continues to be terrorized by the Israeli army. My favorite example of creativity this week comes from Bil’in: A few nights ago, villagers decided they were tired of the nightly army incursions, and called for a volleyball game from 11pm – 3am. Almost 20 internationals and Israelis joined a much larger group of villagers as they reclaimed control of their village and their land. I only wish I had been there.
My next piece of exciting news from this week comes from Jenin. I ran into a Palestinian from Tulkarem whom I had met last year. He’s studying and living in Jenin now, and has started a group at his university that deals with issues of nonviolence and conflict resolution. They’re currently working on a campaign to get the university to boycott Israeli products, particularly Tapuzina, the Israeli juice that apparently has a preservative in it that is banned in many countries. So it’s a focused campaign, and is both political and environmental. The group is working on setting up meetings with young Israeli activists, and is happy to receive internationals as well. I’m sure I’ll write more about this once I see them in action.
And then we come to Salfit. Wednesday was Palestinian Land Day, which commemorates the March 30, 1976 Israeli army killing of 6 Palestinians with Israeli citizenship who were protesting the theft of their land. Consequently, Wednesday saw at least 5 or 6 demonstrations in the West Bank and Israel (and possibly Gaza, though I didn’t hear anything specifically about Gaza). We marched with Women for Life, a Salfit women’s group that formed in part to oppose the impending Wall in this region, to a polluted valley called Wadi Qana. Surrounded by settlements and outposts, this village was evacuated in the 1980s and most of the land and water has been stolen or completely contaminated by sewage from the settlements. The group of women was small, but the number of girls made me happy. When the army came to see what we were doing and parked at the top of the valley, it was the girls who faced them and began to chant and sing in their direction. Learning from their mothers.
Friday, in another Land Day demonstration, the village of AzZawiya hosted a march and prayers on their land. The old path of the Wall would have seen AzZawiya lose 90% of their land – it’s now somewhere between 50 and 70%. The villagers, through demonstrations and court decisions, are trying to get that number to approach zero, although hundreds of trees have already been destroyed to create the Wall’s path.
When we began to march on Friday, we fully expected the army to stop us with tear gas and sound bombs before we reached the land. But as we continued to march, flags of all political parties waving in the breeze, we saw the village of Kufr Qassem getting closer and closer. [Kufr Qassem is a Palestinian village just over the Green Line, technically part of Israel since 1948. Families in AzZawiya/Kufr Qassem were split by the 1948 war, and all the land between the villages is AzZawiya’s land.]
We reached the path of the Wall, the flattened rocky dirt that had previously been an olive grove. Villagers scattered for a few minutes to place flags on the tops of hills of cleared land (reminding me of Sharon’s message to the settlers last year to “claim every hilltop” before it was too late and Israel was forced to make some concessions). The sense of triumph was palpable as one of the leaders picked up a megaphone and began calling the group back together for prayer. The tone became serious, somber, sincere. I had seen pictures of prayer actions before, but I’d never attended one, and it was simply amazing. The call and response, the ritual, the chanting: all were both mesmerizing and familiar to me, being not unlike Jewish prayer I grew up with. Before Friday, I had thought that the idea of praying on the land was partially a media event, but when it actually began, I felt almost ashamed to photograph the men in prayer. As they put their faces to the earth, I wondered whether this would be the last time they would do so in this spot.
The prayer ended as quickly as it began, and people once again began to march, this time towards a couple trailers that were apparently brought there by settlers a few years ago after the army training base in the same spot closed down. Suddenly there was a lot of noise, and 11-year-old Andaleeb grabbed my arm in fear, whispering “jeysh, jeysh” (army, army). On my other side, an older Palestinian woman began to wail: this was her land, she cried. She had planted it, watched it grow, tended to it over so many years, and now it’s gone, just like that. I didn’t understand all of her words, but her gestures and emotions were unmistakable. Another villager explained that last year right after the construction began, this woman had dreamt that something was happening to her land, and walked several kilometers in the middle of the night to find that the bulldozers had started all-night work in AzZawiya. She slept on her land.
After a minute of confusion, we realized the noise was not coming from the army, who still hadn’t made a presence at the demonstration, but from Palestinians who had begun pounding on the metal trailers. Andaleeb calmed down, and we approached just in time to see one of the trailers tip over onto its side. A cheer rose from the crowd, and just as excitement began to sweep me away, the older woman, still next to me, cried “fadi!” (empty). They can knock over all the trailers they want, she said, but it won’t bring back the destroyed land. I felt slightly guilty for leaving her a minute later, but I didn’t want to miss what came next: The villagers quickly worked together to gather olive branches (probably from their destroyed trees) to use as kindling as they tried to set one of the trailers on fire. While they didn’t completely burn down the trailers, the damage was done, and people marched on along the path of the Wall.
Only at the very end, as we stood at the top of a small mountain, did several jeeps enter the area from below. Boys stood on a cliff, stones in hand, but as the jeeps drove past without stopping, the boys put their stones down and we began to walk back into the village, exhausted and delighted.
We were shuttled back to a Palestinian’s house with Israeli activists, the mayor of AzZawiya, and several other villagers. A few minutes after entering, someone asked if anyone spoke Spanish, and I immediately began chatting with the woman who lived there in a mix of broken Spanish and broken Arabic (broken on my end, that is – she’s fluent in both). She’s from Brazil, she explained, but speaks Spanish as well as Portuguese because she lived on the border with Uruguay. She returned to Palestine in 2000, after most of the Latin American Palestinians I know who came back during the Oslo period with hope that Palestinians would soon have an autonomous state. I asked her if she had Palestinian ID, familiar with the plight of so many who cannot get this ID and are technically living “illegally” in their villages, having come to Palestine (through Israel) with a foreign passport and a visa that expired about 10 years ago. No, she answered, she doesn’t have Palestinian ID, she has Israeli ID. Now I was thoroughly confused. Apparently she was living and studying (or working?) in Kufr Qassem for a while after returning. I love stories like this, stories that cross national boundaries and render Israeli ethnic-based law meaningless.
As we were leaving the house, all the Palestinian leaders were talking about the upcoming local elections (May 5). We asked Nada, a wonderful older woman who says she lives alone and has never been married because she loves her freedom, if she had registered to run for the village council. No, she replied, I’m too smart for that. I’ll work for the Palestinian secret police, the Shabak, the CIA.
One of our female friends here in the village of Hares has just registered to run for office. Um Fadi is a crucial member of Women for Life, and is currently the IWPS Arabic teacher. Our conversation during our last lesson ranged from the upcoming elections, to an analysis of Wednesday’s women’s demonstration, to Um Fadi’s history and travels. She spent many years teaching in Saudi Arabia because her husband had to be there for his job, and she gave birth to her children there. “Do they have Saudi citizenship?” I asked. “No,” she replied, “it’s mamnua” (forbidden). I asked her what she thought of this law, that Palestinians cannot get citizenship in most Arab countries. “It’s good,” she replied. “Palestine is our land, I was only a guest in Saudi Arabia.” “But shouldn’t you have the choice to get citizenship elsewhere,” I asked, “without having to give up your claim to Palestine?” She answered emphatically: “If they offered me citizenship elsewhere, I wouldn’t take it. I’m Palestinian.” I pressed once more: “But shouldn’t that be your choice, and not the government’s?” We talked about the political reason for the law, that if other Arab countries gave Palestinians citizenship, Israel would use it to say, “Look, Palestinians can go there, they don’t need to be here.” On the other hand, I pointed out, now Israel uses the argument, “Look, the other Arab countries don’t treat the Palestinians well, so why should we have to?” At this Um Fadi became more animated than I’ve ever seen her as she answered, “Because this is our land!” She then added with a smile, but probably only half-jokingly, “If someone said that to me, I’d choke them.”
Sometimes I think it’s humor that keeps people going here. I’ll close with a story from today: We went with a couple Israelis to meet a Palestinian activist in a nearby village. It was raining slightly, and our shoes were muddy as we hesitantly approached his house, trying to wipe our feet as much as possible before entering. “Don’t worry about it,” he said in Hebrew, “come in.” Smiling, he added, “It’s not only in my house that Jews are dirty, it’s all over the territories.” We shared a laugh, followed by tea, coffee, and conversation.
Let the humor, camaraderie, and creativity continue, and let the occupation fall apart at its seams.
The situation has not improved everywhere. In Hebron and the surrounding areas, fanatical settlers continue to hold the city hostage with their presence and their violence. Last Wednesday, Palestinians discovered poison pellets spread around their land adjacent to an Israeli settlement. Several sheep and other animals have died, and dozens more are sick. The police took a report, but it is unlikely that they will actually try to find the people who did this. The next day, international workers who are in the Hebron region to provide a protective presence for villagers were attacked by a gang of settlers, one of whom was sporting a Halloween mask with a cranium on it. The internationals were subsequently arrested for being attacked, while the settlers went home. The upshot is that the following day in court, the judge let the internationals go and stated that international presence in the region is especially important because of the settler violence.
Moving north into the Ramallah area, the village of Bil’in continues to struggle against the Wall, and continues to be terrorized by the Israeli army. My favorite example of creativity this week comes from Bil’in: A few nights ago, villagers decided they were tired of the nightly army incursions, and called for a volleyball game from 11pm – 3am. Almost 20 internationals and Israelis joined a much larger group of villagers as they reclaimed control of their village and their land. I only wish I had been there.
My next piece of exciting news from this week comes from Jenin. I ran into a Palestinian from Tulkarem whom I had met last year. He’s studying and living in Jenin now, and has started a group at his university that deals with issues of nonviolence and conflict resolution. They’re currently working on a campaign to get the university to boycott Israeli products, particularly Tapuzina, the Israeli juice that apparently has a preservative in it that is banned in many countries. So it’s a focused campaign, and is both political and environmental. The group is working on setting up meetings with young Israeli activists, and is happy to receive internationals as well. I’m sure I’ll write more about this once I see them in action.
And then we come to Salfit. Wednesday was Palestinian Land Day, which commemorates the March 30, 1976 Israeli army killing of 6 Palestinians with Israeli citizenship who were protesting the theft of their land. Consequently, Wednesday saw at least 5 or 6 demonstrations in the West Bank and Israel (and possibly Gaza, though I didn’t hear anything specifically about Gaza). We marched with Women for Life, a Salfit women’s group that formed in part to oppose the impending Wall in this region, to a polluted valley called Wadi Qana. Surrounded by settlements and outposts, this village was evacuated in the 1980s and most of the land and water has been stolen or completely contaminated by sewage from the settlements. The group of women was small, but the number of girls made me happy. When the army came to see what we were doing and parked at the top of the valley, it was the girls who faced them and began to chant and sing in their direction. Learning from their mothers.
Friday, in another Land Day demonstration, the village of AzZawiya hosted a march and prayers on their land. The old path of the Wall would have seen AzZawiya lose 90% of their land – it’s now somewhere between 50 and 70%. The villagers, through demonstrations and court decisions, are trying to get that number to approach zero, although hundreds of trees have already been destroyed to create the Wall’s path.
When we began to march on Friday, we fully expected the army to stop us with tear gas and sound bombs before we reached the land. But as we continued to march, flags of all political parties waving in the breeze, we saw the village of Kufr Qassem getting closer and closer. [Kufr Qassem is a Palestinian village just over the Green Line, technically part of Israel since 1948. Families in AzZawiya/Kufr Qassem were split by the 1948 war, and all the land between the villages is AzZawiya’s land.]
We reached the path of the Wall, the flattened rocky dirt that had previously been an olive grove. Villagers scattered for a few minutes to place flags on the tops of hills of cleared land (reminding me of Sharon’s message to the settlers last year to “claim every hilltop” before it was too late and Israel was forced to make some concessions). The sense of triumph was palpable as one of the leaders picked up a megaphone and began calling the group back together for prayer. The tone became serious, somber, sincere. I had seen pictures of prayer actions before, but I’d never attended one, and it was simply amazing. The call and response, the ritual, the chanting: all were both mesmerizing and familiar to me, being not unlike Jewish prayer I grew up with. Before Friday, I had thought that the idea of praying on the land was partially a media event, but when it actually began, I felt almost ashamed to photograph the men in prayer. As they put their faces to the earth, I wondered whether this would be the last time they would do so in this spot.
The prayer ended as quickly as it began, and people once again began to march, this time towards a couple trailers that were apparently brought there by settlers a few years ago after the army training base in the same spot closed down. Suddenly there was a lot of noise, and 11-year-old Andaleeb grabbed my arm in fear, whispering “jeysh, jeysh” (army, army). On my other side, an older Palestinian woman began to wail: this was her land, she cried. She had planted it, watched it grow, tended to it over so many years, and now it’s gone, just like that. I didn’t understand all of her words, but her gestures and emotions were unmistakable. Another villager explained that last year right after the construction began, this woman had dreamt that something was happening to her land, and walked several kilometers in the middle of the night to find that the bulldozers had started all-night work in AzZawiya. She slept on her land.
After a minute of confusion, we realized the noise was not coming from the army, who still hadn’t made a presence at the demonstration, but from Palestinians who had begun pounding on the metal trailers. Andaleeb calmed down, and we approached just in time to see one of the trailers tip over onto its side. A cheer rose from the crowd, and just as excitement began to sweep me away, the older woman, still next to me, cried “fadi!” (empty). They can knock over all the trailers they want, she said, but it won’t bring back the destroyed land. I felt slightly guilty for leaving her a minute later, but I didn’t want to miss what came next: The villagers quickly worked together to gather olive branches (probably from their destroyed trees) to use as kindling as they tried to set one of the trailers on fire. While they didn’t completely burn down the trailers, the damage was done, and people marched on along the path of the Wall.
Only at the very end, as we stood at the top of a small mountain, did several jeeps enter the area from below. Boys stood on a cliff, stones in hand, but as the jeeps drove past without stopping, the boys put their stones down and we began to walk back into the village, exhausted and delighted.
We were shuttled back to a Palestinian’s house with Israeli activists, the mayor of AzZawiya, and several other villagers. A few minutes after entering, someone asked if anyone spoke Spanish, and I immediately began chatting with the woman who lived there in a mix of broken Spanish and broken Arabic (broken on my end, that is – she’s fluent in both). She’s from Brazil, she explained, but speaks Spanish as well as Portuguese because she lived on the border with Uruguay. She returned to Palestine in 2000, after most of the Latin American Palestinians I know who came back during the Oslo period with hope that Palestinians would soon have an autonomous state. I asked her if she had Palestinian ID, familiar with the plight of so many who cannot get this ID and are technically living “illegally” in their villages, having come to Palestine (through Israel) with a foreign passport and a visa that expired about 10 years ago. No, she answered, she doesn’t have Palestinian ID, she has Israeli ID. Now I was thoroughly confused. Apparently she was living and studying (or working?) in Kufr Qassem for a while after returning. I love stories like this, stories that cross national boundaries and render Israeli ethnic-based law meaningless.
As we were leaving the house, all the Palestinian leaders were talking about the upcoming local elections (May 5). We asked Nada, a wonderful older woman who says she lives alone and has never been married because she loves her freedom, if she had registered to run for the village council. No, she replied, I’m too smart for that. I’ll work for the Palestinian secret police, the Shabak, the CIA.
One of our female friends here in the village of Hares has just registered to run for office. Um Fadi is a crucial member of Women for Life, and is currently the IWPS Arabic teacher. Our conversation during our last lesson ranged from the upcoming elections, to an analysis of Wednesday’s women’s demonstration, to Um Fadi’s history and travels. She spent many years teaching in Saudi Arabia because her husband had to be there for his job, and she gave birth to her children there. “Do they have Saudi citizenship?” I asked. “No,” she replied, “it’s mamnua” (forbidden). I asked her what she thought of this law, that Palestinians cannot get citizenship in most Arab countries. “It’s good,” she replied. “Palestine is our land, I was only a guest in Saudi Arabia.” “But shouldn’t you have the choice to get citizenship elsewhere,” I asked, “without having to give up your claim to Palestine?” She answered emphatically: “If they offered me citizenship elsewhere, I wouldn’t take it. I’m Palestinian.” I pressed once more: “But shouldn’t that be your choice, and not the government’s?” We talked about the political reason for the law, that if other Arab countries gave Palestinians citizenship, Israel would use it to say, “Look, Palestinians can go there, they don’t need to be here.” On the other hand, I pointed out, now Israel uses the argument, “Look, the other Arab countries don’t treat the Palestinians well, so why should we have to?” At this Um Fadi became more animated than I’ve ever seen her as she answered, “Because this is our land!” She then added with a smile, but probably only half-jokingly, “If someone said that to me, I’d choke them.”
Sometimes I think it’s humor that keeps people going here. I’ll close with a story from today: We went with a couple Israelis to meet a Palestinian activist in a nearby village. It was raining slightly, and our shoes were muddy as we hesitantly approached his house, trying to wipe our feet as much as possible before entering. “Don’t worry about it,” he said in Hebrew, “come in.” Smiling, he added, “It’s not only in my house that Jews are dirty, it’s all over the territories.” We shared a laugh, followed by tea, coffee, and conversation.
Let the humor, camaraderie, and creativity continue, and let the occupation fall apart at its seams.
Sunday, March 27, 2005
The Spirit of the People
I’m thinking this week that if there’s anything that can help improve this situation, it’s certainly the spirit of the people. The occupation continues, stronger in some places at some times, less noticeable in other places at other times. The village of Marda has been targeted again in the past few days, with soldiers uprooting trees in the middle of the night, throwing sound bombs in the village, and creating checkpoints on a cold afternoon and not letting people return to their homes. It was either a random attack or, if a few boys actually threw stones at jeeps as some soldiers claimed, collective punishment. How anyone can deny this is beyond me (The case of the uprooting of trees is an absurdly clear example. We asked the soldiers if the trees had thrown stones on the road. “No, but the people who own the trees probably know the kids who did”).
So the occupation continues, and the destruction of land in the Salfit region to make way for the Wall also continues. The villagers of Deir Balut have had enough, and on Thursday a few of them went out to their land in an apparently spontaneous action, and successfully stopped the bulldozers from working. One Palestinian was arrested and later returned. In response, the people decided to have a demonstration the following day. We found out about this incident from three different sources, all of whom told us that “the people” want to have a demo. We waited to send out the press release about it until we were sure the mayor knew, but it was wonderful that it was truly a people’s desire, bottom-up resistance rather than top-down.
So we joined the villagers on Friday. The army was ready – they entered the village before the demonstration even began, and soldiers chatted nonchalantly with villagers until just before we started marching. The normality of the situation struck me. Everyone knew what would ensue shortly, that the people would march as a group toward their land that is being destroyed, and the army would intercept them with violence. And this did happen, to some degree. But there was also an air of spontaneity in the architecture of the day. The soldiers seemed less excited about using tear gas, sound bombs, and rubber bullets than I’m used to (though they did use all of these at various points). There were many times during which small groups of Palestinians, international and Israeli supporters, and press would be gathered and a group of soldiers gathered nearby to impede movement, but the scattered nature of the groups seemed to hold creative potential that I usually don’t see. I stood on top of a stone wall watching the whole scene at one point: the men praying on the land (guarded by soldiers), the women who had pushed past the jeeps to sit further up along the road (guarded by soldiers), several small groups of people at various spots dotting the road, and the boys in the distance setting up a roadblock (including an overturned truck) so the soldiers could not pass, then scattering throughout the olive groves as a jeep approached and then threw a tear gas canister directly at a house near where some people had run. It was strange, watching the scene from above, being there and not being there at the same time, feeling safe as I was standing close to so many soldiers who seemed to have no interest other than to watch the same scene I was watching.
And there was time to talk. I managed to squeeze past the soldiers with Fatima to walk half a kilometer up the road to where we could see the bulldozers working in the distance. She told me her youngest daughter Baraa (9 years old) had begged her to come that morning, but Fatima was too scared. “She has no fear,” said Fatima. “She’s like you,” I responded. “Yes,” Fatima said, “but she’s small, and I’m afraid for her. The soldiers won’t care that she is young.” I wonder what it must be like to be a parent here, in the midst of such random violence. Is there really a way to protect your children? And yet parents try, desperately and unsuccessfully at times, but they always try.
Earlier in the day a soldier had asked me if I didn’t have anything better to do than to come to Deir Balut. I returned the question. Another soldier asked, “Why are you here?” I responded, “To support the Palestinians as they try to save their land.” “And I’m here to oppose them,” he responded, not unkindly, just matter-of-factly. I began to think, “Will this occupation ever end?” when again the villagers of Deir Balut breathed new life into the demonstration. A few soldiers were talking to them in Hebrew, and they were responding in Arabic and English, saying “We don’t speak Hebrew and we don’t want to speak Hebrew. Talk to us in our language!” At the same time a soldier was trying to pass through a narrow space between a jeep and a stone wall, and two Palestinian women stood in his way saying, “Fish tariq!” (There’s no road). Using the same phrasing as the soldiers, they forced him to turn around and go around the jeep a different way. A minor victory.
So the Palestinian spirits were high on Friday, and the Israeli activists’ spirits seemed strong as well. Two of them engaged in a political/ideological argument with a group of soldiers for about 15 minutes, at the end of which they were pulled away by a Palestinian friend who was plotting to release another Israeli activist who was being detained 100 meters away. I do not always find ideological arguments with soldiers very useful, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that the soldiers continued the discussion after the activists left. They were all trying to comfort each other, to justify their presence there: “I’m on the left, too. I voted for Meretz. But here it doesn’t matter, I follow my government’s orders.” “Yes, yes, it doesn’t matter.” … But at least they were thinking. At least they felt the need to justify themselves, even to each other.
The epitome of good Israeli spirit this week has come in the form of a letter from a group of high school students who feel that they cannot and should not justify their presence in the occupied territories to anyone. These 250 kids sent a passionate letter to Ariel Sharon and others, declaring their refusal to serve in the Israeli military. The letter follows.
To: Ariel Sharon, Prime Minister Lt. General Shaul Mofaz, Minister of Defence Lt. General Moshe Yaalon, Chief of General Staff Limor Livnat, Minister of Education
We the undersigned, Israeli girls and boys, believing in the values of democracy, humanism and pluralism, hereby declare that we shall refuse to take part in the occupation and repression policy adopted by the Government of Israel. Our backgrounds are diverse, but we are all agreed that these values are the bases of a just society. Every human being has the right to life, equality, dignity and freedom. We are bound by our conscience and as citizens of Israel to act in defence of these rights, by refusing to participate in the occupation and repression policy.
The occupation leads to inhumanity and to a massive infringement of the right to life. It tramples on the basic rights of millions of people and inflicts daily carnage and suffering. It leads to the confiscation of lands, to mass destruction of homes and public buildings, to arrests and killings without trial, to victimization and murder of innocents, to hunger, to a denial of medical assistance, to collective punishment, and to the building and expansion of settlements and the negation of any chance of normal living both in the occupied territories and in Israel itself. This flagrant violation of human rights is opposed to our view of the world, as well as being in contravention of international conventions signed and ratified by Israel.
The occupation contributes nothing to the security of the state and its citizens but on the contrary, it only aggravates it. It deepens the despair and fans the hatred among the Palestinians, feeds terrorism and widens the river of blood between the two sides. True security will only be accomplished by ending the occupation, dismantling the wall of Apartheid around the Palestinians and striving for a just peace agreement between the state of Israel and the leadership of the Palestinian people as well as the Arab world. The present policy is not a result of a military necessity, but the outcome of a nationalistic-Messianic fantasy.
The occupation has corrupted Israel, turning it into a militaristic, racist, chauvinistic and violent society. Israel is wasting its resources on the perpetuation of the occupation and repression in the territories, while hundreds of thousands of Israelis live in shameful poverty. In recent years Israeli citizens have experienced a deterioration of all public services. Education, medicine, welfare, pensions, everything to do with the well being of the citizenry has been neglected and sacrificed for the continued existence of settlements which the majority of the population wishes to be evacuated. We cannot stand idly facing this situation, which amounts to a “targeted liquidation” of the principle of equality.
We wish to live in a society which pursues justice, upholding equal rights to every single citizen. The occupation and repression policy is an obstacle to the realization of this vision, therefore we shall refuse to take part in it. We wish to contribute to society in an alternative way, which does not involve harming other human beings.
We call on all young people facing mobilization and on all members of the Israeli army to weigh again whether to risk their lives in the service of this repressive and destructive policy.
We believe that there is another way.
Source: www.shministim.org
Send messages of support to: shministim@gmail.com
So the occupation continues, and the destruction of land in the Salfit region to make way for the Wall also continues. The villagers of Deir Balut have had enough, and on Thursday a few of them went out to their land in an apparently spontaneous action, and successfully stopped the bulldozers from working. One Palestinian was arrested and later returned. In response, the people decided to have a demonstration the following day. We found out about this incident from three different sources, all of whom told us that “the people” want to have a demo. We waited to send out the press release about it until we were sure the mayor knew, but it was wonderful that it was truly a people’s desire, bottom-up resistance rather than top-down.
So we joined the villagers on Friday. The army was ready – they entered the village before the demonstration even began, and soldiers chatted nonchalantly with villagers until just before we started marching. The normality of the situation struck me. Everyone knew what would ensue shortly, that the people would march as a group toward their land that is being destroyed, and the army would intercept them with violence. And this did happen, to some degree. But there was also an air of spontaneity in the architecture of the day. The soldiers seemed less excited about using tear gas, sound bombs, and rubber bullets than I’m used to (though they did use all of these at various points). There were many times during which small groups of Palestinians, international and Israeli supporters, and press would be gathered and a group of soldiers gathered nearby to impede movement, but the scattered nature of the groups seemed to hold creative potential that I usually don’t see. I stood on top of a stone wall watching the whole scene at one point: the men praying on the land (guarded by soldiers), the women who had pushed past the jeeps to sit further up along the road (guarded by soldiers), several small groups of people at various spots dotting the road, and the boys in the distance setting up a roadblock (including an overturned truck) so the soldiers could not pass, then scattering throughout the olive groves as a jeep approached and then threw a tear gas canister directly at a house near where some people had run. It was strange, watching the scene from above, being there and not being there at the same time, feeling safe as I was standing close to so many soldiers who seemed to have no interest other than to watch the same scene I was watching.
And there was time to talk. I managed to squeeze past the soldiers with Fatima to walk half a kilometer up the road to where we could see the bulldozers working in the distance. She told me her youngest daughter Baraa (9 years old) had begged her to come that morning, but Fatima was too scared. “She has no fear,” said Fatima. “She’s like you,” I responded. “Yes,” Fatima said, “but she’s small, and I’m afraid for her. The soldiers won’t care that she is young.” I wonder what it must be like to be a parent here, in the midst of such random violence. Is there really a way to protect your children? And yet parents try, desperately and unsuccessfully at times, but they always try.
Earlier in the day a soldier had asked me if I didn’t have anything better to do than to come to Deir Balut. I returned the question. Another soldier asked, “Why are you here?” I responded, “To support the Palestinians as they try to save their land.” “And I’m here to oppose them,” he responded, not unkindly, just matter-of-factly. I began to think, “Will this occupation ever end?” when again the villagers of Deir Balut breathed new life into the demonstration. A few soldiers were talking to them in Hebrew, and they were responding in Arabic and English, saying “We don’t speak Hebrew and we don’t want to speak Hebrew. Talk to us in our language!” At the same time a soldier was trying to pass through a narrow space between a jeep and a stone wall, and two Palestinian women stood in his way saying, “Fish tariq!” (There’s no road). Using the same phrasing as the soldiers, they forced him to turn around and go around the jeep a different way. A minor victory.
So the Palestinian spirits were high on Friday, and the Israeli activists’ spirits seemed strong as well. Two of them engaged in a political/ideological argument with a group of soldiers for about 15 minutes, at the end of which they were pulled away by a Palestinian friend who was plotting to release another Israeli activist who was being detained 100 meters away. I do not always find ideological arguments with soldiers very useful, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that the soldiers continued the discussion after the activists left. They were all trying to comfort each other, to justify their presence there: “I’m on the left, too. I voted for Meretz. But here it doesn’t matter, I follow my government’s orders.” “Yes, yes, it doesn’t matter.” … But at least they were thinking. At least they felt the need to justify themselves, even to each other.
The epitome of good Israeli spirit this week has come in the form of a letter from a group of high school students who feel that they cannot and should not justify their presence in the occupied territories to anyone. These 250 kids sent a passionate letter to Ariel Sharon and others, declaring their refusal to serve in the Israeli military. The letter follows.
To: Ariel Sharon, Prime Minister Lt. General Shaul Mofaz, Minister of Defence Lt. General Moshe Yaalon, Chief of General Staff Limor Livnat, Minister of Education
We the undersigned, Israeli girls and boys, believing in the values of democracy, humanism and pluralism, hereby declare that we shall refuse to take part in the occupation and repression policy adopted by the Government of Israel. Our backgrounds are diverse, but we are all agreed that these values are the bases of a just society. Every human being has the right to life, equality, dignity and freedom. We are bound by our conscience and as citizens of Israel to act in defence of these rights, by refusing to participate in the occupation and repression policy.
The occupation leads to inhumanity and to a massive infringement of the right to life. It tramples on the basic rights of millions of people and inflicts daily carnage and suffering. It leads to the confiscation of lands, to mass destruction of homes and public buildings, to arrests and killings without trial, to victimization and murder of innocents, to hunger, to a denial of medical assistance, to collective punishment, and to the building and expansion of settlements and the negation of any chance of normal living both in the occupied territories and in Israel itself. This flagrant violation of human rights is opposed to our view of the world, as well as being in contravention of international conventions signed and ratified by Israel.
The occupation contributes nothing to the security of the state and its citizens but on the contrary, it only aggravates it. It deepens the despair and fans the hatred among the Palestinians, feeds terrorism and widens the river of blood between the two sides. True security will only be accomplished by ending the occupation, dismantling the wall of Apartheid around the Palestinians and striving for a just peace agreement between the state of Israel and the leadership of the Palestinian people as well as the Arab world. The present policy is not a result of a military necessity, but the outcome of a nationalistic-Messianic fantasy.
The occupation has corrupted Israel, turning it into a militaristic, racist, chauvinistic and violent society. Israel is wasting its resources on the perpetuation of the occupation and repression in the territories, while hundreds of thousands of Israelis live in shameful poverty. In recent years Israeli citizens have experienced a deterioration of all public services. Education, medicine, welfare, pensions, everything to do with the well being of the citizenry has been neglected and sacrificed for the continued existence of settlements which the majority of the population wishes to be evacuated. We cannot stand idly facing this situation, which amounts to a “targeted liquidation” of the principle of equality.
We wish to live in a society which pursues justice, upholding equal rights to every single citizen. The occupation and repression policy is an obstacle to the realization of this vision, therefore we shall refuse to take part in it. We wish to contribute to society in an alternative way, which does not involve harming other human beings.
We call on all young people facing mobilization and on all members of the Israeli army to weigh again whether to risk their lives in the service of this repressive and destructive policy.
We believe that there is another way.
Source: www.shministim.org
Send messages of support to: shministim@gmail.com
Tuesday, March 22, 2005
Spring in Salfit, Palm Sunday in Bethlehem
Spring is here. I guess I’d thought I’d been here enough in the past couple years to be familiar with the landscape, but I’ve never been here after the winter rain, and I’ve never seen so much green. The green of the olive trees is ever-present, but the bright green grass under the trees and the landscape dotted with small flowers are new to me. It’s beautiful.
Yesterday I went to the Palestinian village of Awarta with another woman from IWPS and an Israeli group from Rabbis for Human Rights. The villagers in Awarta and Yanoun are constantly threatened and attacked by settlers from Itamar and its many outposts. On Sunday two men plowing their land in Yanoun were beaten by settlers before Rabbis for Human Rights arrived. Yesterday they went to the police station to file a report, and apparently the settlers are actually being taken in for questioning, which rarely happens. Our purpose in Awarta was to keep one eye on the farmers and one eye on the settlements above, and to do our best to make sure no attacks occurred. Indeed, it was a peaceful day, most of which I spent reading and sleeping under what Palestinians call a “Romani” olive tree, thus named because they are at least 1000 years old.
I continue to get reacquainted with people and places here. I knew one of my first stops had to be Mas’ha, so I went a few days ago to visit Munira and Hani, who live in a house that is completely surrounded by walls and fences. Any of you who have been on my list for a while or have seen me speak know the family, at least through pictures and stories. They’re some of my favorite people here. It’s a little disconcerting sometimes to know people for whom pretense is just that, especially when my Arabic isn’t always quite good enough to get beyond formalities, but it’s also refreshing to know that they’ll both tell me exactly what they think about people, governments, their situation, and life. So we chatted, drank tea and lemonade, ate fruit, and just sat. We heard loud music blaring, clearly a party of some sort, that seemed like it was coming from Mas’ha. We asked the family. “No,” they said, “It sounds like it’s coming from Mas’ha because it’s bouncing off the Wall, but it’s from the settlement.” Can’t these people have any peace? I thought. First the settlers take most of their land and build houses right next to theirs, next the Israeli government demolishes their greenhouses, next they build the Wall for “security” that cuts the family off from their village, and now they have to sit in their home and listen to settlers celebrating with obnoxiously loud music. As we were leaving, we saw a jeep sitting nearby with its doors open and soldiers hanging out, and it seemed the music was actually coming from the jeep. Either way, the Israeli occupation was celebrating itself in surround sound at the expense of the Amer family.
But celebrations come in many forms, and on Sunday I attended one of the best demonstrations I have attended here, if only because I inhaled no tear gas through my already stuffed nose. The Palm Sunday demonstration was organized mostly by Holy Land Trust, the Palestinian NGO in Bethlehem that ran the summer program I did last year [living with a family, volunteering, and learning Arabic. It’s called Palestine Summer Encounter, and they’re running it again this year – if you know people who may be interested, tell them to visit www.holylandtrust.org]. The demonstration struck at two of the most important issues to many Palestinians these days: freedom of movement, and freedom of religion. I reunited with many internationals and Palestinians whom I haven’t seen since last year, all of whom came Sunday to support the people of Bethlehem in their desire to walk from the Church of the Nativity to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, in order to pray.
We gathered in front of the Bethlehem Peace Center in Manger Square near a new installation: and uprooted olive tree. The tree is enclosed by tile walls and the encryption below reads, “I am 500 years old. I was uprooted without my permission from my original site in Bir Ona, Beit Jala, along with thousands of trees all over Palestine, to build the apartheid wall. I am still alive.”
As we prepared to march, members of a Christian international delegation began singing “We shall not be moved” and “Oh Freedom.” I always feel a bit strange about white people singing the songs that defined the African American freedom movement, not to mention the fact that this is a Palestinian struggle and “We shall not be moved” is a concept that seems almost empty if sung by people for whom movement is almost entirely self-controlled. It was nice to hear singing, though, and perhaps this contributed to a spirit that continued later with Palestinian-led singing at Tantur checkpoint.
The walk began with donkeys, children, and adults of all ages and nationalities. As we walked with balloons and banners, a truck followed with speakers blaring music, and people came out of their houses and shops to wave and smile as we passed. It felt more like a parade than a demonstration. As expected, we were stopped by soldiers at Tantur checkpoint, our numbers slightly smaller at this point as the children and donkeys had turned back to avoid risk of injury. We thought the soldiers might advance towards the space in the Wall that has yet to be completed, but we reached all the way to the checkpoint without a problem. Jeeps began to advance, soldiers started running towards us and picking up their walkie-talkies to get orders from their superiors, and we continued to walk. I had only a few moments of fear, which quickly subsided as we got close enough to the soldiers that I thought they were unlikely to throw gas (they do not generally gas themselves). I was right. The Palestinians and internationals in the front rows linked arms and approached slowly and peacefully. The soldiers formed a line across the road, linking arms as well. This standoff lasted for quite a while, punctuated by short conversations between some of the Palestinian leaders and the military commanders. One soldier had a few cartoons and the word “FREEDOM” sketched on his back. Somebody asked him, “What does the word ‘freedom’ mean to you when you’re denying these people their freedom of movement and prayer?” “I want freedom, freedom for everybody,” said the soldier. He continued to say he wished he didn’t have to do what he was doing, which led to the all-too-common interaction of “You don’t have to do it, you can refuse,” followed by “Yes I do have to do it, I’m just following orders,” followed by “You should know that argument doesn’t hold up in a court of law,” and so on. Most soldiers did their best to ignore us and not engage in conversation or take the written statement that some Palestinians were trying to give them. I looked into the eyes of some of the soldiers and wanted to cry, which is a reaction I quite often have when I’m so close to soldiers that I can see them as I should, as human beings and as kids who look just like all the kids I knew at summer camp, and who are the epitome of the Zionist ideals I believed, to some degree, when I was their age (which wasn’t so long ago).
When the army announced that the demonstration would become “illegal” in 15 minutes, and that the soldiers would then use force to remove us, the demonstrators sat down on the ground. Palestinians began to sing “We shall overcome” in English, followed by a couple Palestinian freedom songs in Arabic. As the 15 minutes neared their end, Sami Awad of Holy Land Trust stood up and delivered a beautiful statement to the soldiers who were standing right in front of him [see the statement below]. Everyone was quiet, including the soldiers, and I can only assume that some of them were listening. The organizers then announced that we would turn around and head back to Bethlehem, but that the people of Bethlehem would be back again to demand their rights.
I had mixed feelings about this ending. Although I was grateful not to face tear gas, sound bombs, or the threat of arrest, I would have liked to have seen the community attempt to advance further, to enter Jerusalem as it is their long-denied right to do. My thoughts returned to the previous day’s training and preparation, where Ghassan reminded the group that if we reach the checkpoint we must remember that the soldiers are in the way, not we, and that we are not somehow committing an offense by trying to walk to Jerusalem but the soldiers are committing an offense by trying to stop us. And still, it’s true that to some degree we knew what to expect, that if the leaders had decided to continue towards Jerusalem, we knew the soldiers would have used violence against us. Would we have been to blame, then? The clear answer to me is “No!” and yet I know as well as the organizers of the demonstration that tear gas and sound bombs are portrayed in the media as necessary tools to disperse “unruly” crowds, and that Palestinian refusal to obey the rules of occupation are portrayed as a crime, rather than the inherent criminality of occupation being portrayed as such.
So the crowd turned back, and a few of the internationals reluctantly crossed through the checkpoint “legally” to return to Jerusalem, or in our case to Hares. As we began our final shared taxi ride from Kalandia checkpoint to Hares, a man in the back seat with us took out a container of sweets and passed them around the car, making sure to pass them all the way up to the driver. “I love Palestine,” Anna said to me as she took one of the sweets. We continued to Hares in peace. I remembered Munira and Hani behind the Wall, and now the entire city of Bethlehem behind a different section of the same wall, but somehow as I shared sweets with a carload of Palestinians and listened to Arabic music, I was able to temporarily forget the occupation.
May there come a day when we can forget occupations, or remember them only as a history that we vow not to repeat. Inshallah.
Statement from people of Bethlehem to Israeli soldiers, delivered by Holy Land Trust Executive Director Sami Awad on Palm Sunday (March 20) 2005:
Asalaam ‘alaykum, dear friends,
We in the Bethlehem community have come to you today with a message on behalf of our people. We represent the family members and friends who are imprisoned by these concrete walls and wire fences that now create the Bethlehem open-air prison. You, like the prison guards, control our freedom and ability to live as human beings with dignity in this holy land.
Our strong delegation of civilians comes to you without weapons but with great strength and commitment to deliver the message of just peace. In the name of security, you do not permit us to travel to school and to worship in our holy sites in the city of Jerusalem. Your government deprives us each day of basic human rights to self-determination. Each day you keep us from being with our families at weddings, funerals, graduations, birthdays, and religious holidays. Although Al-Quds is only 20 minutes from Bethlehem, we have not been allowed to pray and worship at our holy sites for many years.
Each day as you come to our city, you serve the system of violence that keeps our people imprisoned and without the ability to live a life of a normal human being. With your guns, tanks, and insults, you teach our children to hate.
However, we believe each of you has the power and choice to choose a different ending to this story. We appeal to your conscience and humanity as individuals and as soldiers who may feel there is no way out of this system. Put your guns away—I repeat, put your guns away—and join us in the fight for peace and freedom.
The People of Bethlehem
Yesterday I went to the Palestinian village of Awarta with another woman from IWPS and an Israeli group from Rabbis for Human Rights. The villagers in Awarta and Yanoun are constantly threatened and attacked by settlers from Itamar and its many outposts. On Sunday two men plowing their land in Yanoun were beaten by settlers before Rabbis for Human Rights arrived. Yesterday they went to the police station to file a report, and apparently the settlers are actually being taken in for questioning, which rarely happens. Our purpose in Awarta was to keep one eye on the farmers and one eye on the settlements above, and to do our best to make sure no attacks occurred. Indeed, it was a peaceful day, most of which I spent reading and sleeping under what Palestinians call a “Romani” olive tree, thus named because they are at least 1000 years old.
I continue to get reacquainted with people and places here. I knew one of my first stops had to be Mas’ha, so I went a few days ago to visit Munira and Hani, who live in a house that is completely surrounded by walls and fences. Any of you who have been on my list for a while or have seen me speak know the family, at least through pictures and stories. They’re some of my favorite people here. It’s a little disconcerting sometimes to know people for whom pretense is just that, especially when my Arabic isn’t always quite good enough to get beyond formalities, but it’s also refreshing to know that they’ll both tell me exactly what they think about people, governments, their situation, and life. So we chatted, drank tea and lemonade, ate fruit, and just sat. We heard loud music blaring, clearly a party of some sort, that seemed like it was coming from Mas’ha. We asked the family. “No,” they said, “It sounds like it’s coming from Mas’ha because it’s bouncing off the Wall, but it’s from the settlement.” Can’t these people have any peace? I thought. First the settlers take most of their land and build houses right next to theirs, next the Israeli government demolishes their greenhouses, next they build the Wall for “security” that cuts the family off from their village, and now they have to sit in their home and listen to settlers celebrating with obnoxiously loud music. As we were leaving, we saw a jeep sitting nearby with its doors open and soldiers hanging out, and it seemed the music was actually coming from the jeep. Either way, the Israeli occupation was celebrating itself in surround sound at the expense of the Amer family.
But celebrations come in many forms, and on Sunday I attended one of the best demonstrations I have attended here, if only because I inhaled no tear gas through my already stuffed nose. The Palm Sunday demonstration was organized mostly by Holy Land Trust, the Palestinian NGO in Bethlehem that ran the summer program I did last year [living with a family, volunteering, and learning Arabic. It’s called Palestine Summer Encounter, and they’re running it again this year – if you know people who may be interested, tell them to visit www.holylandtrust.org]. The demonstration struck at two of the most important issues to many Palestinians these days: freedom of movement, and freedom of religion. I reunited with many internationals and Palestinians whom I haven’t seen since last year, all of whom came Sunday to support the people of Bethlehem in their desire to walk from the Church of the Nativity to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, in order to pray.
We gathered in front of the Bethlehem Peace Center in Manger Square near a new installation: and uprooted olive tree. The tree is enclosed by tile walls and the encryption below reads, “I am 500 years old. I was uprooted without my permission from my original site in Bir Ona, Beit Jala, along with thousands of trees all over Palestine, to build the apartheid wall. I am still alive.”
As we prepared to march, members of a Christian international delegation began singing “We shall not be moved” and “Oh Freedom.” I always feel a bit strange about white people singing the songs that defined the African American freedom movement, not to mention the fact that this is a Palestinian struggle and “We shall not be moved” is a concept that seems almost empty if sung by people for whom movement is almost entirely self-controlled. It was nice to hear singing, though, and perhaps this contributed to a spirit that continued later with Palestinian-led singing at Tantur checkpoint.
The walk began with donkeys, children, and adults of all ages and nationalities. As we walked with balloons and banners, a truck followed with speakers blaring music, and people came out of their houses and shops to wave and smile as we passed. It felt more like a parade than a demonstration. As expected, we were stopped by soldiers at Tantur checkpoint, our numbers slightly smaller at this point as the children and donkeys had turned back to avoid risk of injury. We thought the soldiers might advance towards the space in the Wall that has yet to be completed, but we reached all the way to the checkpoint without a problem. Jeeps began to advance, soldiers started running towards us and picking up their walkie-talkies to get orders from their superiors, and we continued to walk. I had only a few moments of fear, which quickly subsided as we got close enough to the soldiers that I thought they were unlikely to throw gas (they do not generally gas themselves). I was right. The Palestinians and internationals in the front rows linked arms and approached slowly and peacefully. The soldiers formed a line across the road, linking arms as well. This standoff lasted for quite a while, punctuated by short conversations between some of the Palestinian leaders and the military commanders. One soldier had a few cartoons and the word “FREEDOM” sketched on his back. Somebody asked him, “What does the word ‘freedom’ mean to you when you’re denying these people their freedom of movement and prayer?” “I want freedom, freedom for everybody,” said the soldier. He continued to say he wished he didn’t have to do what he was doing, which led to the all-too-common interaction of “You don’t have to do it, you can refuse,” followed by “Yes I do have to do it, I’m just following orders,” followed by “You should know that argument doesn’t hold up in a court of law,” and so on. Most soldiers did their best to ignore us and not engage in conversation or take the written statement that some Palestinians were trying to give them. I looked into the eyes of some of the soldiers and wanted to cry, which is a reaction I quite often have when I’m so close to soldiers that I can see them as I should, as human beings and as kids who look just like all the kids I knew at summer camp, and who are the epitome of the Zionist ideals I believed, to some degree, when I was their age (which wasn’t so long ago).
When the army announced that the demonstration would become “illegal” in 15 minutes, and that the soldiers would then use force to remove us, the demonstrators sat down on the ground. Palestinians began to sing “We shall overcome” in English, followed by a couple Palestinian freedom songs in Arabic. As the 15 minutes neared their end, Sami Awad of Holy Land Trust stood up and delivered a beautiful statement to the soldiers who were standing right in front of him [see the statement below]. Everyone was quiet, including the soldiers, and I can only assume that some of them were listening. The organizers then announced that we would turn around and head back to Bethlehem, but that the people of Bethlehem would be back again to demand their rights.
I had mixed feelings about this ending. Although I was grateful not to face tear gas, sound bombs, or the threat of arrest, I would have liked to have seen the community attempt to advance further, to enter Jerusalem as it is their long-denied right to do. My thoughts returned to the previous day’s training and preparation, where Ghassan reminded the group that if we reach the checkpoint we must remember that the soldiers are in the way, not we, and that we are not somehow committing an offense by trying to walk to Jerusalem but the soldiers are committing an offense by trying to stop us. And still, it’s true that to some degree we knew what to expect, that if the leaders had decided to continue towards Jerusalem, we knew the soldiers would have used violence against us. Would we have been to blame, then? The clear answer to me is “No!” and yet I know as well as the organizers of the demonstration that tear gas and sound bombs are portrayed in the media as necessary tools to disperse “unruly” crowds, and that Palestinian refusal to obey the rules of occupation are portrayed as a crime, rather than the inherent criminality of occupation being portrayed as such.
So the crowd turned back, and a few of the internationals reluctantly crossed through the checkpoint “legally” to return to Jerusalem, or in our case to Hares. As we began our final shared taxi ride from Kalandia checkpoint to Hares, a man in the back seat with us took out a container of sweets and passed them around the car, making sure to pass them all the way up to the driver. “I love Palestine,” Anna said to me as she took one of the sweets. We continued to Hares in peace. I remembered Munira and Hani behind the Wall, and now the entire city of Bethlehem behind a different section of the same wall, but somehow as I shared sweets with a carload of Palestinians and listened to Arabic music, I was able to temporarily forget the occupation.
May there come a day when we can forget occupations, or remember them only as a history that we vow not to repeat. Inshallah.
Statement from people of Bethlehem to Israeli soldiers, delivered by Holy Land Trust Executive Director Sami Awad on Palm Sunday (March 20) 2005:
Asalaam ‘alaykum, dear friends,
We in the Bethlehem community have come to you today with a message on behalf of our people. We represent the family members and friends who are imprisoned by these concrete walls and wire fences that now create the Bethlehem open-air prison. You, like the prison guards, control our freedom and ability to live as human beings with dignity in this holy land.
Our strong delegation of civilians comes to you without weapons but with great strength and commitment to deliver the message of just peace. In the name of security, you do not permit us to travel to school and to worship in our holy sites in the city of Jerusalem. Your government deprives us each day of basic human rights to self-determination. Each day you keep us from being with our families at weddings, funerals, graduations, birthdays, and religious holidays. Although Al-Quds is only 20 minutes from Bethlehem, we have not been allowed to pray and worship at our holy sites for many years.
Each day as you come to our city, you serve the system of violence that keeps our people imprisoned and without the ability to live a life of a normal human being. With your guns, tanks, and insults, you teach our children to hate.
However, we believe each of you has the power and choice to choose a different ending to this story. We appeal to your conscience and humanity as individuals and as soldiers who may feel there is no way out of this system. Put your guns away—I repeat, put your guns away—and join us in the fight for peace and freedom.
The People of Bethlehem
Tuesday, March 15, 2005
Day 3
Dear friends,
I'm back.
Palestine has welcomed me with open arms, and while I’ve had an exhausting few days running from Jerusalem to Bethlehem to Ramallah and back again, it’s been wonderful to see so many familiar faces and places. The sounds, the smells, the sights of the market on the stairs outside Damascus gate, the crowds of people rushing through, even the boys who sit on the stairs outside the Austrian Hospice trying to sneak in under the pretense of having lost a cell phone or soccer ball – all have been reminders of the vibrancy of life here, despite it all. Despite it all. And the “all” seems to have gotten even bigger.
Everywhere I look I see concrete walls. When I last left, the Wall on the east side of the checkpoint into Bethlehem had been built; now it connects with the pieces that stood alone in the distance, slabs around Ayda refugee camp and the town of Beit Jala. Bethlehem is now almost completely enclosed. My host mother from my last visit in Dheisheh refugee camp can no longer find ways to go north and west to Jerusalem to work, so she goes all the way around and through Abu Dis, and back into Jerusalem. It takes several hours each way.
On the way out of Bethlehem this morning I asked a soldier at the checkpoint what would happen when the Wall is finished. “There will be a checkpoint,” he told me. “Will cars be able to go through?” “Yes,” he said, “there will be enough space for vehicles and pedestrians.” “When will they finish?” “As soon as possible.” Yes, as soon as possible, while the world is not looking, or is only looking at Gaza in anticipation of the “disengagement plan” (“disengagement” meaning removing about 2% of the Jewish Israeli settlers who live in the Palestinian occupied territories, but not necessarily removing the army). As soon as possible the Wall will be built, while the world praises the “cease fire” (what cease fire?) and is “cautiously optimistic” that Sharon and Abu Mazen might reach a deal of some sort.
Never have I seen so much active construction of the Wall. Caterpillar bulldozers drill the path through the ground next to Kalandia, the main checkpoint between Jerusalem and Ramallah. Aram, a town that saw itself being cut in half by the path, is now almost completely separated. The only break in the Wall is at the checkpoint itself, which according to everyone I’ve spoken with will completely disappear once the Wall is finished, leaving no viable way to travel between Jerusalem and Ramallah. Apparently there’s a plan that starting in July Palestinians with Jerusalem ID will no longer be allowed into the West Bank. It seems the Israeli government is employing even new ways to cut Jerusalem off from the rest of the West Bank, or as one friend said, to choke Jerusalem.
I keep looking for signs of change. Seeing concrete where it wasn’t before is obvious, other things less so. I have noticed the abundance of political posters left over from the election. It’s nice to see them, to see an expression of some sort of democracy, however strong or real it is or isn’t. It’s nice just to see posters other than martyr posters, posters that seem more about life than death. I asked my host family about Abu Mazen and whether the situation is better or still the same. The same, said Najah. The Wall continues to be built, their life continues to be difficult, there’s been no change. Hussein chimed in and said maybe things are a bit better, not on the ground but politically. “Fine,” she responded, “but I wouldn’t know. I don’t see any changes.” Hussein reminded me that 65% of Palestinians who voted cast their ballots for Abu Mazen. “Why?” I asked. “Do they like him?” “Like him?” he responded. “No, we don’t vote with our hearts, we vote with our minds. People thought maybe he could get something done.” He continued to tell me that Mustafa Barghouti had better politics, better speeches, and better programs, but that his work on the ground wasn’t trusted; he wasn’t seen as being in touch with people outside his circle. And while Abu Mazen worked very closely with Arafat, apparently he’s willing to work with people outside of Fatah and is looking to create something “new.” What that is, we don’t yet know.
I’ve been thinking a lot about what it takes to hold up an occupation, and what it takes to dismantle it. And in the midst of all that, what does it take to live? I crossed through Kalandia this evening as I came back from Ramallah to Jerusalem. It was late, so there weren’t a lot of people, and the soldiers weren’t being particularly forceful or rigid about their roles and rules. I probably could have gone through without showing my passport, and at times I do, not wanting to legitimize the occupation by acknowledging the presence of the checkpoint. But knowing that Palestinians choose not to defy the occupation in that way, what would it mean if I walked around the few people who were standing in line in front of me, and just passed through? Would it be an act of defiance or an abuse of privilege? Tonight I waited and showed my passport to a soldier who made some joke about it in Hebrew. Another soldier saw that I was annoyed and said in English, “You can go now, miss. Thank you.”
I notice Palestinians in the old city of Jerusalem completely ignoring the border police who are there to keep an eye on them and check IDs at random. Is it good that Palestinians are able to continue with life in all its vibrancy? Or is it bad that the situation has been so normalized that nobody even notices the occupier standing menacingly with weapons at every turn? I’ve seen more Palestinians chatting with the police and the soldiers, lighting the cigarettes of the soldiers checking their IDs. Is it good that they can continue to see humanity in the face of the occupier? Or is it bad that they’re complying with the structures of occupation and making life even easier for the occupier? Do they feel forced into being kind by their situation, or is it an expression of traditional Palestinian hospitality?
I don’t know what’s next. I hear the plan to construct “humanitarian tunnels” under the Wall is going forward, basically putting Palestinian roads underground and making it possible eventually to truly close off the settler bypass roads so only Israelis can travel on them. A friend tells me the new checkpoints at the openings of the Wall are being called “terminals.” Will Israel finish the Wall and these “terminals” and then claim it has removed checkpoints, once again manipulating language for political purposes? It reminds me of one of the proposed peace agreements of the past which would have “given” Palestinians the Palestinian town of Abu Dis, east of Jerusalem, and “allowed” them to make it their capital and call it “Jerusalem.” As though the name Jerusalem is all that matters, and not the place. As though there aren’t actually Palestinians living in Jerusalem, who have lived there for thousands of years and have a connection to the stones and the land that goes deeper than most could know.
What’s next for me is this: Today I go north to Hares to begin three months with IWPS (International Women’s Peace Service). I’m excited to see people, and hoping that some kind of clarity in my work will come to me. And meanwhile, I’ll continue to write to you all and at the very least share a glimpse into the life here. Please share my reports with others, and please be in touch – it’s good and important for me to have contact with the outside world while I’m here. Still no mail service in Hares as far as I know, but you can e-mail and call. My cell phone number, if you’re dialing from the US, is 011-972-547-870-198.
Until next time,
Hannah
I'm back.
Palestine has welcomed me with open arms, and while I’ve had an exhausting few days running from Jerusalem to Bethlehem to Ramallah and back again, it’s been wonderful to see so many familiar faces and places. The sounds, the smells, the sights of the market on the stairs outside Damascus gate, the crowds of people rushing through, even the boys who sit on the stairs outside the Austrian Hospice trying to sneak in under the pretense of having lost a cell phone or soccer ball – all have been reminders of the vibrancy of life here, despite it all. Despite it all. And the “all” seems to have gotten even bigger.
Everywhere I look I see concrete walls. When I last left, the Wall on the east side of the checkpoint into Bethlehem had been built; now it connects with the pieces that stood alone in the distance, slabs around Ayda refugee camp and the town of Beit Jala. Bethlehem is now almost completely enclosed. My host mother from my last visit in Dheisheh refugee camp can no longer find ways to go north and west to Jerusalem to work, so she goes all the way around and through Abu Dis, and back into Jerusalem. It takes several hours each way.
On the way out of Bethlehem this morning I asked a soldier at the checkpoint what would happen when the Wall is finished. “There will be a checkpoint,” he told me. “Will cars be able to go through?” “Yes,” he said, “there will be enough space for vehicles and pedestrians.” “When will they finish?” “As soon as possible.” Yes, as soon as possible, while the world is not looking, or is only looking at Gaza in anticipation of the “disengagement plan” (“disengagement” meaning removing about 2% of the Jewish Israeli settlers who live in the Palestinian occupied territories, but not necessarily removing the army). As soon as possible the Wall will be built, while the world praises the “cease fire” (what cease fire?) and is “cautiously optimistic” that Sharon and Abu Mazen might reach a deal of some sort.
Never have I seen so much active construction of the Wall. Caterpillar bulldozers drill the path through the ground next to Kalandia, the main checkpoint between Jerusalem and Ramallah. Aram, a town that saw itself being cut in half by the path, is now almost completely separated. The only break in the Wall is at the checkpoint itself, which according to everyone I’ve spoken with will completely disappear once the Wall is finished, leaving no viable way to travel between Jerusalem and Ramallah. Apparently there’s a plan that starting in July Palestinians with Jerusalem ID will no longer be allowed into the West Bank. It seems the Israeli government is employing even new ways to cut Jerusalem off from the rest of the West Bank, or as one friend said, to choke Jerusalem.
I keep looking for signs of change. Seeing concrete where it wasn’t before is obvious, other things less so. I have noticed the abundance of political posters left over from the election. It’s nice to see them, to see an expression of some sort of democracy, however strong or real it is or isn’t. It’s nice just to see posters other than martyr posters, posters that seem more about life than death. I asked my host family about Abu Mazen and whether the situation is better or still the same. The same, said Najah. The Wall continues to be built, their life continues to be difficult, there’s been no change. Hussein chimed in and said maybe things are a bit better, not on the ground but politically. “Fine,” she responded, “but I wouldn’t know. I don’t see any changes.” Hussein reminded me that 65% of Palestinians who voted cast their ballots for Abu Mazen. “Why?” I asked. “Do they like him?” “Like him?” he responded. “No, we don’t vote with our hearts, we vote with our minds. People thought maybe he could get something done.” He continued to tell me that Mustafa Barghouti had better politics, better speeches, and better programs, but that his work on the ground wasn’t trusted; he wasn’t seen as being in touch with people outside his circle. And while Abu Mazen worked very closely with Arafat, apparently he’s willing to work with people outside of Fatah and is looking to create something “new.” What that is, we don’t yet know.
I’ve been thinking a lot about what it takes to hold up an occupation, and what it takes to dismantle it. And in the midst of all that, what does it take to live? I crossed through Kalandia this evening as I came back from Ramallah to Jerusalem. It was late, so there weren’t a lot of people, and the soldiers weren’t being particularly forceful or rigid about their roles and rules. I probably could have gone through without showing my passport, and at times I do, not wanting to legitimize the occupation by acknowledging the presence of the checkpoint. But knowing that Palestinians choose not to defy the occupation in that way, what would it mean if I walked around the few people who were standing in line in front of me, and just passed through? Would it be an act of defiance or an abuse of privilege? Tonight I waited and showed my passport to a soldier who made some joke about it in Hebrew. Another soldier saw that I was annoyed and said in English, “You can go now, miss. Thank you.”
I notice Palestinians in the old city of Jerusalem completely ignoring the border police who are there to keep an eye on them and check IDs at random. Is it good that Palestinians are able to continue with life in all its vibrancy? Or is it bad that the situation has been so normalized that nobody even notices the occupier standing menacingly with weapons at every turn? I’ve seen more Palestinians chatting with the police and the soldiers, lighting the cigarettes of the soldiers checking their IDs. Is it good that they can continue to see humanity in the face of the occupier? Or is it bad that they’re complying with the structures of occupation and making life even easier for the occupier? Do they feel forced into being kind by their situation, or is it an expression of traditional Palestinian hospitality?
I don’t know what’s next. I hear the plan to construct “humanitarian tunnels” under the Wall is going forward, basically putting Palestinian roads underground and making it possible eventually to truly close off the settler bypass roads so only Israelis can travel on them. A friend tells me the new checkpoints at the openings of the Wall are being called “terminals.” Will Israel finish the Wall and these “terminals” and then claim it has removed checkpoints, once again manipulating language for political purposes? It reminds me of one of the proposed peace agreements of the past which would have “given” Palestinians the Palestinian town of Abu Dis, east of Jerusalem, and “allowed” them to make it their capital and call it “Jerusalem.” As though the name Jerusalem is all that matters, and not the place. As though there aren’t actually Palestinians living in Jerusalem, who have lived there for thousands of years and have a connection to the stones and the land that goes deeper than most could know.
What’s next for me is this: Today I go north to Hares to begin three months with IWPS (International Women’s Peace Service). I’m excited to see people, and hoping that some kind of clarity in my work will come to me. And meanwhile, I’ll continue to write to you all and at the very least share a glimpse into the life here. Please share my reports with others, and please be in touch – it’s good and important for me to have contact with the outside world while I’m here. Still no mail service in Hares as far as I know, but you can e-mail and call. My cell phone number, if you’re dialing from the US, is 011-972-547-870-198.
Until next time,
Hannah
Monday, October 25, 2004
Final Dispatch from Palestine
I don't know quite how I got to the point where I can say this, but after 4 and a half months, this will be my last letter from Palestine this year. This week has been full of olive picking, coordination, strange travels, and goodbyes.
We've had three different delegations here to help with the olive harvest (one from Boston, one from the UK, and one from Austria). Now only the Austrian group is still here, and has been picking in the north of the city of Salfit near the southern fence of Ariel settlement. Moving the group there from Marda took us about 2 hours instead of the half hour it should take. The flying checkpoint I've come to expect under the bridge at Iskaka was nowhere to be seen, but construction workers were paving the only road to Salfit (the only Palestinian road, that is - the army has their own ways of getting there), and it was completely closed. I asked why they didn't do the paving at night. "Do you think the army would let us do that?" one of the workers responded. We switched cars many times and walked several hundred meters right next to the burning tar. At one point we ran into a whole group of 10-15 year old boys. I asked where they were from. Turmus Aya. What are they doing here? They've come to visit their teacher in Yasuf who was beaten up by settlers a few days earlier. I knew the incident. I had spoken with 25-year-old Tariq, who had been attacked on the main road on his way home from work. A settler sprayed gas in his face and a group of settlers kicked and punched him until he was unconscious. A Palestinian car noticed him on the road, picked him up, and took him to the hospital. He suffered injuries to his thigh, ribs, shoulder/back, and nose.
So these kids from Turmus Aya were on their way to visit Tariq. They seemed unconcerned by the delay, and were delighted to have the chance to whip out their American passports and talk to me about Chicago. I've heard that Turmus Aya is a town with large houses and no people, because all the people live outside Palestine. I told the kids this. "Nos nos," they responded (half, half). Some of these children split their time between the US and Palestine, others have never been to the US, but it seems most have family there.
We arrived in Salfit just before iftar (the evening meal to break the fast of Ramadan each day). The farmers were tired, hungry, and thirsty, but not quite as irritable as I would have expected for that time of day. We sat around a table trying to split up which internationals would stay (and therefore pick the following day) with which families. After it was all finished, the mayor took me aside and told me I would be staying with him. "Everyone wanted you at first," he told me, "but then you said you were American, and then you said you wouldn't be picking tomorrow, and now nobody wants you." He said it with his typical joking smile, but I can't help but think there's some truth in it. Wait until they find out I'm Jewish, I thought. Incidentally, one of the coordinators later asked me, "Are you Muslim or Christian?" "No," I responded. "Nothing?" he asked. "Jewish," I responded, and then quickly added, "but not Israeli." "Why do you say that?" he asked. "It doesn't matter. We like you because you are a human being. Jewish, Israeli, it doesn't matter." This is the most common response I get when I tell people I'm Jewish. The other day I met a woman on the bus who, in the midst of telling me that there's no difference between Jews and Israelis, that all participate in an oppressive system, and that Islam is the best religion because it is all-encompassing, also stated that someday we'll realize that we all believe in the same one God, and that we just have different messengers.
The more I find out about Islam, the more I want to know. Someday soon I'll sit down and read the Koran, but until then, I hope to have many more conversations with people and many more experiences like I had that night in Salfit. After dinner in the public gardens the Sheikh gave a speech, which was followed by what I can only call an "Ask the Sheikh" session. Women, men, and children were there, and all were asking him questions about fasting. "How old should children be when they begin to fast?" "Lots of people say they're fasting but they're not. What do you say about that?" "Why are we using plastic plates?" (this was my favorite question). The whole evening seemed very democratic to me. Interaction, interruption, camaraderie. I like seeing democracy in action, especially in religious institutions.
I stayed with the mayor's family, and was excited to get up at 3:30 am to eat the morning meal before sunrise, which I'd never done. I set my alarm, and was up and ready at 3:30. I waited around for a few minutes and didn't see or hear any movement, so I went back to sleep. In the morning, they asked, "Why didn't you wake us up?" They had slept through their alarm.
After a few more errands, I managed to get home and left the next morning for a short 'break' before leaving for good. I had heard from my friend George about a youth center in a building that used to be a prison in Fara refugee camp, in the Tubas region (between Nablus and Jenin, but also on the edge of the Jordan Valley). Kate and I were determined to get there, if only because it seemed like an adventure. And it certainly was. Everything we thought would be difficult about the travels was easy, and everything we thought would be easy was difficult. We snuck around Huwara checkpoint outside of Nablus with absolutely no problem, actually walking with complete confidence in full view of the soldiers, who probably assumed we were settlers or at least walking to the nearby settlement (which was feasible, since it was Saturday and there wouldn't be any settler cars driving). Getting from Nablus to Fara, though, proved to be the real adventure. One driver said he could take us, but after stopping at a broken down amusement park for at least a half hour trying to figure out if his car was strong enough to drive over the roadblock ahead of us, he decided to take us back to Nablus. So we left Palestinian style - that is, over the mountains in a jeep, desperately trying to hold on to our seats as we bounced all over the place, the car speeding over rocks to try to avoid being seen by police or army. We arrived in Fara to a confused crowd of people who kept asking us why we were there (not in an unfriendly way, but they certainly don't get many foreign visitors and were curious, to say the least).
We toured the center, went to the city of Tubas for a few minutes, and then left for Jericho. No, Jericho is nowhere near Tubas, but both are east. Besides, neither Kate nor I had been to Jericho, and we figured we might as well see the oldest and lowest city in the world before leaving. We stopped at Hamra checkpoint, where we encountered hostile soldiers who we're sure are ideological settlers in that area. They wouldn't let us through, claiming that we had to get out the way we came in. Get out of where? we wondered. If we had been near the border with Israel, I would understand that, but seeing as we were in the middle of the West Bank, I was utterly confused. If we had been coming from the other direction would they have forbidden us to pass because we hadn't come through this way? Anyway, our Israeli friend Dorothy made several phone calls for us, and after an hour and a half, the soldiers let us through. Apparently one of the reasons they were worried about it was that if we go through, we might be going to Jericho, which is closed to internationals without special permission. Hamra is nowhere near Jericho, but it is on the same road.
By the time we passed through the checkpoint, it was almost iftar (dark, no cars, etc.). We hitched a ride with a nice settler for a couple minutes, but she was turning off the road, so we got out and began to walk. Kate insisted it was impossible to walk to Jericho, which of course I knew, but at least I needed to feel like I was going somewhere. A couple minutes later, a Palestinian man came out of his house, and we said hello to him in Arabic. He asked where we were going, we told him, and he told us we'd have to come eat with them and spend the night, because there wouldn't be any cars until the morning. I have to say this was a very welcome invitation. And I also have to say that I wasn't surprised. I have come to expect this almost incomprehensible hospitality and trust among Palestinians. Two strange foreigners wandering past his house as it was getting dark - and really, we could have been settlers. How was he to know? Anyway, we stayed, we played with the kids, we talked with the men and women in the house, we slept, and in the morning we got a car to Jericho.
At the checkpoint into Jericho, where we were afraid we'd be asked for our 'permits,' the soldiers just looked at our passports and gave them back to the driver of our car, letting us through with no problem. Jericho is a beautiful city, although it's one of the places where the suffering economy (lack of tourists) is most apparent. The streets were pretty empty, and the cable car operators on the Mt. of Temptation seemed to open up just for us. An article from 1999 hanging in the building said they were expecting the project to pay for itself with Jericho's 500,000 tourists each year. That's over 1,000 a day. I doubt they had many more than 2 the day we were there.
I returned to Hares to the news that Angie, one of our founding team members and a prominent activist in the UK, had been denied entry and was being held at Ben Gurion airport until they could find her a flight back to Britain. We wrote to the press, and I even had a discussion with Abu Rabia last night about an idea that Kate had: Let's get the Palestinian Authority to issue her a visa, to make a statement that if Israel doesn't want Angie in their territory, fine, Palestine wants her in theirs. We'll see where that goes.
I am aware that most of this probably reads more like a travel journal than anything else. I'm not feeling so poetic right now, and I'm a bit overwhelmed with the fact that I'm leaving. I had some wonderful goodbyes yesterday, and realized that people really are going to miss me, and I'm really going to miss them.
What more to say? Perhaps I'll write again sometime next week, from the comfort of my parents' home in Pennsylvania. In case I don't, I'll say my thank yous now, to all of you have been reading and writing and passing my messages along and thinking and reconsidering and apprecicating the realities that are so important to face here. Please remember to contact me if you have ideas of where I can present. Boston: Nov. 7, 2:30, Christ Church.
In the spirit of peace, justice, and truth,
Hannah
We've had three different delegations here to help with the olive harvest (one from Boston, one from the UK, and one from Austria). Now only the Austrian group is still here, and has been picking in the north of the city of Salfit near the southern fence of Ariel settlement. Moving the group there from Marda took us about 2 hours instead of the half hour it should take. The flying checkpoint I've come to expect under the bridge at Iskaka was nowhere to be seen, but construction workers were paving the only road to Salfit (the only Palestinian road, that is - the army has their own ways of getting there), and it was completely closed. I asked why they didn't do the paving at night. "Do you think the army would let us do that?" one of the workers responded. We switched cars many times and walked several hundred meters right next to the burning tar. At one point we ran into a whole group of 10-15 year old boys. I asked where they were from. Turmus Aya. What are they doing here? They've come to visit their teacher in Yasuf who was beaten up by settlers a few days earlier. I knew the incident. I had spoken with 25-year-old Tariq, who had been attacked on the main road on his way home from work. A settler sprayed gas in his face and a group of settlers kicked and punched him until he was unconscious. A Palestinian car noticed him on the road, picked him up, and took him to the hospital. He suffered injuries to his thigh, ribs, shoulder/back, and nose.
So these kids from Turmus Aya were on their way to visit Tariq. They seemed unconcerned by the delay, and were delighted to have the chance to whip out their American passports and talk to me about Chicago. I've heard that Turmus Aya is a town with large houses and no people, because all the people live outside Palestine. I told the kids this. "Nos nos," they responded (half, half). Some of these children split their time between the US and Palestine, others have never been to the US, but it seems most have family there.
We arrived in Salfit just before iftar (the evening meal to break the fast of Ramadan each day). The farmers were tired, hungry, and thirsty, but not quite as irritable as I would have expected for that time of day. We sat around a table trying to split up which internationals would stay (and therefore pick the following day) with which families. After it was all finished, the mayor took me aside and told me I would be staying with him. "Everyone wanted you at first," he told me, "but then you said you were American, and then you said you wouldn't be picking tomorrow, and now nobody wants you." He said it with his typical joking smile, but I can't help but think there's some truth in it. Wait until they find out I'm Jewish, I thought. Incidentally, one of the coordinators later asked me, "Are you Muslim or Christian?" "No," I responded. "Nothing?" he asked. "Jewish," I responded, and then quickly added, "but not Israeli." "Why do you say that?" he asked. "It doesn't matter. We like you because you are a human being. Jewish, Israeli, it doesn't matter." This is the most common response I get when I tell people I'm Jewish. The other day I met a woman on the bus who, in the midst of telling me that there's no difference between Jews and Israelis, that all participate in an oppressive system, and that Islam is the best religion because it is all-encompassing, also stated that someday we'll realize that we all believe in the same one God, and that we just have different messengers.
The more I find out about Islam, the more I want to know. Someday soon I'll sit down and read the Koran, but until then, I hope to have many more conversations with people and many more experiences like I had that night in Salfit. After dinner in the public gardens the Sheikh gave a speech, which was followed by what I can only call an "Ask the Sheikh" session. Women, men, and children were there, and all were asking him questions about fasting. "How old should children be when they begin to fast?" "Lots of people say they're fasting but they're not. What do you say about that?" "Why are we using plastic plates?" (this was my favorite question). The whole evening seemed very democratic to me. Interaction, interruption, camaraderie. I like seeing democracy in action, especially in religious institutions.
I stayed with the mayor's family, and was excited to get up at 3:30 am to eat the morning meal before sunrise, which I'd never done. I set my alarm, and was up and ready at 3:30. I waited around for a few minutes and didn't see or hear any movement, so I went back to sleep. In the morning, they asked, "Why didn't you wake us up?" They had slept through their alarm.
After a few more errands, I managed to get home and left the next morning for a short 'break' before leaving for good. I had heard from my friend George about a youth center in a building that used to be a prison in Fara refugee camp, in the Tubas region (between Nablus and Jenin, but also on the edge of the Jordan Valley). Kate and I were determined to get there, if only because it seemed like an adventure. And it certainly was. Everything we thought would be difficult about the travels was easy, and everything we thought would be easy was difficult. We snuck around Huwara checkpoint outside of Nablus with absolutely no problem, actually walking with complete confidence in full view of the soldiers, who probably assumed we were settlers or at least walking to the nearby settlement (which was feasible, since it was Saturday and there wouldn't be any settler cars driving). Getting from Nablus to Fara, though, proved to be the real adventure. One driver said he could take us, but after stopping at a broken down amusement park for at least a half hour trying to figure out if his car was strong enough to drive over the roadblock ahead of us, he decided to take us back to Nablus. So we left Palestinian style - that is, over the mountains in a jeep, desperately trying to hold on to our seats as we bounced all over the place, the car speeding over rocks to try to avoid being seen by police or army. We arrived in Fara to a confused crowd of people who kept asking us why we were there (not in an unfriendly way, but they certainly don't get many foreign visitors and were curious, to say the least).
We toured the center, went to the city of Tubas for a few minutes, and then left for Jericho. No, Jericho is nowhere near Tubas, but both are east. Besides, neither Kate nor I had been to Jericho, and we figured we might as well see the oldest and lowest city in the world before leaving. We stopped at Hamra checkpoint, where we encountered hostile soldiers who we're sure are ideological settlers in that area. They wouldn't let us through, claiming that we had to get out the way we came in. Get out of where? we wondered. If we had been near the border with Israel, I would understand that, but seeing as we were in the middle of the West Bank, I was utterly confused. If we had been coming from the other direction would they have forbidden us to pass because we hadn't come through this way? Anyway, our Israeli friend Dorothy made several phone calls for us, and after an hour and a half, the soldiers let us through. Apparently one of the reasons they were worried about it was that if we go through, we might be going to Jericho, which is closed to internationals without special permission. Hamra is nowhere near Jericho, but it is on the same road.
By the time we passed through the checkpoint, it was almost iftar (dark, no cars, etc.). We hitched a ride with a nice settler for a couple minutes, but she was turning off the road, so we got out and began to walk. Kate insisted it was impossible to walk to Jericho, which of course I knew, but at least I needed to feel like I was going somewhere. A couple minutes later, a Palestinian man came out of his house, and we said hello to him in Arabic. He asked where we were going, we told him, and he told us we'd have to come eat with them and spend the night, because there wouldn't be any cars until the morning. I have to say this was a very welcome invitation. And I also have to say that I wasn't surprised. I have come to expect this almost incomprehensible hospitality and trust among Palestinians. Two strange foreigners wandering past his house as it was getting dark - and really, we could have been settlers. How was he to know? Anyway, we stayed, we played with the kids, we talked with the men and women in the house, we slept, and in the morning we got a car to Jericho.
At the checkpoint into Jericho, where we were afraid we'd be asked for our 'permits,' the soldiers just looked at our passports and gave them back to the driver of our car, letting us through with no problem. Jericho is a beautiful city, although it's one of the places where the suffering economy (lack of tourists) is most apparent. The streets were pretty empty, and the cable car operators on the Mt. of Temptation seemed to open up just for us. An article from 1999 hanging in the building said they were expecting the project to pay for itself with Jericho's 500,000 tourists each year. That's over 1,000 a day. I doubt they had many more than 2 the day we were there.
I returned to Hares to the news that Angie, one of our founding team members and a prominent activist in the UK, had been denied entry and was being held at Ben Gurion airport until they could find her a flight back to Britain. We wrote to the press, and I even had a discussion with Abu Rabia last night about an idea that Kate had: Let's get the Palestinian Authority to issue her a visa, to make a statement that if Israel doesn't want Angie in their territory, fine, Palestine wants her in theirs. We'll see where that goes.
I am aware that most of this probably reads more like a travel journal than anything else. I'm not feeling so poetic right now, and I'm a bit overwhelmed with the fact that I'm leaving. I had some wonderful goodbyes yesterday, and realized that people really are going to miss me, and I'm really going to miss them.
What more to say? Perhaps I'll write again sometime next week, from the comfort of my parents' home in Pennsylvania. In case I don't, I'll say my thank yous now, to all of you have been reading and writing and passing my messages along and thinking and reconsidering and apprecicating the realities that are so important to face here. Please remember to contact me if you have ideas of where I can present. Boston: Nov. 7, 2:30, Christ Church.
In the spirit of peace, justice, and truth,
Hannah
Friday, October 15, 2004
These Are My People
“Welcome to the most democratic country in the world.”
The man, probably in his 50s or 60s, stopped us in the street to say this. Immediately we knew why. Kate and I were heading back towards the Damascus Gate of Jerusalem’s Old City, but a half hour before we had come from that direction and had seen the massive police force that Israel utilizes every Friday. I do not think the situation was more extreme today than most Fridays, just slightly more offensive. On the first day of Ramadan, hundreds come from the West Bank to pray at the Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem. Most of them have succumbed to the system and have obtained a permit from their occupiers to pray at the holiest Muslim site in the country, but the Israeli police still seemed to prohibit men under the age of 50 from entering the Old City this morning. When we asked why, one police officer called her commander over and told him we were interfering with her work.
So when the Palestinian man walking up the street stopped us to say, “Welcome to the most democratic country in the world,” we understood exactly what he meant. “Were you turned away?” I asked. No, he lives in Jerusalem. It’s just the sight of all the people waiting, hoping to access their holy site to pray, being turned away by Israeli authorities. “It makes you crazy,” he said. “It makes you wonder why there aren’t more suicide bombings.” We agreed, and all shrugged our shoulders somewhat helplessly and walked away.
I’ve grown up hearing Jews talk about the importance of the Western Wall in the Old City, about how the holiest site was forbidden to Jews for centuries. I wonder if any of the police officers or soldiers think about this as they guard the gates of the Old City preventing Palestinian Muslims from entering. It seems they have no awareness of the parallels, no empathy for the people, no understanding of themselves. And of course, it makes me feel I need to take on the burden of shame even more, on behalf of all of my people, be they ignorant or heartless or both.
The Israeli army’s massacre of Palestinians in Gaza continues as I write, with at least 136 dead and several hundred more injured. The settlers also seem to be getting more and more vicious these days. A few weeks ago a Palestinian taxi driver stopped to help a Jewish settler who he thought was having car trouble. The settler shot and killed him. Attacks on Palestinian farmers are increasing in number and severity. One was killed harvesting last week. Others have been beaten, their olives stolen, their groves set on fire. Very few settlers are arrested for any of these attacks. I wonder if the settlers would think it fair for the perpetrators of these acts to be assassinated without trial, their settlements closed off, their other residents arrested, their houses demolished. Or alternatively, I wonder if they would think it fair for every Palestinian attack on an Israeli to be met with a smile and something between a pat on the back and a slap on the wrist.
We picked olives and almonds last week with a family whose land lies on a hill that is now completely surrounded by settlements. The ownership of their land is the only thing separating the Gush Etzion bloc (halfway between Bethlehem and Hebron) from connecting completely to Jerusalem. They have papers dating back to 1924 from every occupying power that has been in the area, including the Israelis. Still, the settlers show up every once in a while with bulldozers and begin uprooting trees and constructing roads. Occasionally they attack people in the house, or attack the water tower or generator – structures that denote presence and sustainability. The battle over this piece of land has been in the courts since 1991.
We picked olives with a different family in a different area last week, whose trees are dying because the sewage from the settlement of Elkana runs right through Azzawiya’s land. I picked olives all day trying not to breathe through my nose, wondering if the donkey that was grazing in the area would get sick, wondering if the children breathing in this waste would get sick. On the way back from the land to the village (a walk that used to take 15 minutes but now takes over an hour because of restricted roads and paths), we saw two settler children on the hill next to us. The older one, who looked about 13, was carrying a handgun. He immediately started to fondle it when he saw us. “How are you?” the Palestinians we were with yelled up to the kids in Hebrew. They didn’t respond, but started walking away. “Don’t be afraid of us,” yelled the Palestinian. The settlers turned around, and the child with the gun yelled, “I’m not afraid! I love problems!” The man we were with seemed visibly disturbed, which surprised me. This type of interaction seems relatively normal to me, but the Palestinian turned to me and said, “It’s really not good that they teach their children to hate like this. They say we cause the problems, but then when I try to say hello they say they love problems. It’s not good that such small children have weapons.”
Perhaps because of the settlers’ ability to get away with anything, they have begun targeting internationals as well. Chris and Kim of the Christian Peacemakers’ Team (CPT) in Hebron were attacked while accompanying children to school two weeks ago. A gang of English-speaking (probably American) settlers in black masks ambushed the group and beat Chris and Kim with chains and bats. Chris suffered a punctured lung and bruised ribs, Kim a broken arm and injured knee. Last week settlers again attacked a group of 5 internationals accompanying the children. The army has responded by saying that if the internationals leave, the problem will stop. CPT points out that violence against the children existed far before the international presence (hence the reason for the presence). The ‘problem’ that the army refers to is clearly the public relations difficulty they might face trying to explain to foreign governments why their citizens are being attacked by citizens of Israel.
I thought of this incident as I was being chased down the street by a settler last night. We had gone to a large pro-settlement demonstration in Jerusalem, partly to join the counter-demonstration and partly just to see what one of these demos was like. The experience reminded me that there is no place I feel less safe and more threatened as a Jew than in Israel, by Israelis. Anger, fear, disgust, and sorrow overcame me all at once, and I walked away from the crowd sobbing. Later I wrote the short piece below. I don’t think it adequately expresses all that I was or am feeling, but it’s a start, and, for now, an end:
These are my people
These are my people
who gather in thousands to support the settlements
whose children plaster Gush Katif bumper stickers on their shirts
and cheer at the mention of a Jewish Israel from the river to the sea.
These are my people
who proudly don their hippie skirts and sandals
who look like everyone I went to summer camp with
who look like everyone I know now
who only by accident of birth are greeting each other with hugs at a settler demonstration and not a peace march.
These are my people
who jump out of the crowd to yell at Kate for wearing a shirt with “Jews for a free Palestine”
who violently push her and scream “Get the fuck out of here, murderer!”
who, upon seeing my camera, raise a fist and begin to chase me down the street, hissing
“Keep moving, you dirty bitch!”
These are my people.
These are my people
who stand around watching
at least a dozen policemen
who chuckle as the settler attacks us
who, as a response, form a line across the street and push us down, down, further and further…
These are my people
who push me away.
The man, probably in his 50s or 60s, stopped us in the street to say this. Immediately we knew why. Kate and I were heading back towards the Damascus Gate of Jerusalem’s Old City, but a half hour before we had come from that direction and had seen the massive police force that Israel utilizes every Friday. I do not think the situation was more extreme today than most Fridays, just slightly more offensive. On the first day of Ramadan, hundreds come from the West Bank to pray at the Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem. Most of them have succumbed to the system and have obtained a permit from their occupiers to pray at the holiest Muslim site in the country, but the Israeli police still seemed to prohibit men under the age of 50 from entering the Old City this morning. When we asked why, one police officer called her commander over and told him we were interfering with her work.
So when the Palestinian man walking up the street stopped us to say, “Welcome to the most democratic country in the world,” we understood exactly what he meant. “Were you turned away?” I asked. No, he lives in Jerusalem. It’s just the sight of all the people waiting, hoping to access their holy site to pray, being turned away by Israeli authorities. “It makes you crazy,” he said. “It makes you wonder why there aren’t more suicide bombings.” We agreed, and all shrugged our shoulders somewhat helplessly and walked away.
I’ve grown up hearing Jews talk about the importance of the Western Wall in the Old City, about how the holiest site was forbidden to Jews for centuries. I wonder if any of the police officers or soldiers think about this as they guard the gates of the Old City preventing Palestinian Muslims from entering. It seems they have no awareness of the parallels, no empathy for the people, no understanding of themselves. And of course, it makes me feel I need to take on the burden of shame even more, on behalf of all of my people, be they ignorant or heartless or both.
The Israeli army’s massacre of Palestinians in Gaza continues as I write, with at least 136 dead and several hundred more injured. The settlers also seem to be getting more and more vicious these days. A few weeks ago a Palestinian taxi driver stopped to help a Jewish settler who he thought was having car trouble. The settler shot and killed him. Attacks on Palestinian farmers are increasing in number and severity. One was killed harvesting last week. Others have been beaten, their olives stolen, their groves set on fire. Very few settlers are arrested for any of these attacks. I wonder if the settlers would think it fair for the perpetrators of these acts to be assassinated without trial, their settlements closed off, their other residents arrested, their houses demolished. Or alternatively, I wonder if they would think it fair for every Palestinian attack on an Israeli to be met with a smile and something between a pat on the back and a slap on the wrist.
We picked olives and almonds last week with a family whose land lies on a hill that is now completely surrounded by settlements. The ownership of their land is the only thing separating the Gush Etzion bloc (halfway between Bethlehem and Hebron) from connecting completely to Jerusalem. They have papers dating back to 1924 from every occupying power that has been in the area, including the Israelis. Still, the settlers show up every once in a while with bulldozers and begin uprooting trees and constructing roads. Occasionally they attack people in the house, or attack the water tower or generator – structures that denote presence and sustainability. The battle over this piece of land has been in the courts since 1991.
We picked olives with a different family in a different area last week, whose trees are dying because the sewage from the settlement of Elkana runs right through Azzawiya’s land. I picked olives all day trying not to breathe through my nose, wondering if the donkey that was grazing in the area would get sick, wondering if the children breathing in this waste would get sick. On the way back from the land to the village (a walk that used to take 15 minutes but now takes over an hour because of restricted roads and paths), we saw two settler children on the hill next to us. The older one, who looked about 13, was carrying a handgun. He immediately started to fondle it when he saw us. “How are you?” the Palestinians we were with yelled up to the kids in Hebrew. They didn’t respond, but started walking away. “Don’t be afraid of us,” yelled the Palestinian. The settlers turned around, and the child with the gun yelled, “I’m not afraid! I love problems!” The man we were with seemed visibly disturbed, which surprised me. This type of interaction seems relatively normal to me, but the Palestinian turned to me and said, “It’s really not good that they teach their children to hate like this. They say we cause the problems, but then when I try to say hello they say they love problems. It’s not good that such small children have weapons.”
Perhaps because of the settlers’ ability to get away with anything, they have begun targeting internationals as well. Chris and Kim of the Christian Peacemakers’ Team (CPT) in Hebron were attacked while accompanying children to school two weeks ago. A gang of English-speaking (probably American) settlers in black masks ambushed the group and beat Chris and Kim with chains and bats. Chris suffered a punctured lung and bruised ribs, Kim a broken arm and injured knee. Last week settlers again attacked a group of 5 internationals accompanying the children. The army has responded by saying that if the internationals leave, the problem will stop. CPT points out that violence against the children existed far before the international presence (hence the reason for the presence). The ‘problem’ that the army refers to is clearly the public relations difficulty they might face trying to explain to foreign governments why their citizens are being attacked by citizens of Israel.
I thought of this incident as I was being chased down the street by a settler last night. We had gone to a large pro-settlement demonstration in Jerusalem, partly to join the counter-demonstration and partly just to see what one of these demos was like. The experience reminded me that there is no place I feel less safe and more threatened as a Jew than in Israel, by Israelis. Anger, fear, disgust, and sorrow overcame me all at once, and I walked away from the crowd sobbing. Later I wrote the short piece below. I don’t think it adequately expresses all that I was or am feeling, but it’s a start, and, for now, an end:
These are my people
These are my people
who gather in thousands to support the settlements
whose children plaster Gush Katif bumper stickers on their shirts
and cheer at the mention of a Jewish Israel from the river to the sea.
These are my people
who proudly don their hippie skirts and sandals
who look like everyone I went to summer camp with
who look like everyone I know now
who only by accident of birth are greeting each other with hugs at a settler demonstration and not a peace march.
These are my people
who jump out of the crowd to yell at Kate for wearing a shirt with “Jews for a free Palestine”
who violently push her and scream “Get the fuck out of here, murderer!”
who, upon seeing my camera, raise a fist and begin to chase me down the street, hissing
“Keep moving, you dirty bitch!”
These are my people.
These are my people
who stand around watching
at least a dozen policemen
who chuckle as the settler attacks us
who, as a response, form a line across the street and push us down, down, further and further…
These are my people
who push me away.
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