Volunteers with the International Solidarity Movement are encouraged to write personal reflections about the work they engage in with Palestinian communities, the events they experience, and the people they meet. These journals offer the human context often missing in traditional reports or journalism. These articles represent the author’s thoughts and feelings and not necessarily those of the International Solidarity Movement.
HEBRON – From January 11 to 15, I was about an hour south of Jerusalem, in the city of Hebron, where four hundred settlers of the most extremist militant ideological faction of the settler movement live amongst more than 120,000 Palestinians.
The once bustling historic old city remains eerily quiet, covered in racist anti-Arab graffiti. A fence ceiling lines the narrow streets, placed between the shops and the settler-occupied apartments above because of the constant showers of garbage aimed at the Palestinians and streets below.
Many of the Palestinians who once lived and worked here have fled. Since the IDF protects the interests of these heavily-armed fundamentalist settlers, Palestinian families who live in the old city and the near-by neighborhood, Tel Rumeida are often virtual prisoners in their home, subject to violent settler attacks and destruction of property.
The Israeli High Court has recently ruled that eight settler families must be evicted from the Palestinian-owned whole-sale market in Hebron starting on the 15 of January. This resulted in the appearance of a few hundred more of Israel’s most militant, ideological settlers in Hebron.
International, Israeli, and Palestinian Human rights workers and activists also gathered to observe and document the situation, as well as intervene when the safety of Palestinians was in danger.
Although most settlers despise the presence of international observers and media (numerous members of the media and human rights workers were attacked and harassed), I was approached by a few curious settler girls the day before the protests were scheduled to begin. One, who had immigrated to Israel two years ago from the United States, told me that Hebron and other Palestinian land belonged to her. “Just read the bible,” she said. She told me that she wanted all Palestinians to “leave”. When I asked her where all of the Palestinians should go she responded, “There are thirteen other Arab counties”. Another young girl said that “Arabs only came to these lands when the state of Israel was declared”, indicating her belief in the right-wing cultural myth that no one lived in Israel when European Jews began to immigrate.
Over the course of the weekend, mobs of teenaged settlers (some wearing black ski masks) roamed the streets of Tel Rumeida and forcefully entered a closed Palestinian part of the old city. These mobs attacked many of the Palestinians and human rights workers they encountered with spit, paint bombs, insults, and physical force. I spent much of the days accompanying Palestinians returning from the Mosque or the old city to their homes on a route that these settlers were also using to move back and forth between the site of the eviction and the temple.
It was truly disturbing to see scores of teenaged boys walking freely with a gun in one hand and the torah in the other with faces and eyes that carried expressions of utter hatred, which I am struggling to properly describe. Perhaps the most difficult thing to cope with was the fact that we are all human and capable of this sort of hatred. These children have been taught to hate just like the Palestinian children I escorted have been taught to flinch at the sight of a settler. I don’t know how far we have come since slavery and Nazi Germany and I wonder if any of this will ever stop. I don’t think it is enough to educate. We must fight harder. We must not turn away from these horrors. We must not forget the oppressed and acknowledge our roles as oppressors.
At the entrance to Qalandia checkpoint there is a sign with a big flower on it that says “the hope of us all.” The insanity of this cheerful phrase in front of an illegal checkpoint was not lost to an Israeli Jewish activist friend of mine. It reminded her of the Nazi slogan “Arbeit Macht Frei,” meaning “work will set you free” which was posted at the entrace to concentration camps in Poland. She thought it would be a great action if we spray painted “Arbeit Macht Frei” on the Qalandia sign; so I made a stencil of it and bought a can of spray paint as soon as I could. I met her at Qalandia today and by chance ran into another American Jewish activist friend of mine. We were a little bit afraid we would get arrested but there were no soldiers in sight and I was feeling a little bit giddy like a kid who knows she’s about to do something bad like eating a whole tub of ice cream before breakfast. We quickly painted it and handed out flyers in Arabic and English to onlookers explaining what we were doing. Then we left without so much as a single IOF gun pointed in our faces.
I’ve been traveling for the past two weeks with groups of people who enjoy more privilege here than perhaps any other group – American Jews. We can relatively easily pass through walls, fences, gates, checkpoints, “terminals” and other obstacles, moving from Jerusalem to Bethlehem to Ramallah to Haifa and back to Jerusalem without a second thought. Unless we think. Unless we call our Palestinian friends on the phone and try to explain what we’re doing. Unless they ask us, “Where are you?” and we debate whether to lie or to tell them we’re in their capital city that they haven’t been able to reach for the past 5 years.
Last week my host family was looking at some of Dunya’s pictures of the terminal and the Wall, and my 11-year-old host brother looked at one photo and asked, “That’s the Wall?” “You haven’t seen it?” I asked incredulously. “Once or twice,” was the reply, “but not recently.” Freedom of movement is so limited that people who don’t have the permits to leave their ghetto have no reason to even approach its walls.
A couple days ago I asked the International Women’s Peace Service (IWPS) landlord if he is still able to drive to work in Salfit from Hares, a village separated from Salfit by the settlement of Ariel and roadblocks and checkpoints. For now, he told me, he can drive there, but the checkpoint at Zatara is being made bigger. I said, “Yes, I know, it will be like the new checkpoints at Bethlehem and Kalandia.” “No,” he said, “the Bethlehem checkpoint is easy to get through.” Instantly I realized that he hasn’t seen the new terminals, because he isn’t allowed on one side of each of them. So he goes around the long way, through a huge valley that steers clear of Jerusalem, and ends up back in Bethlehem, in order to attend a conference on nonviolence. And the checkpoint in the valley, he says, isn’t so bad. He’s a well-connected man with ties to the Palestinian government, and still I know more about the institutionalization of the checkpoint structures than he does, at least on the physical level of having seen and experienced them. If you separate an entire population into small disconnected enclaves, it makes it difficult for people to organize against the magnitude of the system. This is not a new concept for the Israeli government. This is not coincidental.
And then there’s the less visible, or, for internationals like myself, invisible. I’ve been traveling north and south and all over the place for the past two weeks, and I found out only two days ago that nobody from the northern West Bank has been allowed south of Zatara checkpoint (in the center of the northern West Bank) for the past several weeks. 800,000 people in Jenin, Tulkarem, and Nablus cannot travel to Ramallah because of this Israeli closure. People like me can travel without knowing this, because our taxi drivers from Ramallah or Jerusalem can come north and bring us south. We never have to know, but the same is not true of my Israeli friend who is married to a Palestinian from Nablus. They were traveling back from Nablus to Ramallah after Eid Al-Adha, one of the biggest Muslim holidays of the year, and they split at the checkpoint so my friend could come meet our group in Ramallah while her husband twisted and turned through unpaved dirt roads to try to get home without being turned back at checkpoints. Or another man I know from Jenin who works at a human rights organization in Ramallah. He had gone home for the holiday, and it took him more than 5 hours to return to Ramallah. It should have taken about 2 hours, and that’s already taking into account the separation of land and roads due to settlement expansion. I asked him about his father, who I know is sick, and he told me the family has moved him to a hospital in Jericho, though none of them live there, because it’s the only place that different family members can go check up on him without too much hassle.
The division of the West Bank into tiny disconnected cantons is the most recent method of separation the Israeli government has employed, beginning in 1967 and intensifying continuously until today. But I’ve also been especially conscious these weeks of the more existential separation that still haunts people to this day – the loss of 78% of Palestine in 1948, the expulsion of more than two thirds of the Palestinian population, and the separation of families that have never been reunited. I’m not sure I’ve ever met a Palestinian who is able to have regular family get-togethers. Some of them are in the West Bank or Gaza, some in Lebanon, some in Syria, some in Jordan, Bahrain, Dubai, Russia, Venezuela, London, Montreal, Chicago, Houston… Everywhere but together.
I’ve been especially conscious of this dispersion these past weeks because Dunya and I are beginning a new project today that I wish wholeheartedly we had no reason to do. We will try to take kids from a refugee camp to their holy sites in Jerusalem, to the sea in Yaffa, and to the villages that their grandparents fled in 1948. We wish they could just go with their parents and grandparents, that they could visit the land, picnic on the land, build a new house on the land if that’s what they chose to do. But they have no choice. So we will go with them for a short visit, though it breaks my heart when people in the older generations ask us to call them on the phone from the villages so we can describe what we see and they can tell us where we are, what houses used to stand there, where the children used to play.
It breaks my heart when we talk about the project to other Palestinian friends and they ask if we can do the same with their children. It breaks my heart when I tell a 17-year-old friend about the project and she says, “I wish I were younger so I could come… But I’m not sure if I wish I were a refugee.” She just wants to come to the beach. Just to see the sea.
Sometimes my work with refugees, my work connecting Palestinians on either side of the Green Line, feels like a sloppy symbolic attempt to sew back together what my people have torn apart. Sometimes if feels like repentance. Except it’s not about me, and most Palestinians don’t particularly care about my identity as a Jew or as an American. It’s about power and trying to dismantle it. It’s about injustice and trying to fix it. It’s about my 17-year-old friend’s response to a question last week about what message Americans can take back to the U.S. from Palestine. “Revolution,” she said. “If all the people in the world overthrow all the governments in the world, we’ll have no problem living with each other in peace.”
I’m overwhelmed by the desire to share what I’ve learned this week in Palestine, but also overwhelmed by the size of that task. We completed the Birthright Unplugged tour last night, and it’s hard to believe it was only a week long. The amazing people I was blessed to meet, the horrific abuses I was forced to see, the institutional violence I was part of witnessing, the challenges I began to understand, the hope and courage I had the privilege of honoring…so much to tell you…
Too Many Walls
The Wall is called the Separation Wall, the Apartheid Wall, misnamed the security fence. It’s misnamed for both the security and the fence; 3-stories high, permanent concrete blocks wedged shoulder to shoulder, with watchtowers spaced throughout. It is not an overstatement to say that the Wall is creating a prison out of the West Bank.
Security
Most people think that the Wall follows the Green Line (the armistice line of the war of 1948 that forms the de facto Israel/Palestine border and which, under international law, separates Israel from the occupied territories). Let there be no confusion. It does not. The path of the Wall steals 10% of West Bank land into Israel. Though still only partially built, it snakes around the West Bank, carving once-contiguous areas into separate regions, unable to access each other. Its path runs around illegal settlements, de facto annexing them and the land they are on into Israel.
The policy is clear – the most land with the fewest Palestinians is seized. Once the Wall is completed (its planned completion route is public information), the entire West Bank will be carved into non-contiguous “bantustans” that can only be connected by road through illegal Israeli settlement territory.
Roads
There is also an infrastructure of roads that cuts through the remaining connected parts of the West Bank, allowing easy access between Jerusalam and all its “suburbs” (settlements). At its deepest point, the Wall cuts into the West Bank 22 kilometers (13 miles). This is all Palestinian land.
I walked through the Bethlehem checkpoint, now called a “terminal.” That’s very much what it looks like, a massive structure, wedged between the Wall on either side. It’s a sterile building compared to an airport terminal, yet more like a prison with a system of electronic doorways, metal detectors, and soldiers behind bulletproof glass. Above is a platform where at least one soldier stands with his gun pointed down. At the entrance is a banner the height of the Wall: “Peace Be With You” in Hebrew, Arabic, and English. It’s pink, green, and purple, with Israeli Department of Tourism at the bottom.
The Bethlehem terminal is well into the West Bank. Perhaps the department of tourism is confused. I pass through without incident, and turn back to get close to the Wall. I stand up right against the hard concrete, look up, concrete to the sky; look right, left, concrete to both horizons; cry, kick, yell. Silence. I don’t know what to do. I have never been in a ghetto before…
What is Holy Here?
Hebron, Al-Khalil by the Arabic name, is a Palestinian city in the West Bank, 35 km from Jerusalem. Throughout the West Bank, most illegal settlements are built either as “suburbs” to Israeli cities, or further east in rural areas (most of which will soon be annexed into Israel de facto by the building of the illegal Wall). But in Al-Khalil, a group of extremist settlers have planted themselves in the middle of the old city, the heart of the city. The daily violence they cause has forced Palestinians to flee the old city, leaving behind abandoned homes and stores that the settlers will soon take over, excavating the area and confiscating land.
In the mean time, the doorways are covered in anti-Arab graffiti. To date, 840 shops have closed. The corridors echo. The Israeli army, which is supposed to have military jurisdiction over only half of the city, currently controls all of Al-Khalil. There are about 200 settlers in the city, and about three soldiers per settler. The main road of the city has been closed off for Palestinians. All of the gates to the old city, except for two, have been walled. Of the two access points, one has an x-ray machine that all Palestinians must pass through, including children. The Hebron Rehabilitation Commitee (HRC), an amazing Palestinian organization, works to rehabilitate buildings within the Old City to try to encourage Palestinians to return to their homes and shops, so that the settlers will not confiscate their property. They are fighting an uphill battle.
On the tour with Walid Abu-Al-Halaweh of the HRC, we hear of settler violence happening nearby. We go to the place where the settlers have just left, and the ground is covered with rocks, some the size of my finger, some the size of both my fists. We follow Israeli army guards to the noise.
About 20 girls, none looking older than 14 or 15, are screaming, screaming. They are being gently cloistered by the army officers as they continue to scream at the Palestinians around them. The Hebrew is translated for me: “get out of our country, you’re dirt, you’re scum.”
We stand with a group of Palestinian men, women, and children, watching them… or rather, our group is watching them. The Palestinians are mostly waiting to get through the gateway that the girls have effectively blocked now for 20 minutes. Three girls break through the acquiescent army line and race towards us, where another officer holds them.
Grown Palestinian men beside me run backwards. I am shamed for the men, at the humiliation of having to fear a 13-year-old girl, because they know what the soldiers will do to them if they act in self-defense. They are afraid of the girls, with Jewish stars around their necks, screaming filth at their neighbors. The soldiers, who look no older than 19, speak softly with the girls, then turn around to scream and threaten the Palestinian crowd, telling them that if they take one step forward, there will be consequences.
For me, as I watch a people to whom I belong behave worse than any animal on this earth, feet planted, fists clenched, I stare into the eyes of the girls, hoping to communicate to them their own shame. I stare into the eyes of the soldiers, “I am witnessing you, you cannot be held unaccountable.” Finally, the girls are subdued and moved back to the gateway they came from, a gateway that has been built from the ruins of the home of Hashem, our tour guide of the afternoon.
He says that most settler violence happens on Friday and Saturday, on the Jewish holy days…
To Exist is to Resist
1948, known to Palestinians as Al-Naqba, “the catastrophe,” is not some faraway historical moment for Palestinians. For most people, it is the year their family lost their land.
I stayed with a wonderful Palestinian family in Dheisha refugee camp – Sa’de, Nahade, Amani, Jasmine, Wajde, and Sha’de Alayasa. Their family fled from their village of Zacharia in 1948. Upon returning to their village at the end of the war, they were told they could not longer enter. They had deserted their land. It was now a closed military zone, soon to be occupied and turned into a Jewish Israeli neighborhood. No one in the family has been to the village land since 1972. No member of their family is currently allowed to enter Israel. Two generations later, they continue to identify as coming from Zacharia, though both generations were born into the close-quarters of Dheisha, not far from the Wall.
The story is the same for family after family, some who still keep the key to their front door in their refugee home.
Inside Israel, the story is hardly different. During 1948, while some villagers fled from the war into the West Bank or Gaza, some further into Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Egypt, some also fled to what remains Israeli land. They built new villages, sometimes less than a few miles from their old, now razed or occupied villages. Over 100 of these villages are still “unrecognized.” Since the Israeli government does not recognize them, they do not provide them with water, electricity, or any infrastructure whatsoever, including schools or clinics. Yet, all citizens in the state of Israel have a right to these services.
I had the honor of talking with Mohammed Abu-al-Heja, the original lead organizer of the Unrecognized Arab Villages of Israel. Mohammed, originally of ‘Ayn Hawd village in the North, started organizing for the rights of his people in the 1970s and lives adjacent to his former village. Presently the land and homes of his village are occupied by the Israeli town of Ein Hod and Nir ‘Etziyon. Joined by other unrecognized villages throughout the State, they are slowly getting the Israeli government to recognize their new homes. So far 5 villages have been recognized. Mohammed is a charismatic man, slight in build with fiery eyes. Although well into his 60s, he is not quitting the fight any time soon…
The Israelis say they see no partner for peace, yet the Palestinians see no partner for justice.
The Wall, the checkpoints, the Israeli army at every turn, the fight for basic human services, the number of adult males held in detention or prison at any one time, the refusal to allow access to farm lands; all of these actions, including closures on villages, towns, roads, and homes seized between the wall and barbed-wire fences, increasing unemployment, continued dispossession of land makes it impossible for justice for these occupied people.
The continuous threat of violence…hope, faith, organizing, getting pushed down, getting back up, resisting….
Love and anger and sadness and shame and fire and loss and tears and hope.
Marjorie is a young Jewish-American from Boston on her first trip to the West Bank. She is with Hannah and Dunya of Boston to Palestine, who have started the separate Birthright Unplugged organization to give American Jews a chance to witness the occupation.
One of the activities of ISM is to create a physical presence of support for Palestinians resisting the occupation. The presence of international volunteers with cameras in the West Bank has a deterring effect on brutality and excess violence by the Israeli military who want to avoid the bad publicity of an international incident. It is abhorrent that the lives of international volunteers are given more value than that of Palestinians, but this unfortunately is the reality in Palestine. This is a symptom of the new anti-Semitism. Like Jews were scapegoated by the 3rd Reich, Arabs and Muslims have become the new scapegoats of the governments of the West who are incapable of doing any introspection beyond “Why do they hate us so much?”
Bil’in is a village of about 1000 people just north east of Ramallah. For the past year, the village has been resisting the seizure of their land by the Israeli government who have developed a large settlement nearby on the villager’s land. A wall is being built up around the settlement, cutting the Palestinians off from their former farm land. In response to this illegal seizure of the land (building settlements on occupied land is illegal under international law) the village has built their own “settlement” on the Israeli side of the wall. This is a one room shack built in protest.
The shack has been threatened with demolition because the Israeli government calls it “illegal” which is, of course, quite ironic. For the past few days we have been supporting the Palestinians of Bil’in by being present at their “settlement,” hoping to protect it from demolition. This is just one of the creative, non-violent methods the Palestinian resistance is using to draw attention to their cause.
I made a somewhat crude map of what is going on:
It was very heart-warming sitting around a campfire at the shack with Palestinian, Israeli and international activists singing songs, goofing off and having fun together. It could have been the opening line to some sarcastic joke, but it was real, honest and genuine and that made me very happy.
The IDF showed up a few times, we thought maybe they would try to bust up our party but they came and left rather quickly.
People have questioned what is the point of doing this? What is it accomplishing? Last night I saw for the first time what our presence accomplishes.
Abdullah is the owner of the apartment we are staying in in Bil’in and one of the ISM coordinators in Bil’in. He woke us up last night at around 2am saying there were Israeli soldiers in the village and that we needed to come out and demonstrate to them that there were people here who would hold them accountable for anything they did, that they would not be able to go around terrorizing the village and get away with it.
We walked down the street to the mosque where they had passed by earlier and littered the ground a bunch of leaflets. The leaflets said:
To the people of Bil’in:
The Israeli Defense Force who are protecting the Israeli civilians from terrorist acts are determined to prevent any act that creates obstacles to the work on the security fence.
The construction of the security fence aims to prevent terrorists from getting into Israel.
Do not participate in any acts that create obstacles for the building of the security fence.
Do not let those people (demonstrators) effect your daily life. These acts are against your interests.
The IDF will respond strongly to any act that might effect the security fence.
-IDF leadership
Someone called Abdullah on his phone and said they were heading our way. A few seconds later two humvees with approximately 6 or 7 soldiers in full riot gear pulled up. I walked straight towards them, not really having any plan of what to do or say, just knowing that I needed to confront them and show them that there were people here who were not going to let them get away with bad behavior. My heart was pounding in my chest. I was thinking “ok, this is it, this is how it ends, you are going to get shot right here and this is how you are going to die.” But you know, I would rather take 100 of their bullets right now, than die of old age later because I was afraid to stand up for what I believed in, and so I kept on walking. And of course I didn’t get shot, of course I had nothing to be afraid of because I am not Palestinian. We stood in front of them and Marcy told them in Hebrew they they should go home and that they were not welcome here. They told her to go home. It was tense for a few minutes as six unarmed women and two unarmed men stood in front of the seven or eight fully armed soldier waving their guns around. Then they left. Our first victory!
