EXCERPT – Suicide Bomb

An Israeli friend recently told me he’d like to see a blog about my take, and the Palestinians’ take, on Palestinian terror. I told him my take was pretty simple: I support international law as an instrument of peace, and I oppose all deliberate and/or disproportionate attacks against civilians. As for the Palestinians, I can’t speak for them. But I hope this excerpt from my book, and the article that follows, will prove illuminating.

The excerpt below is different from any I’ve posted before. Rather than just being a story, it’s infused with historical and political analysis. The analysis becomes more frequent and more sophisticated as the book goes on, the reader learns more, and the big questions become more urgent.

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EXERPT from Chapter Six: Suicide Bomb

I was chatting with some coworkers in my office [in Ramallah] on August 31, 2004, when Muzna received a text message on her phone. Her face changed as she read it.

She looked up and said tonelessly, “There’s been a bombing.”

It was the first suicide bombing in six months. We were all apprehensive as we waited to find out how many had been killed, where, and by whom. And what Israel’s response might be.

I called Dan [a friend in Israel] to make sure he was all right. He said tiredly, “We’ve been waiting for something like this ever since Yassin was assassinated.”

Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the spiritual leader of Hamas, was a paraplegic, white-bearded old man who wore flowing white robes. Like most Gazans, he was a refugee, driven out of his home in 1948. In 1987, when the first Intifada broke out, Yassin and other members of the Palestinian wing of the Muslim Brotherhood[1] co-founded Hamas, which called for the establishment of an Islamic state in all of historic Palestine.

Islamists were initially tolerated and even encouraged by the Israeli authorities as a counterweight to the secular nationalists of the PLO. They were allowed to set up a wide network of schools, clinics, and charitable organizations that increased their power base and popularity. They carried out their first violent attack in 1989, targeting Israeli soldiers and settlements.

Then in 1994, an American-Israeli settler named Baruch Goldstein gunned down twenty-nine Muslim worshipers in the Ibrahimi Mosque / Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron [believed to be the burial place of Abraham and his wife Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah, and Jacob and Leah, of primary importance to both Jews and Muslims] and wounded a hundred more. The PLO called on Israel to evacuate the increasingly extremist settlers from the heart of Hebron or at least bring in international peacekeepers to protect the Palestinians. Instead, the Israeli army enforced a closure on the Palestinian areas of the West Bank in order to prevent reprisal attacks—in effect punishing the Palestinians rather than the settlers.

After that, Hamas began targeting civilians inside Israel, Yassin said, to “show the Israelis they could not get away without a price for killing our people.” The attacks also had the effect of escalating the conflict, enlisting new supporters for Hamas, and exposing the PA’s helplessness in the face of settlement expansion, closures, and the killings of Palestinian civilians.

Aside from being morally indefensible, Hamas’ targeting of Israeli civilians was disastrous for the image of the Palestinian struggle for justice and a godsend for Israeli hardliners who opposed any compromise. Every bombing drove the Israeli public further to the right—toward believing no peace was possible because there was “no partner for peace.”

Yassin had rejected the Oslo Accords of 1993 and was initially marginalized by the hopes surrounding the peace process. He gained popularity only as talks broke down, settlements went up, and Palestinian civilians continued to be killed by Israeli soldiers and settlers with few or no repercussions. Israel’s devastation of Palestinian Authority institutions during Operation Defensive Shield in 2002 left Palestinians further dependent on Hamas’ social services.

In March—six months prior to this latest bombing—a Hamas suicide bomber from Gaza had killed ten Israelis in the port city of Ashdod. It was a retaliation for two weeks of Israeli incursions that had killed twenty-six Palestinians in Gaza. Eight days later, in the small hours of the morning after pre-dawn prayers, an Israeli helicopter fired three Hellfire missiles at Sheikh Yassin as he was being wheeled out of a Gaza City mosque in his wheelchair. He and two bodyguards were killed along with five bystanders. Yassin’s successor, Abdel Aziz Rantisi, was assassinated a few days later.

The assassinations were condemned around the world and by some in Israel because it was clear they would only lead to further radicalization and violence.[2] Even Palestinians who didn’t support Hamas were appalled. Hamas had vowed revenge, as they always did when their leaders were targeted.

The attacks today appeared to be it. Hamas in Hebron claimed responsibility for the attacks—two bombings within minutes of each other on two city buses in Beersheba in southern Israel that killed sixteen Israelis and wounded dozens.

I said grimly to Dan, “I guess now it’s the Palestinians’ turn to wait for the retaliation for this retaliation.”

An American friend sent me an article with profiles of the Israeli victims. Part of me didn’t want to read it. I was having enough trouble absorbing the psychological impact of the constant Palestinian casualties. But I knew that the moment I declined to mourn for the innocents killed on the other side, I would effectively become a part of the problem. With a heavy heart I clicked the link, read the article, saw the pictures, and was physically sickened.

Most of the victims were immigrants like [my Russian-Israeli friend] Dan who’d come to Israel looking for a better life. They probably didn’t even know much about the political situation. A three-year-old boy was killed. A woman who’d immigrated from Tbilisi, Georgia, to be with her family. A young man from Azerbaijan who’d just finished his degree in biotech. A Ukrainian biology teacher. A woman from the Black Sea region of Russia whose son was a cellist. Several of them had done charity work with children and the elderly. Sixteen unique, striving lives, all in one minute, gone.

The international news was blanketed with headlines about how this savage attack had shattered a six month ‘lull’ in the violence. It was true that since the last suicide bombing, only three Israeli civilians, eight settlers, and eighteen soldiers had been killed by Palestinians. Those were very low numbers compared to similar periods over the previous two years.

But in the same six-month period, more than 350 Palestinians, including 90 children, had been killed by Israeli soldiers and settlers. The press was conspicuously silent about that.

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The prisoners’ hunger strike was broken two days later, on September 2, after eighteen days of protests and suffering. [The prisoners' demands included more frequent contact with their families, improved sanitary conditions, more access to public telephones, adequate medical care, allowing prisoners to pursue their education by registering at universities, reducing prison crowding, and ending the practice of beating detainees en route to courts.] Some Palestinian prisoners had reportedly lost half their body weight. One mother fasting in solidarity with her imprisoned son died.

A spokesman for the Israeli prisons authority claimed, “Israel has not caved in to any demand of the prisoners and nothing is being discussed.” Other sources close to the Palestinian prisoners said some demands had been met. It was hard to know who was telling the truth.

Later, when I was reading Haaretz’s account of the end of the hunger strike, one of the advertisements on the page read, “Make your point: Why haven’t the Palestinians turned to non-violence? Click to send your response.”

I could only shake my head at the unintended irony. Last I checked, hunger striking was one of many textbook forms of non-violent resistance the Palestinians employed constantly. I thought to myself, A better question might be: “Why does the world demand non-violent activism from Palestinians and then totally ignore them unless they do something violent?”

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[1] The Muslim Brotherhood, founded in Egypt, is an Islamist organization and the largest political opposition movement in many Arab countries, especially Egypt.

[2] Extrajudicial assassinations, known as ‘targeted killings’ in Israel, have been a common tactic of the Israeli army during the Second Intifada. Such assassinations violate international law as they bypass due process and amount to execution without trial. They also frequently involve the killing of innocent bystanders. As of the end of 2008, 233 Palestinians were assassinated and 153 bystanders were killed in the course of Israeli assassinations. See B’Tselem’s statistics. For an example of the widespread condemnation of the Yassin assassination, see “Israel Plays with Fire” from The Nation.

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Pasted below is an article about another suicide bombing. This one happened six months after the bombing talked about in the excerpt above — and after Arafat died, Abbas took his place, and a ceasefire was brokered between Israel and the PA in the run-up to the Gaza Disengagement. Hamas respected the ceasefire, but a more radical (and far less popular) militant group called Islamic Jihad did not. Here was the result.

(As for what happened during and after the Gaza Disengagement to lead to the sorry state we’re in now, you’ll have to read the book.)

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Tel Aviv bomber’s family shunned

Conal Urquhart
The Guardian
March 1, 2005

Scores of chairs lined the rooms and corridors, and jugs of coffee and water and trays of figs were ready to welcome men paying their respects.

But the family of Abdullah Badran, the 21-year-old who blew himself up at the entrance to a Tel Aviv nightclub on Friday, killing five Israelis, were left alone in their grief.

For seven days after a burial a Palestinian family receives mourners, normally a big social event involving colourful banners and patriotic music.

But yesterday seven members of the family occupied the otherwise empty chairs and when asked if Abdullah’s death had achieved anything they all shook their heads, and one said no in English.

Abdullah’s brother Ibrahim said they were mystified and angered by his death.

“I really do not know what was on his mind. Maybe he was thinking about the killing of Palestinians in recent weeks, the building of the wall, the lack of goodwill from the Israelis in the political process. He wanted to be a teacher, to get married and get a home. He seemed optimistic in spite of everything. It never occurred to any of us that he would blow himself up.”

Deir al Ghusun is a hill town of 8,000 inhabitants. The flags of Islamic Jihad, Hamas and the leftwing Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine fly from many buildings, but there are none near the house of mourning.

Islamic Jihad, which has claimed responsibility for the bombing, was keeping a low profile. [Fatah and its armed offshoot, the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, openly condemned the bombing.]

Sami Qadan said the whole town was shocked and angered by the bombing and in protest no one was paying respects to the family.

“Things were getting better and then no sooner do we have money coming in again then it is stopped by this suicide bombing. This intifada has killed us and the wall has destroyed us. We cannot even leave our homes and we want it to stop,” he said.

Six of his sons were working as builders in Israel but when they tried to cross the checkpoint on Sunday they were told: “No one from Deir al Ghusun is coming into Israel.”

Abdullah, a student of Arabic literature at a branch of the al-Quds (Jerusalem) University in Tulkarem, was last seen at breakfast on Friday. “We didn’t ask where he was going because it wasn’t our normal practice. There was nothing in him to suggest that he had no plans to return,” his brother said.

The family realised that something was wrong only when Israeli soldiers arrived at 5am on Saturday morning and told them that he had killed himself and four Israelis — a fifth died of injuries yesterday.

Abdullah’s father, Said Badran, refused to believe them, insisting that his son was still in bed. The army arrested the two brothers in the house and later the local imam and five of Abdullah’s friends.

The family had not suffered any particular grievance at the hands of the Israelis, Ibrahim said, although he was detained in 1989 and held for 18 months without trial.

The town has lost a large part of its livelihood because the separation barrier has cut it off from its 825 acres (334 hectares) of farmland. In theory they can reach it through a gate, but it is rarely open, and the Israelis have begun chopping down some of the trees.

Ibrahim said that the family was extremely angry with the people who had chosen and prepared Abdullah for his suicide mission.

“I don’t know who they are but we want them to stop this and reach out their hands for peace. That is the only way the situation will improve.”

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The Fable of Megastan

In 2006, shortly after I left Palestine and moved to Washington, DC, I read a book called Understanding Iraq by Professor William Polk. It had a profound effect on me. I could empathize so much more strongly with what the Iraqis were going through after I had spent time living under occupation myself.

To try to engender some of this empathy in American hearts and minds, I came up with an idea to rewrite American and Iraqi history with the roles of the countries reversed — with America playing the role of Iraq and a fictional coalition of Asian and Middle Eastern countries called Megastan playing the role of America.

Aside from the general interestingness of putting yourself in other people’s shoes, there was vast potential for wordplay and hilarious digs. I couldn’t pass it up, even though it ended up taking weeks of writing, research, graphic design, and web formatting. Here is the result.

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Okies in the Promised Land

It’s my birthday, so I thought I’d post something fun.

Here’s another excerpt from my book — sort of. There is a section in Chapter 10 called “Okies in the Promised Land,” and this is the draft of that section. But it’s too long and “travel-writery” to include in the book. I’ll have to pare it down and extract the elements that best fit the flow and purpose of the book. (It’s a grueling process, stripping down the stories of your life to fit within the limits of literary necessity.)

Anyway, just for fun, here’s the whole story of my parents’ crazy visit to Palestine and Israel in the summer of 2005. It should also answer a question I get all the time:

“What do your parents think about all this?”

Now you’ll know.

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Okies in the Promised Land

My parents had always been nervous about me living in the Middle East, and my letters home weren’t doing much to assuage their fears. But I wanted them to see it for themselves so that for the rest of our lives they would never have to wonder whether I had exaggerated either the beauty or the horror.

My mom and my step-dad Bill had been talking about visiting for months, and I knew they would put it off indefinitely unless drastic measures were taken. So in the end I resorted to blackmail.

I said to Mom, “If you love me, you’ll come see what my life is like over here.”

They arrived at Ben Gurion Airport in the early afternoon on Friday, June 3.

The hotel I had arranged for us was on the Mount of Olives in East Jerusalem. It had a friendly Palestinian staff, a noisy playground nearby, and an unparalleled view of the Jerusalem Old City and the Dome of the Rock.

After freshening up and having a bite to eat, we headed down to the Old City and walked along the Via Dolorosa, the path Jesus walked while carrying the cross, and through the Arab quarter with its bustling mix of shops catering to tourists and residents alike. Mom quietly soaked everything in. It was her first trip abroad. As we were leaving the Old City, she told us it still didn’t seem quite real.

“It all looks like an old Cecil B. DeMille movie set.”

For dinner we walked out of the Damascus Gate and up Nablus Road past the Garden Tomb to the Jerusalem Hotel, where I’d made reservations at the Kan Zeman Restaurant to give my parents their first taste of Arabic food, music, and ambience.

The Damascus Gate of the Jerusalem Old City

We ordered mezze, traditional appetizers served on small plates. They brought fresh bread along with fourteen plates of everything from smoky baba ghannouj and fresh tabouleh to Arabic-spiced chicken wings and fried cauliflower. They loved it so much that for the rest of the trip, we rarely ordered anything else.

An oud (lute) player and drummer were playing and singing, and scented nargila smoke hung sweetly on the air. One diner spontaneously stood up and started dancing, and the rest of the patrons encouraged her by clapping and dancing and singing in their seats. Mom and Bill smiled and clapped along, and I beamed as if to say, “See? I told you this place was awesome!”

We couldn’t have had a better first evening.

Ramallah

We caught a bus to the Qalandia checkpoint the next morning on our way to Ramallah. Somehow I had forgotten to prepare my parents for the psychological impact of seeing a checkpoint for the first time. We had to walk through a dirty, fenced-in path that ran parallel to the outgoing checkpoint where men, women, old ladies, and children were being corralled like sheep and treated like criminals on their own land in the shadow of a sniper tower.

By the time we had passed all these horrible sights, tears were streaming down my mother’s face. Part of me wanted to comfort her, but another, hardened part thought, Welcome to the real world, Mom.

The worst part was that by now, going through a checkpoint did seem as ordinary to me as standing in line at a grocery store. It was just something you did every day, a chance you got used to taking. You felt angry when you got turned back, of course, but it had simply become part of the landscape of life, like the DMV. People, like frogs in slowly-boiling water, could apparently get used to anything—a fact as amazing as it was terrifying.

“Good Lord,” Mom said as we walked toward a dusty parking lot to catch a bus to Ramallah. “How can this be happening over here and no one in America know or care about it?”

I repeated something Yusif had said to me a long time ago: “That’s a very good question, Mom.”

When we got to Ramallah, I showed them my office and the Al Karameh Café across the street where I got a five-shekel cappuccino after lunch every day. (I went as much for the young barista’s shy smile as for the best coffee in town.) We walked to a gleaming pharmacy down the street that had all the latest prescription medications, shampoos, and deodorants. I didn’t tell them that the first time I went in, the pharmacist, an impeccably clean-cut man in his early thirties, was explaining the different types of condoms to a European man as if he was talking about laundry detergents. From then on I got all my embarrassing personal items there.

We followed Main Street toward Al Manara, the main traffic circle of Ramallah, where I showed them the four stone lions, each representing one of the founding families of Ramallah. Ramallah, I told them, meant ‘God’s Hill’ in Arabic due to its scenic beauty and fresh sea breezes. It had been a mostly Christian town until it was inundated with refugees in 1948. It had also been a popular summer retreat for families from as far away as Saudi Arabia until Israel occupied the West Bank in 1967. Since then, tourism had shrunk almost to nothing, and many wealthy Christians had fled to America or Europe to wait out the conflicts.

A close-up of one of Al Manara’s lions in 2005

Al Manara today

We stopped in at the Silwadi juice stand with its baskets of fruit on the counter, and we each picked a handful (I went with a carrot, pear, and ginger cocktail), which he threw into the juicing machine for us. We took our juices and walked north a little ways and ducked into an alley behind the Arab Bank that opened into a sprawling open-air vegetable market, where the sellers were always yelling, “Arba bi ashera, arba bi ashera!” (Four kilos for ten shekels!) Colorful umbrellas shaded extravagant piles of fruits and vegetables on wooden carts—tomatoes and cucumbers, grapes and mangoes, pears and peaches, plums and guava, fresh mint and parsley, oranges and lemons, onions and garlic, eggplant and hot peppers—as much produce as you could eat in a week for a handful of shekels.

According to This Week in Palestine, in the old days you could find “guava from Qalqilia, oranges from Gaza, grapes from Hebron, bananas from Jericho, raspberries from Bethlehem, and apricots from Beit Sahour and Beit Jala.” It was still true to an extent, but because of the closures imposed on Palestinians and the relative ease of Israeli produce getting into the West Bank, you were more likely to see Israeli than Palestinian produce in this market.

We walked back toward Al Manara, past the streets where service taxis congregated, their drivers shouting, “Ariha, riha, riha!” for Jericho or “Nabliss, Nabliss?” for Nablus. I led them to Pronto, where I ordered us all cappuccinos on the veranda overlooking City Hall Park. When I introduced my parents to the waiter, his face lit up.

“Ah, welcome!” he said.

As we were leaving, he refused to charge us for the coffee.

I looked at my parents and laughed. “You see what I have to deal with here?”

We caught a cab to the Muqataa next, past a vista point where we could just make out the Mediterranean Sea through the haze. The gate to the Muqataa was guarded by two handsome Palestinian policemen who gave us directions to Arafat’s tomb, a monument with glass walls surrounding an engraved polished stone covered with flowers and wreaths from world leaders and well-wishers. Three Palestinian soldiers stood guard inside the tomb, and I greeted them with one of my favorite Arabic expressions, “Yatikum al afiyeh.” (May God give you strength in your work.) They smiled and returned the greeting.

We caught another cab to the City Hall Park of Al Bireh, the city that adjoined Ramallah on the north and east. Tables and chairs were set up invitingly around gardens and fountains, where people could order food, drinks, and nargila. I showed my mother a colorful flowing mosaic sculpture that had been inlaid into a garden wall. It showed clay jars pouring out an ocean of blue water in front of a resplendent golden sun. My mother did mosaic art, so I knew she would appreciate it. Finally I showed off my clean, spacious apartment and the supermarket next door, where I could get anything from Nutella and peanut butter to deli sliced smoked turkey and hummus.

For dinner, we drove into the countryside to a small restaurant called Al Fellaha (The Farmer Woman). It specialized in homemade musakhan, a Palestinian national dish made of tender roast chicken, onions, sumac, allspice, and saffron baked on top of crisp, chewy wheat bread and sprinkled with toasted almonds and pine nuts. Along the way, I pointed out the picturesque ruins of several primitive stone shelters in the hills that had been used for centuries by farmers camping out at harvest time.

Dinner at Al Fellaha was one of our favorite memories of the trip. It was so tranquil in the countryside, the food was homemade and perfect, and the restaurant owners were a charming family. I told every funny story I could remember from the past year, and we laughed and had a wonderful time. They asked me more about the settlements. As I was trying to explain who they were and what they did, Bill interrupted and said, “So basically they’re like NRA Baptists.”

I laughed. “Well, NRA Baptists if the government let them kick non-Christians out of their homes, beat and harass them, and destroy their property. That pretty much sums it up.”

We rounded out the lovely day with drinks at Darna, the restaurant that had recently been shot up by militants. Muzna and some other friends joined us. It was back in order again, and not a trace of the recent violence could be seen except for a few bullet holes chipped into the stone ceiling. I did not point them out to my parents.

Bethlehem

We headed to Jericho the next day and toured the city briefly before catching a cab to the Dead Sea. Just as the dark blue sea was coming into view through the desert haze, we were stopped at a flying checkpoint. An Israeli soldier with an assault rifle slung over his shoulder squinted at our documents, handed them back, and said, “Sorry, the road is closed.”

I leaned out the window. “What do you mean, closed?”

“I mean go back, the road is closed.”

“Why?”

“No Palestinian cars allowed.”

Most of the Jordan Valley and Dead Sea rift was off-limits to Palestinian traffic, but I had assumed our driver would know roads toward the Dead Sea that a Palestinian car could take.

“When did this go into effect?” I asked.

The soldier smiled. “Today.”

I stared at him in disbelief. Seeing a soldier arbitrarily deny my mother a glimpse of one of the wonders of the world on her once-in-a-lifetime vacation awakened a primal rage I didn’t realize I was capable of. I started yelling at the soldier. He just laughed, which infuriated me further.

Finally Mom pulled me back into my seat, and the driver backed up and turned around. With no other outlet, my fury turned on the driver. I accusing him of lying to us and taking our money knowing we’d be turned back. I wasn’t thinking clearly, and Mom was obviously mortified by my behavior. I can’t imagine how I would have reacted if the soldier had been denying her life-saving medical treatment, or beating or humiliating her.

“There are many things to see in Jericho,” the driver said, weathering my outburst with admirable restraint. “I can take you to Hisham’s Palace. I promise you will enjoy it.”

The palace had been built north of Jericho in the year 743 for an Umayyad caliph, modeled on a Roman design and covered with exquisite mosaics. We found a guide to walk us through a dusty desert field full of ancient carved stone columns and a few intact buildings. The most famous element was a gorgeous mosaic in the bath house depicting a lion attacking a gazelle under a luscious pomegranate tree. Other mosaics were on the floor, amazingly preserved and buried under six inches of sand that could be swept away to view the designs.

After the tour, we followed the guide toward a modern mosaic studio, where a young Palestinian artist told us Laura Bush had recently visited and pledged to fund his project to reconstruct ruined mosaics. He proudly showed off a picture on his cell phone of himself standing next to the First Lady.

We caught a service taxi to Bethlehem next. The taxi held seven passengers, and we spent ten sweaty minutes waiting for a seventh passenger to show up before Mom realized what we were waiting for and said, “I’ll pay for the seventh seat myself!”

I tried to explain this in Arabic to the Palestinian woman in a headscarf sitting next to the empty seat. She looked confused and said in English, “Pardon me?” We all laughed. I explained in English, and she translated it to the guy next to her. The guy wearing a turban in the front seat turned around and said, “Eh?” The guy next to the woman translated it to him. Then the guy in the turban stuck his head out the window and yelled in perfect English, “Bertram, come on!” The whole routine cracked my parents up to no end.

Our route went through Wadi Nar (Valley of Fire), a remote desert canyon, rather than through Jerusalem, which would have been faster but included stretches of road that were off-limits to Palestinian cars. The road was long, hilly, and circuitous, and right in the middle of the canyon our taxi blew out a tire. We were worried we might be stuck in the hot sun for hours, but the Palestinian passengers jumped out like an Indy pit crew and changed the flat in a matter of minutes.

In Bethlehem, I showed my parents Manger Square, the Church of the Nativity, and the Milk Grotto where Mary spilled milk while nursing Jesus, but Mom was more fascinated by the Palestinian shopkeepers who sold us souvenirs and insisted we stay for drinks. They explained that our purchases supported six families and asked if we needed anything else. We said we needed a taxi, and they called a brother-in-law to pick us up and take us to three different idyllic tracts of land that all claimed to be the Shepherd’s Fields.

In the afternoon, we went back to Manger Square for coffee before heading back to Jerusalem. Soon the call to prayer sounded from the Mosque of Omar on the opposite end of Manger Square from the Church of the Nativity. The mosque was built on the site where an early Muslim caliph had prayed after issuing a law that guaranteed respect and protection for Christian shrines and clergy in the city.

Mom leaned toward me and asked, “What is he saying?”

It was just the ordinary call to prayer, but I pretended to listen intently, as if attempting a difficult translation. “He’s saying… ‘Kill the infidels, kill the infidels.’”

My step-dad nodded thoughtfully, as if this were an interesting cultural note. Mom froze in terror, her coffee halfway to her lips.

I couldn’t keep a straight face for long. “I’m kidding. Don’t worry. He’s just saying it’s time to pray.”

Our final stop was Rachel’s Tomb, also known as the Bilal bin Rabah Mosque and containing Bethlehem’s only Muslim cemetery. The Ottoman-era structure had been claimed by settlers who believed it was where Jacob’s favorite wife had died while giving birth to Benjamin en route to Jerusalem. Palestinians were now barred from entering the mosque, the grave, and the cemetery. It had been transformed into a fortified military post in the 1990s and enclosed in concrete walls guarded by soldiers and sniper towers in a northern Bethlehem neighborhood.

The Wall swerved deeply into Bethlehem to surround the complex. The neighborhood in this area had been reduced to a near-ghost town due to the Wall cutting residents off from their land, other neighborhoods, and Jerusalem. A few apartment buildings were draped in camouflage netting. These apartments had been taken over by Israeli soldiers to use as army outposts.

We showed our passports to an Israeli guard as we entered the complex and waded through a group of teenage Jewish boys lying on the floor in a corridor. The tomb shrine was in a chamber at the end of the corridor. Several women dressed in long skirts with scarves covering their hair were standing next to the shrine and moving their bodies as they prayed. Armed settlers and soldiers wandered the corridors.

Like Joseph’s Tomb and the Ibrahimi Mosque, there was no sense of serenity or holiness here. We felt anxious and queasy, and we turned around to leave as soon as we saw the tomb. But when we got back to the huge metal exit door, it was locked tight. Mom got a look of panic on her face, and I asked one of the Jewish teenagers how we could get out.

“We’re waiting for a bus with an armed escort to take us back to Jerusalem,” he said.

My parents looked at him like he was insane. An armed escort? In Bethlehem?

When the soldiers finally arrived to let us out, we didn’t take the armored bus. We walked into northern Bethlehem and toward the checkpoint in the Wall that led back to Jerusalem.

The view of the Wall here was one of the single most shocking sights in the entire West Bank. For millennia, Jerusalem and Bethlehem had been sister holy cities, less than ten miles apart. Now it was almost as difficult for Jerusalem’s Christians and Muslims to get to their holy sites in Bethlehem as it was for Bethlehem’s Christians and Muslims to visit Jerusalem. The traditional Palm Sunday procession from Bethlehem to Jerusalem that spring had, for the first time, been stopped short by the Wall that now separated the two holy cities. The aborted procession was a powerful symbol of the depravity and disgrace of a Wall carving up the Holy Land with no regard for its native inhabitants. Severing Bethlehem’s ancient cultural, spiritual, and commercial ties with Jerusalem was a crime of historic proportions.

We walked toward the new terminal built into the Wall, a checkpoint that looked more like an international border crossing. I passed through the metal detector first. They didn’t even check my passport or search my bags. When my parents followed, I heard a female Israeli guard say to Mom, “Are you a tourist?”

“Yes,” my mother said.

“We love tourists,” the Israeli guard said.

My mom nodded miserably as she watched Palestinians just a few yards from us getting harassed by other soldiers. Walking away from the terminal to try to find a taxi into Jerusalem, with the giant concrete Wall hiding from sight the friendly, strangled, ghettoized birthplace of Jesus Christ, my mother cried for the second time.

Jerusalem Day

The next day, hoping for a more relaxed and touristy atmosphere, we headed to the Jerusalem Old City to visit the Haram al Sharif [aka Noble Sanctuary or Temple Mount] and see the unforgettable sight of the Dome of the Rock shining against the azure sky.

The Old City was more crowded than usual, and when we reached the Western Wall prayer plaza and tried to make our way to the Haram, we were stopped by an Israeli soldier.

“It is closed,” he informed us.

“Why?” I was too exhausted to be angry.

“It’s Jerusalem Day.”

It took us a while to understand what this meant. It was Yom Yerushalayim, a Jewish celebration of the ‘liberation and reunification’ of the city in 1967. Thousands of American Jews had descended on the city and were parading around as if they owned the place while Palestinians were kept out of sight and under control by hundreds of Israeli police and soldiers, checkpoints, and closures. As we were walking back through the Muslim Quarter, a young shopkeeper asked us what we were looking for.

“We wanted to see the Dome of the Rock,” I said glumly, “but it’s closed for Jerusalem Day.”

“Go up on the roof of the Armenian Hospice,” he said. “It has the second-best view of the Dome of the Rock in the city.” He gave us directions, and we were welcomed into the hospice and onto the roof, where the view was indeed almost as resplendent as that from the Haram itself, looking over the entire Old City.

A portrait of Jerusalem of old

The Church of the Holy Sepulcher was the last must-see site in the Old City. Mom insisted on hiring a guide to take us through the labyrinthine structure built on Golgotha, the Hill of Calvary where Jesus was crucified and buried. Several Christian sects competed for administration and maintenance of the church and its grounds, and their infighting had prompted Salah al Din (Saladin) in 1178 to appoint a Muslim family, the Nusseibehs, to be custodians of the keys to the church and to mediate disputes.

Mom found a kindly man who offered us a tour, and he turned out to be Wajeeh Nusseibeh, the keeper of the keys himself. Off we went into the crazy amalgam of churches, with a different sect controlling different corners and levels, chambers and chapels. Every room was more intriguing than the last. One entire hallway of rock walls was covered with crosses carved by Crusaders during the European occupation of the city.

Mr. Nusseibeh told us that when Jimmy Carter had visited, he wanted to examine every stone. George W. Bush, on the other hand, had looked at the church for only ten minutes and talked the whole time. At the end, he opened an old wooden safe and showed us a picture of himself in the official book of the church and other pictures with various global VIPs — popes, presidents, and movie stars. We took our own picture with him. The whole tour cost only $20. Mom still says it was the best $20 she ever spent.

After rounding the day out with lunch at the Jerusalem Cinematheque and an afternoon at the Israel Museum, we caught a cab back to our hotel. Our driver was Jewish and didn’t know what or where the Mount of Olives was. He called a friend and got directions to it.

Things were going fine until we hit the first ‘Jerusalem Day’ roadblock. Israeli soldiers were manning it with machine guns. The driver turned around and tried to find another route only to be blocked again. When we hit the third roadblock guarded by tense, sweaty soldiers, the driver started cursing and careening around every back alley in Jerusalem trying to find a way, demanding more money, and nearly hitting cars and cats and people as he sped along. Mom was clutching her shirt and quietly singing ‘How Great Thou Art’ under her breath.

As we neared our hotel, the driver said in alarm, “This is an Arab neighborhood!”

“Yes,” I said. “It’s the Mount of Olives in Arab East Jerusalem.”

“You’re not scared?” He seemed genuinely flabbergasted.

Mom muttered, “Not half as scared as we are of your driving.”

The Galilee

The rest of our trip would be in Israeli cities, hopefully with no more guns, checkpoints, or insane Jerusalem cabdrivers. The Sea of Galilee (called Lake Kinneret in Israel) was our next destination.

As luck would have it, our bus to Tiberias was crammed with Israeli soldiers on their way north, each carrying an M-16. One of them accidentally scraped a piece of skin off my mother’s arm with the muzzle of his gun as he passed by. She was too terrified to make a sound. To try to make her feel better, I whispered, “I think this qualifies you for a Purple Star of David.”

She laughed nervously. From then on she acted proud of her Israeli war wound.

We settled into our hotel after we arrived in Tiberias, a city on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee. The next morning we rented a car to see the nearby Biblical sites—the Mount of Beatitudes where Jesus delivered his Sermon on the Mount, Tabgha with its Church of the Multiplication of the Loaves and Fishes, and Capernaum, where the apostles Peter, Andrew, James, and John lived and where Jesus began his public ministry after leaving Nazareth. All the sites were within minutes of each other, and Mom’s favorite was the ruin of St. Peter’s mother-in-law’s house. A guide told us she had been rich and lived on the shore, and Jesus and the boys used to go there to hang out on weekends. Mom said she had a mental picture of Jesus and the twelve in her basement shooting pool.

“It’s so weird to be here,” she said. “It’s just like in the Bible, but so much closer together than anyone can imagine.”

I suggested we check out the Golan Heights next, the strategic slice of Syrian land overlooking the Sea of Galilee that had been occupied by Israel since 1967. Bill agreed and Mom kept silent, clearly not pleased. As we made our way through the grassy hills, we saw the ruins of several Syrian villages with mosques that had apparently been left standing so they could be used for target practice. They were riddled with bullet and shell holes.

As we were leaving one ghostly demolished town in the middle of nowhere, an Israeli soldier suddenly stepped out of the bushes on our right and held up his hand to stop our car. Mom asked me why he was stopping us. I told her I had no idea.

Just then three Israeli tanks trundled out of the bushes behind him and crossed the road in front of us, loaded down with men and ammo.

“That’s it,” Mom said after the tanks and the soldier had left. “No more near-death experiences today.”

So we left the Golan and drove toward Nazareth, the heart of the green Galilee, to see the Church of the Annunciation, which was built on the spot where the angel Gabriel told Mary she was pregnant with the Messiah. We couldn’t find the church at first, so we asked two young Arab boys on bicycles to lead us to it. They refused to take the shekels we offered in thanks.

The courtyard of the church was lined with beautiful mosaics from dozens of countries showing Mary and baby Jesus, each with its own twist. The Japanese Jesus looked Japanese and the Thai Madonna was wearing a traditional Thai headdress and sarong.

On the way out of town, we saw a sign for Nazareth Illit (Upper Nazareth). I pointed it out and said to Mom, “It means—”

“Even I know what that means,” she said.

It was an extension of Nazareth built for Jews on land expropriated from Arabs, intended by the Israeli government to help rectify the ‘unfavorable’ demographic balance of Arabs to Jews in the Galilee. According to Israeli historian Ilan Pappe, “Its 50,000 inhabitants live in a dynamic urban space that keeps expanding and developing. The 70,000 Palestinians of old Nazareth live in a city half the size that is not allowed to expand by a single square meter; indeed, one of its western hilltops was recently requisitioned for Upper Nazareth.”

Apparently Israel’s discriminatory land policies weren’t confined to the West Bank and Gaza.

For dinner we drove to the eastern shore of the Sea of Galilee to have a fish dinner at a kibbutz called Ein Gev and watch the sun set over the water. Our Israeli waitress was friendly and charming, and the St. Peter’s Fish was excellent.

Mom wrote in her journal: “After we ate, Billy walked out on the pier to get sunset shots, and we walked over to the rock seawall, and looked down and saw a little kid feeding catfish. We went back and got our leftover bread, and until dark we fed pieces to the fish and laughed like crazy people at the big stupid ugly catfish opening their mouths wide, knocking each other out of the way, jockeying for position, and generally acting like a bunch of hillbillies. Oh God, we laughed so hard. I was just so happy we were all still alive.”

Acre and Tel Aviv

In the seaside city of Acre, an Arab-Israeli city north of Haifa, we splurged on a beautiful hotel on a Mediterranean beach. Our picture windows opened up to the sea breeze and a fabulous view of Acre’s Old City in the distance. We headed there in the afternoon for a tour of the Knights Halls, the prisoner’s hall, the Citadel, the Great Hall, the Crusader’s tunnel, and the Turkish bath used by Zionist militants to spring their comrades out of British prison in 1947. In the late afternoon we walked to the pier to see if we could take a short boat ride and see Acre from the sea. A tour boat was just about to leave, and we asked if we could board. They looked at us strangely but took our shekels and let us on.

Soon Arabic music came on over the loudspeakers and dozens of kids got up and started dancing and singing and laughing. That’s when we realized why they had looked at us strangely. We had crashed some kid’s birthday party. We couldn’t pay attention to the views of Acre for watching the cute, funny kids. Two of them grabbed plastic swords out of a shopping bag and started brandishing them at each other. Their mom started yelling at them in Arabic while pointing to the swords and pointing to her eye.

Mom laughed. “You don’t need to translate that. She’s saying what I always say: ‘You’ll put someone’s eye out with that thing!’”

The next day, on the train to Tel Aviv, twenty beautiful Israeli girls boarded with us, all dressed as policemen with pistols stuck down the backs of their pants. Mom whispered in awe, “They looked like movie stars. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen that many naturally beautiful women in one spot. They must not let ugly women apply for those jobs.”

We ended the trip over beers on a beach in Tel Aviv, relaxing and reliving the trip.

“So what did you think?” I asked. “I mean, overall impressions.”

“I’m so happy we came to check out your life over here,” Mom said. “We really had a great time. When I wasn’t being terrorized by soldiers or cabdrivers, I was absolutely happy to be here.” She smiled and looked out over the peaceful sea. “I’d come back in a heartbeat.”

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Changing Tides — Overview of 2009 in Palestine

People are always asking me, “How are things in Palestine? How have things changed since you were there last?” These are difficult questions to answer, in part because it’s difficult to explain how things came to this pass without writing a book. (Working on it.)

The short answer is, violence is down in the West Bank, and a few major checkpoints have been opened for longer periods than usual. Buildings are going up in Ramallah at an astonishing rate, and Arab Israelis are allowed to visit Nablus on Saturdays to shop. Nablus has had a building boom of its own, and the Huwara checkpoint being open most of the time has given that besieged city a breathing space it hasn’t enjoyed in years. It even has a mall and a cinema now.

Yet Palestinians are more depressed and downhearted than ever. Why?

Two words: Gaza and Obama.

Everything that could possibly go wrong in Gaza has gone wrong. After Hamas won democratic Parliamentary elections in 2006, Israel and the world slapped sanctions and blockades on the Palestinian territories to let them know they had made the ‘wrong’ democratic choice.

Then in the summer of 2007, according to journalist David Rose of Vanity Fair, “President Bush, Condoleezza Rice, and Deputy National-Security Adviser Elliott Abrams backed an armed force under Fatah strongman Muhammad Dahlan, touching off a bloody civil war in Gaza and leaving Hamas stronger than ever.” This is usually cited in the press as Hamas seizing control of the Strip in a bloody coup. There’s rarely any mention of who started it.

Since then, the blockade against the Gaza Strip has worsened into a humanitarian crisis, and the Palestinian territories have been split between the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip and the Fatah-controlled West Bank. It’s had a profoundly depressing effect on the Palestinian people, producing many sad and pointless rifts and retaliations.

To top it all off, Israel has a hard-line right-wing government led by Benjamin Netanyahu whose positions are laughably far from the general international consensus based on international law. But this isn’t what depresses the Palestinians, because they know where power ultimately resides: Washington, DC. And the US has a new President: Barack Hussein Obama.

In June 2009, Obama gave a stirring speech in Cairo that showed unprecedented respect and understanding of the Middle East and its context. More importantly, Obama put his prestige and the good will of the entire Arab world on the line by saying publicly that Israel would have to stop settlement expansion in order for negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority to resume.

Hope was kindled in many hearts that things might really be different this time. The days of Israel violating international law with impunity might finally be over. The Palestinian Authority felt emboldened to take a similarly strong stance against settlements. They said to their people, “See what our non-violent call for negotiations has achieved? Hamas may have taken credit for driving the Israelis out of Gaza, but we’ll be the ones to deliver the West Bank!”

To no one’s surprise, Netanyahu merely chuckled, approved a few hundred more settlement housing units, and went back to his morning coffee, confident he could expand whatever he wanted and Obama wouldn’t do a damn thing.

Apparently he was right. The Obama administration did a little hemming and hawing, and for appearance’s sake, Netanyahu said, “Fine, I’ll freeze settlement expansion. Right after I finish the 3,000 settlement housing units already under construction and approve a few hundred more. I’ll call it ‘natural growth’ to make it sound kosher. And of course I’ll keep building security infrastructure and schools and synagogues in the West Bank, cuz normal life has to go on for Jews, you know? And forget about ‘East’ Jerusalem. We’ll build whatever we want in it and keep kicking Palestinians out of their homes and replacing them with Jews. After ten months, I’ll have to resume construction everywhere, otherwise my right-wing coalition will get antsy. Take it or leave it.”

The Palestinian Authority could never accept such a farce. They hoped the US would finally have their back on this one.

Nope. Hillary Clinton hailed Netanyahu’s ‘concessions’ as “unprecedented.” Then she started mumbling about how negotiations should go forward without preconditions, as if it were the Palestinians who were blocking the path to peace—as if Obama never made a crystal-clear call for freezing settlement expansion as a precondition for talks himself. The Palestinian Authority was left with their asses hanging in the wind, as usual.

As one commenter put it: “This is similar to Bill Clinton’s inviting Arafat to Camp David II despite the bad timing and lack of preparation. Clinton said, ‘Hey, come on, if the talks fail, we won’t blame you.’ But the talks failed, and Arafat was blamed. Here we have it again. It’s like Lucy, Charlie Brown, and the football.”

I understand that Israel/Palestine might not be Obama’s number one priority given that he’s fighting two losing wars and financial and health care crises. But the least he could have done was not make things worse. More and more Palestinians are asking: If a black President with a Muslim father can’t deliver change, who on earth can?

Goldstone

It only gets worse. On September 15, 2009, the Goldstone Report was released by the UN Fact-Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict led by Judge Richard Goldstone. It detailed a seemingly endless series of alleged Israeli war crimes against Gaza’s civilians during Operation Cast Lead in early 2009.

Judge Goldstone is a highly-respected South African Jewish judge who served as the chief prosecutor of the UN Criminal Tribunals against the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. He took on the Gaza assignment with a heavy heart because he had a great deal of respect and affection for Israel. But in the best Jewish tradition, he knew justice must be blind, and he took on the nightmarish task.

To his shock, Israel refused to cooperate with the investigation at all. He had to enter the Gaza Strip through Egypt, and what he saw there, he said, would give him nightmares for the rest of his life. When the report came out, instead of addressing the substance of the report, the Israel lobby and its backers slandered the venerable judge, calling him biased and saying his report encouraged terrorism, made it harder for democracies to defend themselves, and damaged the peace process.

First of all, what peace process? Second, any ‘peace process’ that might be harmed by investigations into credibly alleged war crimes sounds like a pretty rotten peace process to me.

Nonetheless, when the Goldstone Report went before the UN Human Rights Council, the US government pressured Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to withdraw his support for it. Abbas acquiesced. Goldstone was shocked again. If the Palestinians didn’t endorse the report, it wouldn’t go anywhere. People who’d been working for justice for Palestinians for decades felt betrayed. The Palestinians themselves were simply dumbfounded.

As I wrote in an earlier post, there was an outcry among the Palestinian public so intense, Abbas was forced to reverse his decision. The Goldstone Report then passed easily the UN General Assembly with 114 in favor, 18 against, and 44 abstentions.

But the damage had been done to Abbas. The Palestinian public, many of whom already thought of him as a tool of Israel and America, began to despise him.

Abbas Gets Fed Up

In general, Palestinians are getting fed up with the formula, “Suppress dissent among your own people and wait for the Americans to pressure the Israelis to agree to a fair two-state solution based on international law.” Even Abbas—architect of the Oslo Accords, head of a corrupt and nepotistic ‘Authority,’ reliable puppet of so many years—is getting fed up.

In early November, Abbas held a press conference and announced that he wasn’t going to run for president in the upcoming elections. It sparked a firestorm of debate about what it all meant. Some believe he is genuinely fed up and just wants to take his money and run. The US has backed him into a corner where if he makes one more idiotic move, he’s likely to be ousted by his own people anyway.

“This is an obvious sign of frustration,” said Nabil Shaath, a member of the central committee of Fatah. Abbas is “absolutely frustrated that the Palestinians have fulfilled every ounce of the American requirements in the roadmap and got nothing in return.”

Salah Bardawil, a Hamas leader, said Abbas had been mistaken to place his trust in the US: “We warned from the start these negotiations wouldn’t bring anything to the Palestinians. He didn’t listen to us and now he suffers.”

Others think it’s a way to pressure the Americans and Israelis. They’ve created an atmosphere so toxic that if Abbas does quit, he’ll likely be replaced by far more uncompromising leadership. (This was what happened in 2005-2006. In 2005, the Israelis and Americans humiliated and marginalized Abbas. In 2006, Hamas won the Parliamentary elections.) New presidential elections are scheduled for early 2010, and if the US State Department wants their man Abbas to succeed, they’d better make some serious changes.

Then again, it looks like the 2010 elections probably won’t happen anyway. The West Bank and Gaza are still split, and Hamas says they won’t let Gazans vote in elections unless there’s a reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah and a unity government formed—a prospect that seems to recede further and further as time goes on.

Everything’s backed into a corner with no apparent means of escape. The deadlock is palpable. It feels like the moment before an earthquake, when the earth has been strained past the point where incremental steps to ease the tension might work. A rupture seems imminent.

Declaration of Independence?

Palestinians don’t have much stomach for continued violence, but they are starting to look for radical solutions. One option is for the PA to declare its mission to negotiate a fair two-state solution a failure and dissolve itself. It’s the equivalent of going limp when someone is trying to arrest you. I’ve heard Palestinians say they’d rather go back to direct occupation by Israel so that at least the situation is clear, and Israel will once again be obligated to ensure the well-being of the civilians under occupation—a job it now pawns off on European donors to the PA—which Israel frankly can’t afford.

But this would mean hundreds of Palestinian Authority bigwigs giving up their salaries and privileges, which would violate the Iron Law of Institutions (the tendency of people to care more about their power within an organization than the success of that institution).

Another option is to declare an independent Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza and seek international backing for it. In August, Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad released a detailed plan for building up PA institutions over the next two years. The Israeli government approved of it until they found out there was a political angle: The plan also contained a classified portion calling for a unilateral declaration of independence. At the end of two years, the PA, in conjunction with the Arab League, would file a ‘claim of sovereignty’ to the UN Security Council on the 1967 borders.

The Palestine Liberation Organization tried to declare independence in 1988, but at the time it wasn’t feasible to implement it in any meaningful way. Times have changed, though, and such a declaration now might develop a dynamic of its own.

In November, the Israeli government became alarmed when reports surfaced that major EU countries and some US officials might support a Palestinian declaration of independence. “The reports indicated that Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad has reached a secret understanding with the Obama administration over U.S. recognition of an independent Palestinian state. Such recognition would likely transform any Israeli presence across the Green Line, even in Jerusalem, into an illegal incursion to which the Palestinians would be entitled to engage in measures of self-defense.”

As South African/American journalist Tony Karon put it, “In the shocked aftermath of the 1967 war, Fatah took the lead in breaking the Palestine Liberation Organisation free of the tutelage of the Arab League, in a declaration of independence that put their fate in their own hands rather than relying on Arab armies to defeat Israel. Today, they face a similar challenge—declaring independence from Washington and once again taking their fate into their own hands.”

The EU looks ready to recognize Palestinian statehood, and so does Russia. The Arab world, Africa, Latin America, and Asia would probably support it, and Fayyad has said he presented the proposal to the US and got no signal of opposition.

“It’s a very dangerous move,” said a senior Israeli foreign-policy official. “More and more cabinet ministers understand that diplomatic inaction on Israel’s part is likely to bring international support for the Fayyad program.”

If the US threatens to veto it, the Palestinians could say, “You’ve failed in all your attempts at brokering negotiations, even when we had a moderate leader like Abbas who was committed to non-violence. You couldn’t even get Israel to stop expanding settlements. The entire Arab League put forth a two-state peace initiative, and Israel simply ignored it. And you’ve said over and over that a Palestinian state is in the American interest. Why would you veto this?”

Besides, as Henry Siegman of the Council on Foreign Relations and former Executive Director of the American Jewish Congress writes, “The assumption, implicit in Israel’s occupation policy, [is] that if no peace agreement is reached, the ‘default setting’ of UN Security Council Resolution 242 is the indefinite continuation of Israel’s occupation. If this reading were true, the resolution would actually be inviting an occupying power that wishes to retain its adversary’s territory to do so simply by means of avoiding peace talks—which is exactly what Israel has been doing.”

The US might veto it anyway, but even a vetoed resolution would bring attention to the fact that the US has failed, that Israel and America are the primary obstacles to a fair two-state peace, and that the EU has been pouring money into PA institutions toward a state for 16 years, and all that’s been achieved is more settlements and a great deal of death and destruction.

If US didn’t veto it and the UN passed a Security Council resolution recognizing Palestine within 1967 borders, it would allow Palestinians to leverage much greater international pressure against Israel for continuing to expropriate land, build settlements, and maintain the siege and occupation.

According to Richard Silverstein, “It would embolden international institutions like the World Court to more energetically pursue claims against Israel.” It would enable the UN to take a leadership position rather than a backseat to the US. Israel would be further isolated, more vulnerable to boycotts, divestment, and sanctions. It could be “precisely the bucket of cold water needed to bring Israel (or at least the significant pragmatic segment within Israeli society) to its senses.”

Netanyahu is Playing a Dangerous Game

Meanwhile, with or without a declaration, grassroots pressure on Israel is heating up around the world. Things are being said in American papers, in the US Congress, and on American TV that would have been unthinkable just two or three years ago.

When Ehud Olmert, who was Prime Minister of Israel when the assault on Gaza took place in early 2009, did a US speaking tour in October 2009, he could barely speak for being disrupted, subjected to mock citizens’ arrests, and called a war criminal by audiences in Chicago, San Francisco, and elsewhere. President Shimon Peres was recently greeted by angry demonstrations in Argentina and Brazil. More and more Israeli leaders are afraid to travel abroad for fear they’ll be arrested on war crimes charges.

In February, Hampshire College in Amherst, MA became the first US college to divest from companies on the grounds of their involvement in the Israeli occupation of Palestine.* (Hampshire was also the first US college to divest from Apartheid South Africa thirty-two years ago based on similar human rights concerns.) Nine months later, in November, Hampshire hosted a National Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Conference that seemed grounded, strategic, and prepared to win. Campuses all over the country now have organized cells pushing for divestment. (My alma mater, Stanford University, was on this bandwagon early.)

Roger Cohen suggested in the New York Times that we should talk to Hamas and Hezbollah. He wrote, “Perhaps Hamas is sincere in its calls for Israel’s disappearance — although it has offered a decades-long truce — but then it’s also possible that Israel in reality has no desire to see a Palestinian state. One view of Israel’s continued expansion of settlements, Gaza blockade, West Bank walling-in and wanton recourse to high-tech force would be that it’s designed precisely to bludgeon, undermine and humiliate the Palestinian people until their dreams of statehood and dignity evaporate.”

He said that “Israel has the right to hit back when attacked, but any response should be proportional and governed by sober political calculation. The Gaza war was a travesty; I have never previously felt so shamed by Israel’s actions.”

And in the comment section of his article, nearly every reader-recommended comment agreed with him.

The debate on TV is still almost entirely one-sided, with scant attention paid to Palestinian realities, rights, and arguments. But that truth-telling jester, Jon Stewart, is ahead of the curve on this, too. He was practically the only person on cable television to express outrage over what Israel did to Gaza.

Given that Jon Stewart is such an opinion-maker—voted the most trusted man in news after Walter Cronkite died—it’s heartening that his views on Israel/Palestine are so spot-on. (I never fail to notice that whenever he shows a map of Israel, he cuts out the occupied West Bank, Gaza, and Golan Heights.)

He went further in October by inviting my old boss, Dr. Mustafa Barghouthi, and a Jewish-American peace activist named Anna Baltzer to give a joint interview on his show. There was huge pressure to cancel it from the usual suspects, but Jon remained resolute and the show went on. Mr. Stewart did throw a lot of bogus Israeli talking points at them, but he also gave them space to respond to them. And when a Zionist in the front row shouted, “Liar!” after Dr. Barghouthi said Palestinians had been subjected to a system of segregation, Jon Stewart made fun of him. When he cat-called again, he was escorted from the premises. The crowd repeatedly cheered Anna and Dr. Barghouthi, and the video rocketed to near the top-rated Daily Show interview of all time.

The international movement for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) called for by Palestinian civil society in 2005 has also gained momentum. A multinational corporation called Veolia abandoned the Jerusalem Light Rail project that served to entrench the occupation of East Jerusalem after a concerted international grassroots campaign. The Norwegian government divested from Elbit Systems because of its role in the construction of the illegal Wall.

(My friend Mohammad Othman, now in Israeli prison, was instrumental in the Norwegian divestment. Unfortunately, Palestinian non-violent efforts are being cracked down on by Israel with increasing brutality. But that’s a long story that deserves its own post.)

And Henry Siegman, former director of the American Jewish Congress, wrote an article in The Nation that calls Israel “the only apartheid regime in the Western world.”

This is just the tip of the iceberg. As Israeli journalist Gideon Levy put it, Israel is rapidly becoming a nation alone.

The point is (according to Israeli journalist Naom Sheizaf), “all those opposing the occupation here and abroad, shouldn’t occupy themselves with hopes of political change in Israel. Chances are it won’t happen soon, and even if it does, it probably won’t help much… But international pressure on Israel does help… Israelis may complain of double standards, ask why the world couldn’t pick on China or Sudan (truth is it does), but in the end, the pressure gets to us. It makes pundits suggest new ideas and politicians explore new positions, since everybody fears that any solution forced by the international community will surely be worse than the one we come up with.”

Washington Shifting Ever-so-slightly

Even the American Administration is showing signs of getting fed up. Congress did pass its idiotic legislation condemning the Goldstone Report by a vote of 344 to 36, with 22 abstentions. But believe it or not, that’s a narrow win compared to the usual mindless passage of pro-Israel legislation. Several Congressmen, including two who actually visited the Gaza Strip—Brian Baird and Keith Ellison—came out strongly against the measure. Brian Baird even compared his own twin boys to the dead children of Gaza.

There was never a question that the legislation would pass, but according to Josh Ruebner of the US Campaign to End the Occupation, “[after] watching more than 10 years of debate on Israel/Palestine resolutions in Congress, I cannot remember one which featured such a robust performance by the opponents of a ‘pro-Israel’ resolution and such a feeble performance by its supporters. Clearly the discourse on Israel/Palestine has changed in the general public and it seems like more Members of Congress are starting to get it.”

The Obama Administration may be starting to catch on, too. According to Israeli analyst Daniel Levy, “It is not the new approach of the Obama administration that has failed, but rather, this is a moment of clarity regarding the bankruptcy of the old approach that has guided policy for over a decade and that the Obama team had inherited and embraced. As Rob Malley and others have argued, what is needed now is a review (as has been conducted in other foreign policy areas) and a testing and likely abandonment of many of the prevailing policy assumptions.”

Daniel Levy again: “During his first term as prime minister in the late 90’s, Benjamin Netanyahu made an enemy of then US President Clinton and played the Republican congress against the Democrat president. This directly led to the collapse of Netanyahu’s government and his fall from office. Judging by today, Netanyahu is keen for a repeat performance albeit under circumstances even less propitious for him politically.”

Netanyahu’s stubbornness on settlements may have led Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to call for an “independent and viable [Palestinian] state based on the 1967 lines.” This really is unprecedented—the first explicit American call for negotiations based on international law rather than on Israel’s wants and needs. On a recent trip to Jerusalem, Clinton asked Netanyahu to reference a Palestinian state based on 1967 borders in negotiating guidelines. He refused. Relations between Obama and Netanyahu are reportedly getting colder by the minute.

Unfortunately, the Israel lobby is still very strong. “If Obama tries to make aid to Israel conditional on a settlement freeze,” writes Stephen Walt in the Washington Post, “Congress will simply override him. Putting real pressure on Israel risks alienating key politicians and major Democratic fundraisers, as well as Israel’s supporters in the media, imperiling the rest of Obama’s agenda and conceivably his prospects for reelection. Moreover, several of Obama’s top advisers, such as Dennis Ross [a stalwart unofficial agent of the Israel lobby and prominent cheerleader for the Iraq war], are enthusiastic supporters of America’s ‘special relationship’ with Israel and would almost certainly oppose using U.S. leverage to force Israeli concessions. Obama and special envoy George Mitchell are negotiating with one hand tied behind their backs, and Netanyahu knows it.”

But it’s increasingly obvious that we can’t simply deny Hamas’ existence, starve, bomb, and blockade Gaza, and hope they’ll go away. Hamas has shown many signs of moderation, and each has been ignored. Before elections took place in January 2006, they dropped the call for the destruction of Israel from their manifesto. Hamas has also renounced suicide bombings, and the Hamas leader in Gaza, Ismail Haniyeh, said his government was willing to accept a Palestinian state on the ’67 borders.

So if Palestinian ‘extremists’ are willing to settle for less than 22% of historic Palestine, and the rest of the Arab world is, too, what is Israel waiting for?

Because if there’s no two-state solution—if negotiations don’t work, non-violent resistance doesn’t work, unilateral declarations of independence don’t work, and if Israeli settlers continue to consolidate their hold on big chunks of the West Bank, leaving only isolated pockets for the Palestinians, cut off from one another by the network of settler-only roads and tunnels that link the settlements to Jerusalem and each other, and the Israeli government has no will or incentive to end this state of de facto apartheid…

The two-state solution may be dead.

“If that is so,” says the Financial Times, “then the prospect is for a long and bitter fight for equal rights within one state. That would spell the end of Israel as a democratic Jewish state. It would come to resemble in many ways the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. If Mr. Netanyahu believes that he has achieved a victory by refusing to halt the settlements, he is wrong. It is more like a project of national suicide.” (Article reprinted here.)

This argument for a one-state solution by Ali Abunimah of Electronic Intifada is bold, well-researched, and imminently logical. The number one argument against the one-state solution is apparently, “Poll after poll says Israeli Jews would reject it.” Well, what if the continuation of Jim Crow had been left up to Southern white voters?

Israeli commentators are starting to figure this out, too. If they don’t get serious about two states soon, one state looms. They’re even saying it on the Op-Ed pages of mainstream Israeli papers like Yedioth Aharonoth: The status quo is dying.

For the record, I’m not yet indelibly in the one-state camp. But it does seem like the fairest and most elegant solution, and Israel has no one to blame but itself for undermining the two-state formula. Also for the record, I wasn’t thinking seriously about a one-state solution until the assault on Gaza in early 2009. And I don’t think I’m alone.

Either way, it’s increasingly clear that the US can either midwife peace with justice (talk with Hamas, encourage a Palestinian unity deal, and negotiate in good faith based on international law) or let Israel continue its path of destruction and wait for Palestinian resistance to rise again and the rest of the world to back Israel into a corner with boycotts. Netanyahu’s not smart enough to realize this, but we should be.

You’ve got a Nobel Peace Prize, Mr. Obama. Earn it.

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* On January 20, I was contacted by the Director of Communications at Hampshire College, who said my report of their divestment from Israel was inaccurate:

“Hampshire College moved some investments out of a fund following a socially responsible investment screening last year. That screening, conducted by independent reviewer KLD Research and Analytic, vetted companies on several criteria — none of them having to do with Israel — that included employment discrimination, environmental abuse, weapons manufacturing, unsafe workplace settings, and dealings with Burma or Sudan. Hampshire College has repeatedly stated the facts here and we ask that they be corrected and not be misrepresented again, please.”

I replied:

Thanks for the note. Here’s what I’ve read:

The College disputes this assertion [of divesting from Israel], saying they are not divesting from Israel per se, but because the six companies in question “violate the college’s policy on socially responsible investments.” When pressed they admitted that the decision to divest was “based on a complaint by Students for Justice in Palestine about six companies doing business in Israel.”

This sounds like “quiet” divestment to me, which is understandable. It’s not easy to stand up to the Israel lobby in this country. Regardless, you have a proud tradition of being on the vanguard of human rights issues. Many millions of human rights supporters would applaud you and take heart if you could openly oppose human rights violations by Israel just as much as you oppose human rights violations by Burma or Sudan. At least Burma and Sudan aren’t committing their atrocities with our tax dollars.

Until then, I will add your disclaimer to my website.

Respectfully,
Pamela Olson

Gaza Freedom March

Something exciting has been happening in Egypt this holiday season. Around 1,400 people from all over the world — traveling at their own expense, or through fund-raising drives in their communities — converged on Cairo to travel to the Gaza Strip on New Year’s Eve and march with the people of Gaza to the Erez crossing (the border that separates Gaza from Israel in the north).

Their aims? To draw attention to Israel’s siege on the Gaza Strip, deliver humanitarian aid, and try to end Israel’s brutal blockade, which started when Hamas took over the Strip in 2007 (after Fatah, backed by the CIA, tried to overthrow them) and intensified a year ago after Operation Cast Lead.

The blockade is something so evil, it’s difficult to describe or comprehend. Israel has essentially turned the Gaza Strip, home of 1.5 million souls, into the world’s largest open-air prison. Some go further and liken it to a ‘concentration camp,’ because prisoners in any normal country are at least given enough to eat, a set date when they can leave, and decent sanitation and medical care.

A year ago, in an assault the Israelis dubbed Operation Cast Lead, the Israeli army killed around 1,400 Palestinians, mostly civilians, including hundreds of children, destroyed hospitals, schools, factories, businesses, farms, and sewage and electrical systems. Until now they have refused to allow building materials or spare parts to enter the Gaza Strip, leaving their devastation frozen in time.

The Israeli government claims it’s necessary because Palestinians might use the materials to build more home-made, unguided rockets, which have a 0.5% kill rate (i.e., one out of every 200 rockets finds a victim) with which to terrorize Israel’s southern population. (The rockets are themselves retaliations for Israel’s blockade, assassinations, mass arrests, illegal land grabs, violations of ceasefires, etc.)

Blocking some materials is debatably justifiable, though principles of proportionality and laws against collective punishment should be taken into account. But what can possibly explain Israel’s blocking shipments of pasta, cheese, and chickpeas? Israel later allowed these items into Gaza due to US pressure, but they still don’t allow things like toilet paper, soap, toothpaste, chocolate, cigarettes, or spare parts for generators or water treatment plants, creating among other things a dangerous shortage of drinking water.

In addition, “U.S. and Western officials complain that Israel frequently changes the list of humanitarian goods allowed into the Gaza Strip, creating major logistical problems for aid groups and donor governments which are unable to plan ahead.”

Meanwhile, the production of textbooks by the UNRWA ceased long ago “because there is no paper, ink or glue in Gaza.” Many life-saving medicines and machines can’t get through the blockade, and dozens of men, women, and children have died because Israel refused to allow them to leave the Gaza Strip to seek medical care not available in the Strip. The only way anyone has managed to survive in a human way is through smuggling tunnels linked with Egypt. Egypt is threatening to cut that off soon as well.

This is collective punishment on a historic scale.* It is illegal under international law and immoral under any sane moral code.

Meanwhile, Operation Cast Lead was so brutally disproportionate (a greater than 100-to-1 kill rate, roughly 300-to-1 if you count civilians only), with so many credible allegations of deliberate Israeli strikes against civilian targets, it was made the subject of a UN war crimes investigation. The author of the report was renowned international jurist and South African Jew, Judge Richard Goldstone.

His report alleged devastating war crimes committed by Israel and lesser war crimes committed by Hamas. Israeli journalist Amira Hass explained, “The Goldstone report asks Israel to open an independent inquiry to the allegations [of war crimes], and if, within six months, there is no sufficient or satisfying response from Israel — and Hamas, for that matter — it can be transferred to the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court.”

On a more human note, Judge Goldstone told PBS’s Bill Moyers that the things he witnessed and reported on in Gaza were so horrific, “It… will give me nightmares for the rest of my life.”

(Watch a two-minute clip from the interview here. You can find the full Goldstone Report here.)**

Israel laughed in the face of the report, knowing the US government would kill it in its cradle. Indeed, President Obama pressured Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to renounce it (a story I’ll tell in a forthcoming post), and the US Congress passed a bill condemning the report as “irredeemably biased and unworthy of further consideration or legitimacy.”

Judge Goldstone sent a letter to Congress explaining that the bill was full of misrepresentations, factual errors, and utter nonsense. Congress, taking its cue from the Israel lobby, ignored him (with a few brave exceptions).

So Israel shrugs and moves along, keeps Gaza under siege, and kicks a few more Palestinian families out of their homes in East Jerusalem for good measure — throwing families out of their home in the dead of night, dumping their possessions by the side of the road, protecting Jewish settlers who march in and take their place, and arresting or beating anyone who protests. (I’m not even going to talk about Israel’s increasingly brutal repression of Palestinian non-violent protest in the West Bank or the fact that I have two friends in Israeli jails, one without charge, the other on bogus charges.) And the world’s governments do nothing.

Never has it been more clear that our governments have failed. Never has it been more clear that it’s up to us.

Back in the summer of 2005, Palestinian civil society called for boycotts, divestment, and sanctions against Israel until it obeyed international law. Last year the campaign finally took off. Though it is arguably not yet inflicting real pain, for the first time it is inflicting real fear.

The Gaza Freedom March is another prong in the civil society counter-attack against Israel’s crimes. 1,400 killed by Israel. 1,400 marchers. 1,400 lives wiped from the earth. 1,400 speaking out against this injustice from all corners of the globe. One man or woman, one voice, for every Palestinian killed. Thousands more marching in solidarity all over the world.

Unfortunately, the Egyptian government — a dictatorial police state propped up by American tax dollars and political support — refused to allow the marchers to get near the Gaza Strip, much less enter it through the Rafah border crossing. They claimed the security situation was too unstable. (Um, when is the security situation in Gaza ever stable?) So instead of protesting in Gaza, the marchers found themselves stuck in Cairo protesting against the Egyptian government and their own embassies for doing nothing in the face of another assault on liberty.

Philip Weiss, the American Jewish editor of the excellent Mondoweiss blog, reports from Cairo:

“I have to say that the broken Gaza Freedom March has been a great achievement. How can that be, when we are going stir crazy in Cairo? Well an international conversation over the issue is taking place here among the most diverse collection of people. I keep thinking of ways to convey just how inspiring that is. One minute you are talking with a slim, proper Japanese man. Then a minute later an Egyptian youth is telling you that Gaza thanks you for your moral solidarity. Then a minute after that Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb is saying that she came here to march, and she will march. Borders have fallen away here, and the American frame is gone. On my plane I met a kid from Jersey who had done the free Jewish ‘birthright’ trip a year ago and whose Jewish friends have been angered at his decision to come here, but when I saw him today, he seemed enthralled, transformed.”

The mainstream media is mostly ignoring it, as noted by Stephen Walt, co-author of The Israel Lobby, though there was a surprisingly nice write-up in the New York Times. It even mentioned Hedy Epstein, the 85-year-old Holocaust survivor who went on hunger strike to protest Egypt’s complicity in Israel’s blockade of aid and activists. Seriously. If irony were a commodifiable resource, the Middle East wouldn’t need oil. All that’s missing is for someone to dress up as Moses and shout, “Let my people go!”

Eventually the Egyptian government consented to allow 100 of the delegates to go to Gaza. After much turmoil and drama, they rejected this piecemeal offer because of its token nature and divisiveness. (The Egyptian government claimed these 100 were the peaceful ones, for example, implying the rest were hooligans.)

Phil Weiss again:

“Big deal we’re not in Gaza. It’s like being in Birmingham when the big march is going down in Selma… The Americans, who are so conditioned to living with the Israel lobby, as an abused wife to her battering husband, are being exposed to a more adamant politics — we are having a rendezvous with the Freedom Riders. For another thing, our direct actions and demonstrations seem to be awaking Egypt, a little [Egyptians on the whole are disgusted by Egypt's complicity with Israel's blockade, but their police state does not tolerate internal dissent], and getting a lot of publicity [at least in Europe and the Arab world]. Helen Schiff told me that the front page of an official government newspaper today said, ‘Mubarak to Netanyahu: Lift the siege and end the suffering of the Palestinian people.’ ‘We gave him that line!’ she said. A longtime civil rights activist, Helen told me it’s ‘fabulous’ what happened. We are achieving more in Cairo than we would if we had gotten into Gaza.”

They never did make it to Gaza. But they planted the seeds of a more sustained, organized, and motivated world-wide movement to end Israel’s illegal policies and American and European complicity. Here is the “Cairo Declaration,” a document drafted by the Gaza Freedom March as a blueprint for going forward. It calls for intensified action for academic, cultural, and economic boycotts of Israel until it complies with international law, continued legal actions against suspected Israeli war criminals, speaking tours, and other non-violent means.

A South African Jewish journalist named Tony Karon, who supported the Gaza Freedom March, recently posted this encouraging message on Facebook:

“In South Africa in 1988, if you’d asked any of us how long our struggle was going to last, the honest answer would have been twenty years. We couldn’t destroy the regime and they couldn’t destroy us; looked like a bloody stalemate. And then, barely a year later, a changing international balance of forces that none of us could have foreseen prompted a dramatic change of course. The darkest hour is just before dawn and all that… Happy New Year, and keep up the great work!”

May this shiny new decade bring many happy surprises.

Much love,
Pamela

* Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention states that no protected person may be punished for an offense he or she has not personally committed. Reprisals against protected persons and their property are also prohibited.

Quoting Wikipedia: Under the 1949 Geneva Conventions collective punishments are a war crime. By collective punishment, the drafters of the Geneva Conventions had in mind the reprisal killings of World Wars I and World War II… In World War II, Nazis carried out a form of collective punishment to suppress resistance. Entire villages or towns or districts were held responsible for any resistance activity that took place there. The conventions, to counter this, reiterated the principle of individual responsibility. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) Commentary to the conventions states that parties to a conflict often would resort to “intimidatory measures to terrorize the population” in hopes of preventing hostile acts, but such practices “strike at guilty and innocent alike. They are opposed to all principles based on humanity and justice.”

** Bill Moyers sums it up: “There are… some very tough allegations of Israeli soldiers shooting unarmed civilians who pose no threat, of shooting people whose hands were shackled behind them, of shooting two teenagers who’d been ordered off a tractor that they were driving, apparently carrying wounded civilians to a hospital, of homes, hundreds, maybe thousands of homes destroyed, left in rubble, of hospitals bombed. I mean there are some questions about one or two of your examples here, but it’s a damning indictment of Israel’s conduct in Gaza, right?” This is a miniscule portion of what Israel is accused of. You can find the full report here.

Photo Essay – Last Days in Palestine 2009

Sorry for neglecting this blog so long. It’s been a crazy last few weeks in Palestine. I just arrived in New York, where I’m spending a week catching up with friends and sleeping off the jet lag. On December 17th I’m flying back to sweet home Oklahoma for holidays with the family. Due to many distractions in Palestine (friends in prison, travels, soccer, street hockey, yoga, this blog, etc.), I’m a couple of months behind on writing. I hope to have the book finished in February, at which point I’ll most likely move to New York and try to sell it.

In the meantime I’ve been contacting prominent people on the Israel/Palestine circuit, which has borne some fruit, including a very useful and encouraging email from Noam Chomsky. I’ll be following up with the contacts he and others have given me after the holidays.

I’m also working on a big research article about Abbas’s threat to resign, which has so many causes and potential consequences, it’s taking me a while to put everything together in a satisfying way. I’ll post it here as soon as it’s done.

Meanwhile, here’s a photo essay about my last weeks in Palestine. All of these photos, as well as the ones in the Photo section of this blog, are available in high-resolution upon request.

In October or so, I visited a village called Sebastia near Nablus that boasts fantastic Roman and pre-Roman ruins. Here is the mosque built over the prison where John the Baptist was said to have been imprisoned before being beheaded by Herod.

I took dozens of pictures of the stunning landscape around Sebastia, but to save space I’m just including my favorite. The man in the photograph is a friend of mine from Sebastia who works in the human rights department of the Palestinian Authority and was a huge help in securing insurance for Rania. Hopefully he can help her get a job in the spring — she only has enough money to get through April, and her husband won’t be released until the end of July. Her baby girl is due any day now.

Here’s a Roman-style theater in the hills above Sebastia, a venue recently cordoned-off and invaded by Israeli settlers and soldiers and used for some kind of graduation ceremony, of course without permission from the residents of Sebastia. They thankfully left after a few hours without damaging anything, but it’s a mild version of the kind of routine humiliation Palestinians have to put up with on their own land.

Next are some pictures from Bil’in, the plucky village west of Ramallah that’s lost much of its land to a huge settlement called Modiin Illit and had about half of its land isolated by the Wall. Bil’in is one of the most active fronts in the non-violent struggle against the Wall. Every Friday since February 2005, villagers, Israelis, and internationals gather after lunch to protest the illegal route of the Wall.

In 2007, the Israeli High Court handed Bil’in an unusual victory. It ordered the settlement to stop expanding on Bil’in land and ordered the Israeli military to move the route of the Wall and return about half the land isolated by the Wall to the village (which meant only 25% of their land would now be stolen for the settlement).

Even though the victory was only partial, “The villagers danced in the street,” Emily Schaeffer, an Israeli lawyer who worked on the case for the village, recalled in 2009. “Unfortunately, it has been two years since the decision, and the wall has not moved.”

See: Ethan Bronner, “Bil’in Journal: In Village, Palestinians See Model for Their Cause,” New York Times, August 27, 2009.

Here’s the main protest sign for the week.

They built another contraption, a scale with the UN flag on one side and an Israeli flag on the other, with the scale tilted heavily toward the Israeli flag, indicating that Israel was flaunting the entire world’s wishes (with American help, of course). It was carried over a wooden coffin that said, “International Law,” indicating that Israel’s actions were helping destroy the concept of the rule of international law.

Here’s another view of the main protest sign, carried by several French women wearing keffiyas and a Palestinian guy whose smile alone made the day worthwhile, at least for me.

Several protestors have been injured by Israel, including a few who were permanently disabled. Two young men in motorized wheelchairs joined our procession, and this kid took the opportunity to hitch a ride with one.

Here’s the procession to the Wall. You can see the Wall isolates so much land.

And here we are gathered at a gate in the Wall just before the tear gassing started.

Here’s an article I wrote in 2005, when I went to Bil’in for the first time. The part about Bil’in starts about halfway down the page. Non-violent protests in Palestine are covered more extensively in my book, Fast Times in Palestine.

Back in Ramallah, I took some pics around town, including this one of Al Manara, the central traffic circle.

A jewelry story display window.

Some of the opulent bridesmaid’s dresses at the Heliopolis dress shop on Main Street.

No matter how much I write about Palestine, I still get absurd questions from people like, “Can women drive in Palestine?” and “Do they make you wear a veil?” This display window, just a block off Main Street, should dispel at least a few of these questions. Any place that has mannequins in such provocative poses wearing sheer lingerie in broad daylight can’t be all that uptight.

A man selling tormus, a kind of boiled seed, fuul, or fava beans, and corn on the cob on Main Street.

Sunset in my neighborhood of Ramallah, Al Masyoon.

This minaret and church tower are visible from many points in Ramallah, a nice reminder of Christian-Muslim unity in the city.

One Sunday I randomly caught a service taxi to Kobar, a village northwest of Ramallah that looked pretty remote and interesting, and took a hike. I took dozens of pictures of the beautiful landscape, and here are my two favorites.

For the Eid al Adha feast holiday (the one where Muslims slaughter goats and give some of the meat to the poor to commemorate God’s mercy when he ordered Abraham to sacrifice his son and then said, “Just kidding!”), I went to Jayyous to see Rania and her family, the ex-mayor and his family, and many other friends.

Here’s Rania’s son Karim pretending a TV remote is a cell phone. Phones are connected in his mind with his father, who’s in Israeli prison on bogus charges. As long as he can remember, his father is nothing more than a disembodied voice coming from a phone. He often picks up cell-phone-shaped things and says, “Baba?” (Daddy?)

Here are some Jayyous boys with their toy guns. Feast holidays are times to give presents, clothes, and money to kids, and toy guns are almost as popular among children in Palestine as real guns are among children in Oklahoma. I’ve watched this entire pack of kids grow up since they were barely walking.

And here are some sweet little girls.

I went for a hike on Jayyous’s land and got some pics of the land and the Wall. Here are two of the most telling.

The Green Line (the border between the West Bank and Israel) is 4 km west of Jayyous, but you can see how the Wall comes right up next to some of the houses in town.

Here’s a view of the razor wire bales that form a “buffer zone” around the Wall, and on the other side of the Wall, all that is Jayyous land. Greenhouses, wells, reservoirs, olive groves, and all. The blasted earth in the middle is a rock quarry where Israel illegally dynamites Jayyous’ land and takes their stones.

Two of the mayor’s grandkids — so cute! I held the one on the right, Mustafa, when he was just a baby, and I was there for the wedding of the one on the left’s mama and daddy. Other grandkids and friend’s nephews and cousins have also grown up to be so beautiful, handsome, smart, interesting, friendly, etc. It’s been an honor to know them through the years.

The mayor’s mama. She never says anything and moves very slowly, like a silent shadow or ghost. So I was surprised when, just like the kids, she insisted I take a picture of her. She took the camera from me afterwards and squinted at the display of her photo on the back. Then, to my shock, she started dancing a little jig! My main worry was that she was going to drop or throw my camera, but her grip was viselike. I guess not all who appear quiet and slow are demonstrating their full powers…

But what I miss most about Ramallah right now is the Ramallah Football Club, which I founded a few months ago. We play Thursdays at 3:30 next to the church behind Osama’s Pizza.

Toward the end I was the only girl playing most of the time, but back before daylight saving’s time (and before a Ramallah women’s basketball team poached a couple of our best players), we had up to half a dozen girls some days. After daylight saving’s time and shorter days forced us to move our games from 6:00 to 4:00, then 3:30, only the hardcore (or unemployed) players kept coming.

Isabel on the left has regular yoga sessions at her apartment, and Lisa is an Irish friend. Here we are at Pronto’s after a yoga session. I’m pretty sure the pizza and wine cancel out the healthy effects of the yoga, but oh well.

We and some other friends were talking for hours that night, and I started talking about the concept of my book — about how few books are written that paint the Palestinians as human beings first, (pathetic) victims or (fanatical) perpetrators of violence second. Palestinians are never seen in popular culture as just kids and moms and dads and aunts and uncles and cute guys and pretty girls and all the things human beings are. So when terrible things are done to them, most people in the West don’t care, because they don’t see them as folks just like us. That’s why my book is called Fast Times in Palestine rather than the usual dour and depressing titles, and that’s why it “focuses on life in this complex and charming proto-nation (which just happens to be under occupation) rather than on the occupation itself.”

One of my friends said, “I know what you mean. Even though I live here, the statistics don’t have that much of an effect on me. They can’t. You’d go crazy if you thought about everything to much. But every now and then something gets through all those defense mechanisms, and it’s usually something very simple. Like there was a famous French singer at the Ramallah Cultural Palace a few months ago, and I was sitting near the front, and in front of me was this guy who just… This singer, I’m not sure you know her, but she’s very famous here, and you could tell this man was so excited. He was dancing and smiling like it was the best day of his life. And I was thinking, This guy, right here, smiling and dancing to this French singer — this is who the world and the media is demonizing? And I started crying, and I cried pretty much the whole time.”

Another friend said, “The same thing happened to me, only it was some kids I met in the southern Hebron Hills, where the settlers keep poisoning the fields and the Israeli army keeps trying to throw them out of their villages. We were playing with the kids before we talked to the grown-ups, and one of them had fair hair and reminded me so much of my little brother. They were doing things like pretending not to want our attention and then doing everything possible to get it, and by the end they were climbing all over us. You know, just like kids anywhere. So I got to know them as kids first, and only afterwards I heard their story. The one with the fair hair, his dad said to me, ‘You see that scar on his forehead?’ The kid had been shot in the head by a settler. It was a miracle he even survived. When I got home that night, I lost it completely.”

I’ll talk in the book about what finally burst the dam of my defenses. It was the lowest time of my life. I’ve never been the same.

Leaving Ramallah was sad, of course, though the sadness was mitigated by several going-away parties, some of them for me. ’Tis the season for people to leave Palestine for the holidays, and sometimes permanently, so mine wasn’t the only good-bye. It’s been an honor and a pleasure. ’Til next time.

Of course, at the end of it all, I had to cart my luggage past the Qalandia checkpoint, which decided to be extra-awful on the day I could barely fit my stuff through the metal turnstile gates. I picked the wrong of two lines, the one that stopped moving for twenty minutes even though we could see female soldiers inside chatting with each other. The one where just in front of me was a tall, pretty woman in a hijab, jilbab, and knee-high black high-heeled boots that kept setting off the metal detector. She couldn’t understand the irate Israeli teenager’s rude and heavily-accented English yet managed to keep her dignity intact while being treated in an abhorrent way. I don’t really feel like talking about it anymore.

As my bus was pulling away from the checkpoint, I happened to look out my window and see a young Palestinian man with a keffiya wrapped around his head against the cold. Then my window framed an Israeli soldier who casually raised his gun until it was pointing at the Palestinian’s head. He pantomimed pulling the trigger and feeling the kick as he shot the young man in the head. The Palestinian guy was walking away and didn’t see the soldier pretend to kill him, but another soldier did and chuckled. Nice last view of the occupation.

I went to Haifa to visit my Russian-Israeli friend Dan for a couple of days before taking off. Here’s a map of Israel he bought in 2000, when he moved to Israel. You can see the West Bank isn’t marked at all. It’s shown as if it’s part of Israel. Only a few grey patches, the 17% of the Palestinian territories designated Area A under the Oslo Accords (see this post to learn more about the geography of occupation), is demarcated as vaguely ‘not-Israel,’ since it’s illegal for Israeli citizens to travel there under Israeli law. All the settlements are treated as simply part of Israel.

Feel free to link to this next time you hear someone complain about Palestinians not having Israel on their maps or not recognizing Israel.

I made it through Ben Gurion with minimal problems (and truth-telling) but then got randomly pulled aside and felt up by the Swiss in Zurich. Oh well. After two days of bleary traveling, I’m in New York and happy to be here. I lost my warm hat in Ramallah a while ago and went shopping for another one, and the warmest, cheapest one I could find is dark blue and has a little embroidered picture of Bob the Builder on it. I’ve been wearing it around SoHo and the Village, and I expect it to be a hipster trend by the time I come back in February.

That’s it for now. Happy Holidays to everyone!

Beauty and Apartheid in East Jerusalem

Two more Palestinian homes were demolished in East Jerusalem by the Israeli government today, leaving 18 people homeless. Earlier today Israeli bulldozers demolished another two-family home in the town of Isawiya in East Jerusalem. On Tuesday, a four-family home was bulldozed and its 30 residents made homeless. Meanwhile, Jewish-only settlements continue to expand on Palestinian land.

As many South Africans who’ve been here continue to attest, Apartheid wasn’t this bad.

In honor of the families made homeless over the past two days, I’m posting a story about a neighborhood in East Jerusalem called Al Bustan in Silwan, a Palestinian town southeast of the Jerusalem Old City. It’s part of occupied Arab East Jerusalem. The entire neighborhood of Al Bustan, housing over 1,000 people, is threatened with demolition by the Israeli government. Here’s a story of Israelis and Palestinians trying to prevent this by working together to clean and rehabilitate the town’s ancient aqueduct. It’s a simple but wrenchingly beautiful story written by a Jewish Israeli man. It brings me to tears every time.

Two of the homes demolished today were in Silwan.

Work Day, Al Bustan, Silwan

David Shulman
Taayush
July 2, 2005

Ankle-deep in the pungent, turbid water of Silwan, we stand in the old ruined aqueduct, hoes and pick-axes in our hands. It is 9:30 in the morning and already hot. We have come to clean the aqueduct and make it functional again. We scrape away at its muddy bed, filling buckets with sandy clay and rocks to be emptied out on the hill below, where a new terrace is being built by our Palestinian friends.

The task is Sisyphean; the Palestinian locals keep reassuring us that we will hit bottom after 15 centimetres or so, but as the day progresses the channel becomes deeper and deeper, with no bottom in sight. The water flows downhill from an ancient spring somewhere up-mountain — so we are told — a spring older than King David, who lived here in Silwan, older even than the Jebusites from whom he captured the city 3000 years ago. The Silwanis think the spring was here from the beginning of time.

In the old days, the aqueduct carried this clean spring-water in a carved stone channel just under the wall of heavy stones that lines the road; in this way water reached down into the village for drinking, washing, irrigation. At some point in the last years, the Jerusalem municipality blocked it at one end and built a large concrete cess-pool just below it. So now the water still emerging from the ancient spring mostly stands stagnant in the aqueduct, evaporating in the hot sun of the Jerusalem summer.

The people of al Bustan have long wanted to unblock the channel, to clean it and let water flow back toward their neighborhood; but they have been afraid to do this on their own, knowing very well that the police or the Border Guards would almost certainly intervene to prevent them. Only our presence here today, some 100 volunteers from [Israeli peace groups] Ta’ayush [Arab-Jewish partnership], Bat Shalom, Machsom Watch [Checkpoint Watch], and the Israeli Committee against House Demolitions, has given them the freedom to put their ready plans into operation.

We are here, however, not just for the water and the terrace but mainly because of the [Jerusalem] Municipality’s plans to demolish 88 houses in al Bustan — in fact, to wipe out the neighborhood altogether, ostensibly in order to create an “archaeological park” in the heart of Silwan. In fact, the intention is very different and altogether transparent: al Bustan will fall victim to the latest attempt to Judaize east Jerusalem, pursuant to the settlers’ stated goal and the government’s clear policy of making the lives of Palestinian Jerusalemites as miserable as possible.

The sheer scale of the current attempt — some 1000 people will be rendered homeless — has sparked considerable protest as well as this collaborative venture between Israeli peace-groups and the local committee. We have come in the hope of drawing international attention to what Israel is planning, and thus of forcing the government to back down. We have come in solidarity with innocent victims. And we have come to work.

There is a lot of press, including a Korean TV journalist making a film about life in Israel-Palestine, a reporter from the Berliner Zeitung, and a Chinese crew; if they manage to get a few seconds on the evening news in China, possibly many millions will see this happy moment. Several video crews are filming continuously, and indeed the hillside looks, to my eyes, strikingly photogenic. There are teams of volunteers cleaning up the debris of decades — rusted spikes wrapped in barbed-wire, blocks of concrete, huge broken branches, and moldy piles of tin and plastic; others are breaking up the caked top-layer of soil just down from the aqueduct, readying it for the grassy terrace it will soon become; some are filling buckets with rocks and earth and pouring them out on the hill below to build up the emerging terrace.

The whole hillside is alive with color and movement; young men from the village, and some children, work side-by-side with the Israelis, and the site is changing rapidly, minute by minute, the long neglect over at last. Amnon, only recently recovered from a broken shoulder, is working heroically with his one uninjured arm, hoeing and raking and carrying buckets and branches and heavy stones.

I am not alone; three Sanskritists from our group at the Institute for Advanced Studies have joined me, along with R., my Tamilist friend and colleague from New Zealand; also P. — my closest friend in the world — is with us for the first time. Thirty years ago we were in the [Israeli] army together — an irrevocable bond. He is working — hard — on the Sabbath; he rode the bus down to the village with the rest of us; he is an observant Jew.

How does it feel, I ask him?

“Like Shabbat Bereshit,” he says — the Torah reading about the creation of the world.

From the start, the police are also with us, seeming, on the surface, rather benign — at first two blue jeeps, reinforced later by a detachment of Border Guards. They have promised that we would not be stopped on our way down into the village, and they do not appear to be unduly troubled by the notion of this work-day. It is not, after all, a demonstration. But around 11:00 a settler appears, dressed in his white Shabbat clothes, with conspicuous skull-cap and fringes and a well-fed belly. He looks scornfully at the Jews working beside Palestinian Arabs. He lives in a house seized from one of the Silwanis, overlooking this hillside.

He stops for a word with the police commander. It is not allowed, he claims — and, as usual, the settler calls the shots — to pour earth to make a terrace, or to plant a tree, or to repair a stone wall, without specific permits. We are intending to do all of the above, but now the officer informs us, bowing to the settler’s mysterious authority, that we can go on working so long as we refrain from these clearly criminal acts. They will stay here to make sure we keep within bounds.

The man working beside me says to me in Arabic: “He — the settler — is living in my house. He took my house.” He is, of course, enraged. “All the problems,” he says, “come from them; only from them. They won’t let us live. They won’t let us breathe.”

Another Silwani bursts out in a torrent of curses, and for a moment the rhythm of our hoes and buckets is rent by the pulsations of rage. The moment passes. We will wait a while before deciding about the tree.

Amiel has brought it, a huge mulberry, tut in Arabic and Hebrew; he and Ezra scoured the nurseries of Jerusalem looking for it, because this place was years ago known as “Tut Junction,” after a famous, ancient mulberry tree. That tree is gone, and we intend to replace it today, also to restore the street signs with the original names. Ezra, meanwhile, has been imprisoned by the army for visiting our friends in the south Hebron caves; tonight he will be brought before a Jerusalem court for an extension of his remand. They seem, this time, intent on punishing him. Nothing, truly nothing, threatens the army more than a man of peace.

From my position inside the aqueduct, I wonder out loud with P. at the hate that has risen up within me at the sight and sound of the arrogant settler. I can’t deny its existence. I can call up not even an iota of empathy, and I refuse to try to imagine his warped inner world. Hate, I say to P., is a part of us; like love. Better to acknowledge it.

Is that why you are here? he asks me. Is that why you act? Of course, he agrees, this settler is hateful: look at his swagger, look at the stolen house, look at the hate coursing through him. Who, after all, would try to stop a man from planting a tree in his own garden? But is that a reason to act?

No, I answer. I mostly seem to act from some other, obscure place. Maybe it is a need to be outside, away from my professor’s desk. Maybe it is a hunger for the intense connectedness of days like this, days of crossing the borders, one by one. Maybe it is love — for these people working beside me. Maybe, very likely, it is pure, uncontainable outrage at the immense injustice inflicted on them, day by day, and a refusal to let the Jews, or anyone else, perpetrate it without protest: being Jewish, so I thought, was mostly about just such a refusal. The prophets who lived here in Silwan, when David was king, sang mostly about that. If we had been alive in those days, I tell P., I would have been a ragged street urchin, mad with poetry, and you would have been one of those prophets. That is why you are here today.

Never before have I been so needed as a medic: there is a host of minor cuts and wounds which require cleaning and bandaging. I almost exhaust the medical supplies I brought with me; it is time to refresh my medic’s pouch. By now I am covered in mud and reeking of the stagnant water; will the stench ever leave my shoes, my jeans? I am also very thirsty, as the day wears on, an endless and relentless thirst no liquid can quench.

After lunch I climb with P. into the Roman antiquities farther up hill — a bath-house in the shadow of an overhanging cliff. Ta’ayush, P. says, reminds him of our days in the army; there is the same stark, unfamiliar eros of body and sun and smell, of the group living its life as a collective, of the simplicity of eating and working and using your hands.

Yes, I say — suddenly memory cascades back to Shomron and basic training, I can smell it again. But there we were slaves, and here we are free.

They ask us to climb up into the cemetery above the road for a few photos, for the Arabic newspaper Al Quds. Only men — women should not go into this space. We somewhat comically, artificially play at cleaning the grave-stones, mostly marked as children’s graves, for the sake of the picture. Why didn’t they photograph us working furiously downhill? Perhaps the sight of Israelis cleaning Muslim tombstones will have some power.

Pictures over, we go back to work. A little later someone climbs the tall electricity pole and ties a newly painted signpost on it, in Arabic and English, another fruit of today’s labors: maqbarat al atfal above, and below, an unconscious touch of poetry: “Children’s Symmetry.”

By now it is 3:00, the day begins to wane. Time to wind down: and time for the tree, come what may. Amiel carries it into the newly hoed plot. It is a splendid specimen, and within minutes it stands embedded in the soil, lightly tied to an iron stake; wrapped around the stake, covered in plastic, is a huge enlargement of an aerial photograph of the village, with a bright circle tracing the boundaries of this neighborhood threatened with extinction.. We pour buckets of water over the base of the tree, and a cheer goes up: “Silwan! Silwan!” People clap and sing and shout.

But now the police wake up, since we have at last broken the law. They march back and forth on the road, barking into their cell-phones. The Border Guards look restless, or agitated, as well, and for a few moments I wonder if at this final moment we will have to face a fracas, a police charge, or the arrest of some of our friends. In a way, I don’t much care. There is something about planting a tree that stands outside and beyond all other categories. It is always and ever auto-telic: its own intrinsic justification. I am glad we have planted this mulberry tree here, glad to have been part of it, glad also for the defiance. And now, as the policemen look on with anger, apparently hesitant to move, the Silwani spokesmen rise to speak through the loudspeaker to all of us who have worked here today.

“This is the day of Silwan,” says M., in Arabic, “a famous day, a day of peace. I thank you on behalf of the people of Silwan. You have come from all over, even from distant countries, to help us, who have been targeted by the Israeli authorities — one thousand men, women, and children from al Bustan. I thank you for the sake of peace. Let all people know. In Silwan we are not free. We want our liberty, we want our livelihood, we want an end to our agony. Make sure that the Israeli government knows, and the Jerusalem municipality knows: we will never give up our homes. Make sure for the sake of peace, the peace we all want.”

Again the cries: “Silwan! Silwan!” Mixed in with them is another shout, almost a rhyme: “Salaam!”

Now Khulood speaks for Ta’ayush in a swift, crystalline Arabic, every syllable a promise of human hope. “We are not afraid,” she says, “not afraid of the Border Guards or the Police or the soldiers, not afraid of anyone. We came here to stand beside you, and we will never abandon this struggle. Your struggle is ours.”

Someone suddenly thrusts the loudspeaker at me. I try to escape it, try to push it back at Amnon, at anyone, but they insist and I can see there is no choice. They want someone to say something in Hebrew, and it will have to be me. I have no idea what to say, but I press the button and start, without thinking.

“We had the honor, and the pleasure, of working here today as your guests. Thank you for inviting us. We loved this day, as we love and honor peace. We want you to know that we are with you and that we will never allow anyone to destroy your houses. We will come whenever you need us, whenever you invite us here, as your friends.”

I stop, the loudspeaker mercifully passes on to another, but one of the young Silwanis hurries over to me, takes my arm.

“You don’t need an invitation,” he says to me, speaking of all of us, his eyes full of light. “Silwan is your home.”

EXCERPT – Omar’s Story

Here’s an excerpt from Chapter 7, “Arafat’s Funeral.” It was the fall olive harvest season in 2004 and Yasser Arafat had just died. I was on holiday in Jayyous picking olives, happy for a brief escape from my journalistic duties, when a dear friend found me and told me some bad news.

Omar’s Story

I was harvesting with Qais’s family the next day when Ali found me.

“Ya Bam,” he said with a grave, apologetic look. “I would not ask you for this, but I think there is no other way. It’s OK if you don’t want to. Really, there will be no problem.”

This didn’t sound good at all. “What’s up?”

He sighed sorrowfully. “There is a farmer’s son from here in Jayyous named Omar. A few days ago, when Arafat died, some of the shebab [youth] were burning tires at the south gate of the Wall as a demonstration. Omar’s father was on the land, and Omar went to the gate to wait for him. When the soldiers came, the shebab started throwing stones at them. I don’t know if Omar was throwing stones or just waiting. Anyway, the soldiers came through the gate with their guns, and Omar ran away with the others, but a soldier shot him twice in the back.”

I could feel the blood drain from my face. “My God.”

“Yes, and then they took him away to a hospital in Israel. We called and found the hospital he is in. It is in Kfar Saba. He is OK, he is alive, but he has had many surgeries. When we call the hospital, they are very rude and won’t tell us anything more. His parents are going crazy. They want to visit him, but the hospital says they cannot get a permit to visit him unless they come to the hospital and take a paper that tells about his condition. So you see…”

“Yeah, there’s only one catch,” I said with measureless disgust. “Well, look, I can go to the hospital and get the paper.”

He sighed again. “Really, Bamila, I know this is a holiday for you, and we wouldn’t ask…”

“I know.”

I called Dan [an Israeli friend who lived in Kfar Saba] to see if he could pick me up in Jayyous and take me to Kfar Saba. I’d forgotten he had recently sold his car. He apologized and said he didn’t have time to borrow one, either. So I got up early the next morning and made my way through Ramallah down to the Qalandia checkpoint, crossed on foot, took a minibus to East Jerusalem, caught a cab to the Jerusalem Central Bus Station, and caught another bus back up north to Kfar Saba. It was a journey of more than a hundred miles and six hours to get to a place less than five miles from Jayyous. It would have taken ten minutes if Dan had picked me up on the settler road.

Finding the hospital in Kfar Saba took a bit of hunting, but once I found it, the task didn’t seem so daunting anymore. All I had to do was ask for a paper, say hey to the injured kid, and be on my way back to Jayyous in no time. It might even be one of those bridging-the-divide moments with the Israeli doctors, because what human being could fail to sympathize with a young man who’d been shot in the back, or a young American woman trying to help him? It was easy to be rude over the phone. In person, I was confident they would see us as human beings and treat us as such. By the time I walked through the front doors of the hospital, I was feeling almost cheerful.

I found a receptionist and said, “I have a friend from the West Bank who’s been injured and is being treated here. I need to get a paper that explains about his condition so his parents can come and visit.”

She looked uncomfortable, as if she feared I might be mildly crazy or criminal. “You’ll have to talk to someone in administration,” she said. “I don’t handle these things.”

She directed me to a small back office, where I found a dark-haired man in his forties and asked if he spoke English.

“Of course!” he said, widening his eyes as if the likes of me asking if he spoke English were the most preposterous indignity he’d suffered that day. I told him what I was here for.

He waved his hand dismissively and looked away. “We don’t give papers about West Bank people here. We’re not allowed. It’s like a secret that he’s here.”

I checked his voice for irony or humor and found none. “I’m sorry, what do you mean you don’t give papers about people being here? That’s why they sent me. I just need a paper that says he is here to give to the DCO [District Coordination Office] so we can get a permit for his parents to visit.”

He shook his head. “We don’t give out information like that. You have to call Dalia in Beit El. She’s in charge of these things, not me.”

Beit El was a settlement north of Ramallah between Al Bireh and Surda villages that stole and destroyed a great deal of land belonging to the villages. Palestinians sometimes had to go there to take care of administrative matters related to the occupation. I said, “If we could have done this from Beit El, I’m sure it would have been done already. But they sent me here physically to get a paper. All I need is a paper that says—”

He smiled mock-patiently, as if I were simple or slow, and interrupted me. “Listen very carefully. You aren’t the first person who has come here looking for information about these people, and you won’t be the last. We don’t give out papers. That’s it. Don’t ask anymore.”

I had a distinct feeling he was lying through his teeth. But what could I do?

“Can I visit him?” I asked weakly.

“What do I care?”

I left his office with my face flushed and my fists clenched. The way he’d said “these people” had sent hot chills down my spine. If I had eaten anything that day, I feel fairly confident I would have thrown it up.

At least I could visit the injured boy, so maybe the day wasn’t a total wash. I walked up to his floor, and the nurses pointed me down to the basement, where he was having a CT scan. I asked the receptionist at CT if she knew where I could find the boy I was looking for.

She looked at me blankly. “Maybe that’s him?” she said, pointing behind me.

I looked back. There was a good-looking blue-eyed young man with pale skin and curly brown hair in a gurney in the middle of the waiting room. He had an IV drip in his arm and seemed alert but tired. His eyes looked naturally sharp but dulled now, resigned to a casual bit of violence that would drastically affect the rest of his life—something simultaneously offhand and unthinkable. “Omar?” I asked.

He nodded, his expression alternating between wariness and polite confusion.

Suddenly I felt extremely shy. This wasn’t just a task about papers and permits. It was a human being who’d had something horrible done to him, and here he was. He wasn’t expecting anyone, least of all a foreign girl he didn’t know. I wasn’t sure what to say. I told him I was a friend of Ali’s in Jayyous. He nodded.

“Keef halek?” I asked. [How are you?]

He gave the traditional pleasantly noncommittal answer: “Hamdulillah.” [Thanks to God.]

My eyes widened. “W’Allah?” [Really?] How could he even say it?

He looked down at himself. “Zai shufik.” (As you see.) I wilted, wishing desperately that I didn’t have to see a typically polite and self-possessed young Arab with something typically horrific done to him in this devastatingly singular way. I reported on this kind of thing daily at my job. This was, in fact, mild compared to the things that made the news. Omar had survived, had no brain damage, was not in critical condition, and had not lost several limbs and/or family members. He was just in a hospital having surgeries and CT scans done far away from his family, not knowing how bad his prognosis was. This was nothing.

And yet it was overwhelming. So where did that leave all the other things I reported on, all the bloody and senseless things I didn’t have to see for myself?

I swallowed hard and asked who else he knew in Jayyous. He named some names. I asked how old he was, and he said twenty. I wanted to ask more, but I didn’t know the Arabic for words like ‘prognosis’ or ‘paralysis,’ and the small talk I knew seemed wildly inappropriate. He made the Middle Eastern hand gesture, palm up and fingers pinched together, that meant, “Wait a moment.” He indicated that the doctor would be out soon and could translate for us.

When the doctor came out, I introduced myself and asked if he spoke Arabic. He said yes. He looked like a Mizrahi Jew, thin and pale-skinned, possibly from Yemen.

“Would you mind translating a few things Omar might want me to tell his family?” I asked. “And can you explain to me about Omar’s condition?”

He looked at his watch. “I need to eat soon,” he said.

I smiled. “Yeah, me too.” It was late afternoon and I hadn’t eaten all day. I was trying to highlight our shared humanity and gently suggest that this injured, helpless, isolated boy’s terrible predicament was slightly more important than lunch. He didn’t smile back.

“Wait fifteen minutes,” he said and wheeled Omar into the CT scan room. Fifteen minutes later, two orderlies wheeled him back out. The doctor had escaped out another door.

My ears burning from the latest rebuff, I followed Omar and the orderlies up to his room, where I found a pretty young nurse named Sofya from Netanya. I asked her about his condition.

She said brightly, “Well, his kidney is damaged and his spine is broken, and he can move one leg a little, but the other not at all.”

“Will he ever walk again?”

She shrugged nonchalantly and said, “Mmm, I don’t think so, probably not.”

The room turned grey and looked sharper and further away as tears stung my eyes. For nothing he was in this state, no reason at all. Not just injured but paralyzed, handicapped, probably for life. And nobody cared.

I tried to keep my voice steady as I told the nurse what I was here for. She looked like she had no idea what I was talking about. I asked if I could use the phone to call Ali in Jayyous. She allowed it.

When I heard Ali’s baritone voice, clear and reasonable and familiar and friendly in this sea of obtuse hostility, thick hot tears fell. I explained everything to him and gave the phone to Sofya so he could tell her exactly what we needed.

Ali was one of the most kind, diplomatic, and cool-headed people I had ever met, and I could tell he was getting further with Sofya than I had. She said she would try her best, but she didn’t sound very hopeful. She tried to call Dalia in Beit El, but there was no answer.

Sofya shrugged. “Maybe you can come back tomorrow?”

It wasn’t clear how anything would be different tomorrow, and my desire to get back to Jayyous as soon as possible, among friends and olives and kindness, was so visceral it was painful. So I went on the trail of the paper again. After another hour of hunting and asking and negotiating, Sofya finally conceded that the paper could be issued here after all.

“But the doctor who does these things is busy today,” Sofya said apologetically. “Maybe she can do it tomorrow.”

“She can’t possibly do it today?”

“No, I’m sorry, she is receiving many children today, and she is the only one who can receive them. She is very busy.”

“How long does it take to make the paper?”

“I don’t know, about fifteen minutes.”

“She can’t spare fifteen minutes? It would help a lot of people so much.”

“I’m sorry.”

I’d learned an important lesson in Russia: If something important is at stake and hostile bureaucracy is standing in your way, you have to make it harder for them to ignore you than to fulfill your simple request. Otherwise they’ll blow you off every time.

“Look, can I just talk to her real quick?”

Sofya narrowed her eyes and pursed her lips. Then she rolled her eyes and sighed. “Come with me.”

I followed her into a darkened office. The doctor was a tasteful-looking Russian blonde woman who sneered slightly when she saw me. She was alone in the room and looked rather bored. She wasn’t receiving any children. I tried to explain what I needed, but before I could finish my sentence, she was tearing a piece of paper off a pad and writing a few words in Hebrew about his condition. She affixed an official label and stamped it and handed it to me.

“Thank you so much. Is this is all I need?”

“Yes.”

I breathed a sigh of deep relief. Mission, it seemed, Accomplished.

A kind orderly helped me fax the paper to Dalia in Beit El, then Sofya gave me the phone to call Dalia and see if she got the fax. Dalia finally answered. She grudgingly admitted that she got the fax and everything was in order.

“So that’s it?” I asked. “Is that what you need to give his parents a permit?”

She paused, then said challengingly, “We don’t know how long he will be there.”

I couldn’t believe it. She was acting like this was some kind of game and she was still trying to win. “His spine is broken,” I said evenly. “He is not going anywhere.”

Another pause, then testily, “I can give you three days. OK?”

“Perfect. Thank you very much.”

Back in Omar’s room, Sofya gave me the phone again and allowed me to dial Omar’s parents in Jayyous. Omar was so weak he could barely handle the phone, but he talked to his family for the first time and told them about his condition.

I’d been on the other end of the phone several times, in the family’s home when they were talking to a relative in an Israeli jail or in some faraway hospital. People always tried to act as cheerful as possible so as not to upset each other. The mother didn’t want her son to think about how she’d been sick with crying. The son didn’t want his mother to know he’d been lonely, injured, ill, humiliated, terrified, starving.

After Omar hung up, he touched my arm and pulled his shirt up. The surgery scar was immense, from his heart down past his waistband. He put his shirt back down and indicated that he wanted me to move his legs. He pointed to a spot on one of his swollen legs, and I touched it. He shook his head, and tears welled slightly in his otherwise impassive young face. He couldn’t feel it.

It was time for me to go soon. Dan had agreed to pick me up and take me back to Jayyous in a borrowed van. I shook Omar’s hand and held it for a while as I met his pale blue eyes with mine. A strange and terrible peace descended on us. There was nothing to say. We were fundamentally no different from each other, yet he knew as well as I did that I would never have to come to terms with a misfortune anywhere near as incomprehensible as his. Something horrific might happen to me one day, but I probably wouldn’t be shot for no reason, and I certainly wouldn’t then be transferred to a foreign country and held captive by people whose indifference was somehow worse, more degrading, than cruelty.

I left the hospital in a daze. After walking a few steps in the fresh air, I ducked behind a column and sank to the ground and wept. On the weight of my tears was not just Omar but all the people like him whose stories would never be told and for whom help would never come.

When Dan arrived, I had no idea how to tell him how my day had gone. I mostly stayed quiet and felt terrible that I couldn’t bring myself to act happy to see him, or to express how grateful I was that he was taking me back to Jayyous. All I wanted, desperately, was to get back to the olive groves and to my friends in Jayyous who understood how I felt without words.

Dan and I had kept in touch over the phone, but I hadn’t seen him since he’d sold his car. Getting from Ramallah to Kfar Saba on public transportation was such an ordeal, and we were both so busy with work and life. Whenever I did see or talk to him, something horrible had usually just happened and I was depressed about it. I hated for him to always see me like this. I hated to bring this gloom into his life when I had no idea how to fix it. I felt isolated by my constant inability to explain or describe what I was going through. Even though Dan was sitting right next to me, I missed him.

As we entered the West Bank on a settler road, I caught sight of the thirty-foot concrete Wall that encircled Qalqilia. Forty thousand people in a cage at the dawn of the twenty-first century. “Look at that!” I exploded stupidly, rising out of my seat and banging my head on the roof of the van.

“I know,” Dan said numbly. “I can’t believe it. It’s like some movie about South Africa or something. And it’s happening right here.”

My Boss Decides to Run for President

Dr. Barghouthi called an emergency meeting a few days after the Eid holidays were over. I was annoyed because I already had my evening perfectly planned. I was going to Beit Sini (China House) on Main Street to get some Kung Pao chicken, then I was going to go home and curl up around some hot cocoa and watch Lara Croft: The Cradle of Life on MBC2 in my pajamas. I’d seen it in a theater in Moscow dubbed badly into Russian, and tonight I’d finally have a chance to find out how much of it I had understood. And for two restful, thoughtless, soft, warm hours, I could forget about everything else.

Except now I had to sit through this meeting that probably had nothing to do with me. I desperately hoped it wouldn’t go on too long.

We gathered around the big wooden table in the conference room. As soon as we were seated and quiet, Dr. Barghouthi dropped the bombshell:

“So, I have decided to run for President against Mahmoud Abbas.”

That perked me up, but I still didn’t see what it had to do with me. I was sure he could run for President even if I was at home eating Chinese take-out.

As I surreptitiously glanced at the clock on my cell phone (it was already after six, and the movie started at seven), I heard him say he’d need someone to volunteer to be his foreign press coordinator. Whoever that unlucky person was would have to stay in the office tonight and compile, organize, and prioritize the contact information for all the foreign correspondents in Israel/Palestine, which would take at least five or six hours. He or she would then represent Dr. Barghouthi to all the world’s press for the next two months, traveling, taking calls, helping organize press conferences, and writing press releases in addition to all the responsibilities of their usual job.

He said, “The election will be in early January, so we have less than two months to organize, consult with our constituencies, prepare offices, organize supporters, design and distribute campaign materials, and many other things. Time is of the essence.”

Suddenly I had a sinking feeling. No one was looking directly at me, but everyone knew the other foreigners in the office would be jetting off to England or Spain or Australia for the Christmas holidays. I would be the only native English speaker left.

Slowly, through my hazy, unhappy sense of duty, something else began to filter through my thick head: My boss was running for President. And I was being offered a front-row seat. Was I simple?

I took a deep breath and braced myself. “I can do it.”

For more information about my book, Fast Times in Palestine, see the About section.

Olives and Rabbis

Last Friday a friend told me she was going with the Rabbis for Human Rights, an Israeli organization, to a village called Sawya to help with the olive harvest. I invited myself along, eager to see Israelis and Palestinians interacting in such a positive way.

Sawya is a hilltop village located between Ramallah and Nablus. When the Oslo Accord maps were being drawn up in 1993, nearly all of Sawya’s land was designated Area C, which means Israel has total security and administrative control of it. Virtually every new home built outside the circle of Sawya’s built-up area in 1993 is slated for demolition by the Israeli government. Meanwhile, illegal Israeli settlements all around it continue to expand, and the people of Sawya find it increasingly difficult to access their land.

I caught a service taxi to the village on Friday morning and arrived just as two busloads of Israelis and Jewish Americans pulled up. Most of them were rabbinical students or members of an eco-kibbutz near Eilat. A tall, energetic rabbi in a t-shirt, baseball cap, and work jeans was the leader. He was an Israeli with an American accent and a full grey beard. He split everyone into two groups, and I joined the one heading to the olive harvest first.

My group must have been the eco-kibbutzniks, because they were all dressed like Stanford hippies. (One of them, it turned out, actually was a Stanford hippy. Small world.) The odd man out was a guy in his thirties with a neatly-clipped beard and a green t-shirt. When we were introducing ourselves, he said, “My name is Daniel, and I’m sorry to say that last time I was here, I was wearing green.” He meant he had been a soldier in the Israeli army.

Our Palestinian guide was an amiable man in his early forties named Abed, and he talked for a while about the work he did for women’s empowerment in Ramallah. He said women were slowly becoming more empowered in Palestinian society, and that a few mayors and several members of the Legislative Council were women. More and more women were also attending university. But they had a ways to go, especially in the more conservative towns and villages.

He had met his wife at one of his empowerment workshops, he said, but unfortunately she had an East Jerusalem ID, which meant that if she moved to any part of the West Bank behind the Wall, she would lose her ID along with many freedoms and privileges. As for Abed, he was strictly forbidden from living in East Jerusalem, and even to visit he had to get a permit. He has a daughter but rarely sees her.

He talked also about Sawya, its land, and the settlements. Pretty basic stuff, but it all seemed to be news to the kibbutzniks. The questions they asked made it clear they didn’t have even a basic grasp of the situation. It was good that they were there, but it had taken me a year before I felt I had a decent handle on the situation (condensed neatly for you in my book). I desperately wished I could do a Vulcan mind meld with these kids. Or give them each a copy of my book.

They were also missing out on the essence of the harvest. It was pleasant enough, but two hours with a bunch of internationals could hardly be called a real olive harvest experience.

We had a small picnic lunch on the hillside before we left, overlooking a small valley and another hill across the way. The settlement Rehelim was built on that hill. Abed told us about how many Palestinian olive trees the Israeli army cut down to build settlements, settler roads, and the Wall. “Or sometimes, like you see this junction here…” He pointed to a crossroads of settler roads in the valley. “You see there are olive trees all around this junction. If someone attacks a settler car at this junction, the Israeli army cuts down all the olive trees.”

Daniel, the ex-soldier, protested, “But that’s legitimate. That’s for security reasons.”

“Maybe,” I piped in matter-of-factly. “But the settlements aren’t legitimate. The settler roads steal Palestinian land as well. And if you cut off people’s ability to resist here, they might take it to Tel Aviv.”

As we were walking to meet the other group, I started chatting with Daniel. When he learned I lived in Ramallah, he asked, “Have you spent time in Israel, too?”

“Yeah, I’ve spent a lot of time in Israel.”

“Have you spent any time in the settlements?”

“Yes, I’ve spent time in settlements.”

“That’s good. It’s good not to dehumanize anyone. I mean, a lot of the settlers are just living there because it’s cheaper. You can get a much nicer house in a settlement for less money than you’d pay in Israel.”

My jaw tightened involuntarily as countless images of the devastation wrought by settlements flashed through my mind. “I’m sure it was very economical for many white people in South Africa to enjoy the privileges of Apartheid,” I said. “But this is no reason to allow such policies to continue.”

Tour of Oppression

We found the other group soon, and now it was their turn to harvest olives for two hours and our turn to go on a small tour of West Bank oppression. Our first stop was the Huwara Checkpoint south of Nablus, where the rabbi got out and told us a few basics about checkpoints and roadblocks and settlement policies.

He spoke about the work of Rabbis for Human Rights to help Palestinian farmers access their lands and the difficulties they faced. Palestinians were often denied access to their land, either because it was in Area C, near a settlement, near a settler road, near the Wall, on the other side of the Wall, or because settlers were causing problems in the area and Palestinians were barred from the area ‘for their own safety.’

Even when the Palestinians were given permission to access one of these ‘hot spots,’ the permissions were often revoked without warning or decreased from three days to one and a half without reason. The presence of Israelis and internationals was often the only thing that could convince soldiers either to protect Palestinians from settlers or to allow them as much access to their land as they were legally entitled to under Israel’s military authority (inadequate as it usually was).

Just as the Rabbis for Human Rights were congratulating themselves for their good work, he said, they began to realize that what they were doing was even more inadequate than they feared. They were only helping a relatively small percentage of Palestinians access their land, and only during the olive harvest itself. If farmers didn’t have access to the land for the rest of the year — to prune the trees, plow the land, and do other maintenance work — the olive yield was much smaller. The rabbis tried to incorporate this reality into their activism as well, but it was impossible to keep up with all the damage control that was needed.

He also talked about cases where settlers had stolen families’ entire days’ olive harvests at gunpoint, not because they wanted the olives but to deprive Palestinians of their livelihood. Much worse, sometimes they cut down or burned hundreds of trees at a time. Olive trees, with their ancient years and deep roots, were powerful symbols of Palestinian ties to the land. Settlers apparently hoped that by destroying these trees, they were solidifying their own claims to the land.

In Burin, a lovely village where I once enjoyed a huge dinner with a family who invited me in while I was on my way to Nablus, forty trees were just cut down by settlers in response to Israeli police evacuating three illegal structures in various West Bank outposts. In Al Mughayir, a Palestinian village northeast of Ramallah, which like Sawya is surrounded by Area C land, two hundred trees were cut down by settlers from an ‘outpost,’ a small ideological settlement satellite built in contravention even of Israeli law.

According to the The Economist, one man named Mr. Abu Awad, who lost 70 trees due to the settlers’ rampage in Al Mughayir, “lost income worth around $3,400 that he would have earned from this year’s harvest. But that is not all. ‘I planted these trees with my own hands 35 years ago,’ he says.”

I’ve heard families have heated arguments over the fate of a single tree. Each tree is like a member of the family, raised and cared for and climbed and combed over many lifetimes, an endlessly renewable source of dignified income and indispensable olives and oil. It is nearly impossible for Westerners to grasp what these trees mean to their owners. Losing 40 at once, or 70, or 650 in the case of one Jayyous farmer in 2005, is felt as a kind of massacre.

(For a small taste of the anguish of losing a grove, see this video.)

The rabbi mentioned that in recent years, the Israeli army has gotten better about protecting Palestinians from settlers and allowing them access to more land so they could harvest their olives with less harassment. This apparently isn’t saying very much.

The rabbi went on, “Whenever there’s talk of a settlement freeze, or a temporary outpost structure is demolished, the settlers often go on a rampage, destroying trees or private property or assaulting Palestinian farmers to make the Israeli government ‘think twice’ about doing it again. They call it ‘exacting a price.’”

This isn’t his opinion. According to Haaretz, “Extremist settlers often vandalize Palestinian property to protest Israel’s removal of small, illegal outposts in the West Bank—a tactic they call ‘the price tag.’”

According to The Economist, “Many of the settlers pursue a ‘price-tag policy,’ deliberately instigating violence and mayhem so that the Israeli military and political establishment is loth to take action, such as evacuating the 100-plus ‘illegal’ settlements [i.e., settler outposts, which are illegal even under Israeli law], for fear of further violence… Whenever there are signs of [peace] negotiation, [settlers] increase their attacks—among other things, on olive trees. They want to show who controls the land. Binyamin Netanyahu’s right-wing Israeli government has plainly emboldened the settlers… When the ruling politicians seem to back the settlers, the Israeli soldiers feel less obliged to protect the Palestinian farmers.”

It was impossible for me to keep my mouth shut when the rabbi spoke as if settler vigilantism were some kind of inevitable force that Israel was totally helpless against.

“Don’t you think that if the Israeli army actually punished the settlers who did these things, they would stop immediately?” I said loudly enough that everyone could hear. “Imagine if they treated the settlers the same way they’d treat a Palestinian who assaulted a settler or damaged Israeli property.”

The rabbi winced and looked away. He knew as well as I did that it was a rhetorical question. “Unfortunately, there’s a double standard when it comes to enforcing laws here,” he said.

Just then an Israeli soldier approached our group. The rabbi asked him what the problem was. The conversation was in Hebrew, but the gist of it was that he didn’t have a permit to stand near a checkpoint and give a talk. We got back on our bus and headed back to Sawya.

While we were on the bus, someone asked the rabbi, “What do you say to people who say the Biblical covenant is still good, and thus it’s a religious imperative to redeem the Land of Israel for Jews?”

“A lot of people ask me that,” said the rabbi. “What I tell them is that even if the covenant is still good, in the hierarchy of values, human life is much more important than land. Thus if giving up land means saving human lives, it’s a moral imperative,” he said. “Some people don’t believe giving up the land will save lives,” he added parenthetically, “but that’s another story.”

Personally, I thought the question itself was ridiculous. Why on earth should anyone consult religious texts when it came to property rights? Especially when the actual owners had valid property deeds? To me, this question was exactly equivalent to, “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?”

My answer would be, “I couldn’t possibly care less, just get off my land.”

Alas, people with religious (pre)texts and guns—that’s the problem.

The rabbi gave another small speech when we met the other group at Sawya. At the end he sighed deeply and said, “Look, this work we do is not fun. It’s not nice to see what’s happening here and to think it’s our nation doing it. But it’s a moral duty for us to be here. Not only that, it’s also in our self-interest. Think about it. We won’t survive here very long if we don’t have neighbors who see us as human beings. I’ll give you an example. One time the army had captured a Palestinian kid, maybe twelve years old, and had tied him to their Jeep to use him as a human shield while they shot tear gas at some demonstrators. The kid was terrified. I was the only one stupid enough to walk through the tear gas and try to free the kid. The soldiers stopped me and beat me, but eventually the kid was released. Later he told his friends, ‘A tall man in a kippah saved me.’ A tall man in a kippah. He said this to his friends. How can his friends demonize someone in a kippah after that? It’s just one example, but these things can have ripple effects. Another time I was harvesting olives and talking with a man, and it turned out he was a member of Arafat’s presidential guard. Can you imagine? But here’s the thing. I could be wrong, but I think that after he saw the work we did, if there comes a time when he has to choose between violence and non-violence, I think he stands a better chance of choosing non-violence.”

Perhaps the rabbi was right. Either way, doing these good works is indispensable while the occupation is still in full force, stealing land, using children as human shields, and assaulting Palestinian farmers. But as long as the occupation goes on, these injustices will be happening in thousands of places where a rabbi doesn’t happen to be watching. As long as the occupation goes on, they’re only dealing with a few symptoms, not the disease.

The overwhelming majority of Palestinians already choose non-violence (and often get arrested, beaten, or shot for their trouble). But the trigger for violent resistance will always be there until the occupation is ended, with liberty and justice for all.

Sawya

Soon the volunteers left and I was the last person remaining. It was only two o’clock. I asked Abed if I could have a quick tour of the village before I headed back to Ramallah. He said sure, and we caught a ride up the hill to the village’s main street and went on a walk around town. It was a typical Palestinian hilltop village with old stone houses (and newer cinderblock additions), narrow winding roads, and spectacular views everywhere.

Across the valley to the east we could see half a dozen picturesque hilltops, nearly all with settlements or settler outposts on top of them. The main settlement was called Eli.

“All of these mountains belong to Sawya,” he said. “You see that hilltop there, the one with the new outpost on it? It belonged to my cousin, who passed away several years ago. It takes an hour and a half to walk there from here. For me, making the trip once is difficult. But my cousin, even when he was 65 years old, used to make the trip twice a day to work on his land and eat his meals in the fresh air.”

Sawya’s lost mountains. Nearly every hilltop in the frame has a settlement or outpost on it, including the one on the far left

I shook my head. “It’s hard to imagine what this land must mean to you.”

“It means everything to us,” he said passionately. “We have memories in every corner of this land.” He pointed to the north. “Rehelim settlement is there. A while ago we were given special permission to visit part of our land near that settlement that we hadn’t seen in twenty years. I was especially excited to see a spring that we used to go to with the purest water you can imagine. We had such good memories in all of this land, but especially there. And when we got there… I couldn’t believe it. It had been turned into a pond of sewage.”

He shook his head in disbelief. “It is a paradox. The settlers talk about ‘redeeming’ the land. How is it ‘redeeming’ the land when they treat it this way? What is even the purpose of taking land if you treat it this way?”

He pointed to the gently-sloping northern face of one of the hills. “And you see this area here? It has the best figs. Many fig and olive trees. But you can see, the Israelis built a ring road around the outpost on top of the hill, for ‘security.’ They do this for all the settlements and many outposts. The guards can use these roads to get anywhere in seconds. And then they build another, bigger ring road to protect the first road. If you cross any of these roads, if you even get near them, they will often come and question you, and maybe they arrest or shoot you. Many people will not go near this area anymore.”

Abed shook his head. “Our village is more than 500 years old. Their settlement is twenty years old. Ours hasn’t grown past our one hill in 500 years, but Eli took over all those hills in just twenty years.”

By now the sun was going down, and I had a choice to make: I could try to find a service taxi back to Ramallah or stay the night in Sawya and harvest olives for real the next day. Abed guessed what I was thinking. “If you want, I can try to find you a taxi,” he said. “Or you can stay with my sister.”

I didn’t have any plans in Ramallah the next day, and it had been a while since I harvested in a new village, so I accepted the invitation. We stopped to have tea and grapes on another relative’s porch on the highest point in Sawya to watch the sunset. The shadows of the blushing hills got longer and longer, and the villages and settlements all around began to glow as they turned their lights on for the night.

We walked back to his porch under a crescent moon and sat with his brother Ibrahim, a tall man with a thin face and friendly English. His wife was a lovely woman with a shy smile and eyes that looked like my grandmother’s when she was a young woman. She looked to be in her mid-thirties, but when her hijab slipped slightly, I saw streaks of premature white in her hair. Ibrahim’s adorable sons, aged 2, 6, and 8, ran around the whole time playing and laughing. The youngest, Yazid, looked exactly like his mother.

After we had chatted pleasantly for a while, I asked if Ibrahim had any other children. There was a strange silence. Then Abed said, “His oldest son, my nephew, was killed a few years ago. A settler ran over him with his car.”

“I’m so sorry,” I said, aghast. “I have three nephews, and if anyone hurt them…” I couldn’t finish the sentence.

“It wasn’t an accident,” Abed said grimly. “And this is not my opinion. The settler admitted in court that he deliberately ran over the boy. He said it was revenge for his own son having been injured some time earlier by Palestinians who threw stones at his car.”

I paused for a moment, speechless. “Was the settler punished?” I asked, with a sinking feeling that I already knew the answer.

“He was given a one-year sentence, and his driver’s license was suspended for three years.”

“That’s it?” My outrage was unnaturally muted because I had heard so many stories like this before — a necessary kind of psychological scar tissue to keep the ulcers away. But even if the physiological manifestations of anger are attenuated, something deeper is injured whenever I hear a story like that.

“He only served six months in the end,” Abed said with the same hollow numbness.

“You know, this is our life,” said Ibrahim. “You can see us, we smile and joke and laugh and do what we can. But many of us are like an old tree. On the outside you see that it’s a tree, but on the inside, it’s black and hollow. Many Palestinians are totally destroyed as human beings.”

Talk gradually turned back to pleasanter things, because one can’t dwell on the worst of life all the time. The dark abyss is only touched on now and then and otherwise ignored in public and grieved in private. You can manage to forget it for hours at a time. But it’s always there.

The good is always there, too. The sun and the fields and children who are still alive.

We had fareeka (wheat soup) with baked chicken for dinner that night at Ibrahim’s house and watched movies in English on MBC2. Ibrahim had a relatively nice house because he had managed to get a permit to work in Tel Aviv. He spoke fluent Hebrew. Like Abed, he didn’t demonize Israelis. He just wished they would protect everyone equally under the law.

Sawya’s Olives

The next morning we got up early and headed to the groves. It was a delightful day. Ibrahim’s three adorable sons were there as well as Abed’s sister’s son and daughter. The son was a blue-eyed, cheerful pre-teen, the daughter a dark-eyed and clever young woman who followed me around and chatted with me all day. Abed told me proudly that they were both first in their class at school. Their father had died a few years earlier, and their mother was a teacher.

The kids

The moms

We talked and harvested and picnicked all day. Abed spent an hour asking the kids questions about history and geography, and they enthusiastically competed with each other to answer them. After a while he pawned the job off on me, despite my limited Arabic. The first question I asked was, “What’s the biggest country in the world?”

The eight-year-old said, “Algeria!”

Abed said, “No, not in the Arab world, in the whole world.”

“United States!” his blue-eyed cousin said.

“No.”

“China!” the dark-eyed niece said.

“No, not the largest population. The largest area.”

“Um… Um… Europe!” That was the six-year-old.

I laughed. “No. Give up? Ru…”

“Russia!” they all said in delighted unison.

I took some pictures of them, and they insisted on taking some pictures of me.

Me in a tree

Goofing around while the women work!

The funniest moment of the day came when I was trying to take a picture of Abed and his three nephews, but I couldn’t get them all to smile at the same time. Finally Abed said in English, “Say cheese!”

Yazid, usually a quiet child, yelled, “TEEEEEEZ!”

Everyone burst out laughing. (Teez is a bad word in Arabic. It’s an impolite way to say ‘buttocks.’) He didn’t understand why everyone was laughing. He was just happy to be the center of attention.

In a little over twenty-four hours, a new village had been colored in on my map with faces and friends, views and porches, children and stories. When it was time for me to leave, they made me promise to come back as soon as I could.

As I was walking toward the road to find a service taxi, the children gathered to smile and wave good-bye to me, an American, with boundless innocent, friendly good will. It struck me as something so fragile and unlikely in such a dire and unfair situation, I instinctively grabbed for my camera to try to capture it and remember the feeling it gave me, the feeling Palestine so often gives me that meanness and ugliness aren’t the natural state of man after all. But it was something too pure to capture in any way.

EXCERPT – Sangria’s

Chapter Four is entitled Ramallah — Palestine has its own beer? The beer was one of the many surprises that greeted me when I moved to Ramallah, sight unseen, in the summer of 2004.

In this chapter, the book is still in ‘travelogue’ mode. In case it’s not clear, my book is unique in that it’s ‘wedge-shaped.’ By this I mean that most books on the Middle East either start shallow and stay shallow, or start so deep most Americans get lost before they begin. Mine starts at zero and ramps the reader up to a wide-angle and sophisticated understanding of the Israel/Palestine conflict.

The book begins as a travelogue about my first bewildered trips to the Middle East, which anyone can follow. Once the reader has a good sense of the local flavor and the situation on the ground, I transition into narrative journalism while still keeping up the beauty, suspense, and humor that are so indigenous to this land. Extensive footnotes from respected sources generalize the specific stories told. The last four chapters are infused with political, social, moral, and legal analysis. An Epilogue in Washington, DC brings it all home.

Here’s a section from Chapter Four called “Sangria’s.” It was one of my first nights in Ramallah. Muzna is one of my coworkers, “in her late twenties, slim and regal, with expressive eyes and dark shoulder-length hair.” She’s still a good friend today.

Here’s the excerpt:

Sangria’s

One day after work, Muzna invited me and a couple of other coworkers to join her for drinks at a place called Sangria’s. We walked to Al Manara and turned right toward another traffic circle called Duwar al Saa’a, the Clock Circle. There had apparently been a clock in the circle at some point in time, but now there was only a white stone column rising from a fenced-in circle of shrubbery. A massive candy shop, shawerma stands, office buildings, and trees surrounded the unmarked monument. One of the buildings had a cartoonishly large pair of glasses on the side that advertised an eye clinic.

We turned right again and walked downhill on a street I’d never been down before. The view opened up to the hills, valleys, trees, and white stone houses on that end of town. We soon arrived at a row of elegant old buildings made of tawny hand-cut stone. The one we turned into was unmarked except for a small wooden sign that had ‘Sangria’s’ carved into it.

Inside, an empty foyer led to an outdoor corridor that opened onto the most enchanting beer garden I had ever seen, built on a grassy hillside and enclosed by stone walls overhung with flowering vines. The tables on the upper terraces were shaded by large canvas umbrellas, and the lower tables sat under leafy trees hung with strings of lights. A grass hut in the center served as a bar. Waiters were busy distributing olive oil candles to each table under a clear, darkening sky. The crowd was young and stylish, the women dressed in club clothes, with almost no headscarves in sight. It was the last thing I expected to see in Ramallah.

We found a table and I asked our waiter for Turkish coffee and a nargila [hookah]. Everyone else ordered a beer called Taybeh.

“Where’s the beer from?” I asked once the beers had arrived.

“From here,” Muzna said. “Taybeh is a Christian village not far from Ramallah. They have a brewery there.”

“Really?” I was surprised again. I had assumed it was foreign, or possibly Israeli. “Can I try yours?” She handed over her frosty longneck, and I took a sip. It was medium-bodied, refreshing, with just the right amount of hops.

“Wow,” I said. “That’s a good beer.” Muzna smiled.

Just then a goofy Happy Birthday song came on over the loudspeakers at ear-splitting volume in Egyptian-accented Arabic. Two waiters emerged carrying cakes with giant sparklers spewing fire out the top. The birthday party had ordered enough cake for everyone on the patio, and after the birthday girl made her wish and the sparklers burned themselves out, the waiters handed out pieces of it.

I happily accepted a plate, but when Muzna was offered one, she shook her head and said, “La, shukran.” (No, thanks.)

The waiter raised his eyebrows and asked chidingly, “Leish?” (Why?)

I laughed out loud. It was good to be back in the Arab world.

You can get Carlsberg or Heineken, too. Or Sex on the Beach or a Black Russian.

Where’s the Palestinian Gandhi?

I’ve been receiving feedback on this blog, most of it positive but some critical. The disappointing thing is that most of the critical feedback is so by-the-book. People don’t respond with arguments but with worn-out talking points, most of them carefully calibrated not to advance the debate but to obfuscate it. For example, if I say the route of the Wall is illegal, they say, “Doesn’t Israel have a right to defend itself?”

Of course. Anyone who is threatened has a right to defend himself. I never said Israel didn’t have a right to defend itself. I only said the route of the Wall through occupied territory that isolates private property from its owners was illegal. If Israel wants to build a Wall on its own land, it is more than welcome.

But there I spent two entire paragraphs on the defensive, explaining an obvious point. This is why these talking points are so effective. Whether wittingly or not, they support the status quo because they keep us away from debate about the real issues.

One of my favorite pro-occupation talking points is the line, “Where is the Palestinian Gandhi?” There are several subtexts to this line. One is that the Palestinians apparently deserve whatever Israel dishes out to them until they produce a super-human peace activist like Gandhi or Martin Luther King. As if the British had every right to stay in India forever if Gandhi hadn’t appeared. As if segregation was OK right up until MLK found his platform.

Another subtext is that Palestinian culture isn’t capable of producing peace activists — that Palestinians are inherently more unreasonable and therefore culturally inferior to Israelis. Israel has plenty of peace activists, soldiers who refuse to serve in the Israeli army, and human rights organizations. All of them are vilified by the right-wing in Israel and ignored by the mainstream, but at least they exist and call for Palestinian human rights. Where’s the Palestinian brave enough to champion Israeli rights?

To understand why this line is nonsensical, first you have to understand that in the minds of Palestinians, this is not a conflict between equals, with equal moral claims, any more than the Apartheid struggle or the anti-segregation struggle were conflicts between equals with equal moral claims. Imagine an outraged Senator from Mississippi in 1962 saying, “We have plenty of white people working against segregation. Where’s the black man brave enough to speak up for Southern white rights?” It’s an absurdity.

The vast majority of Palestinians aren’t trying to take anyone else’s rights away (unless you consider it an Israeli ‘right’ to build illegal homes on Palestinian private property or collectively punish Palestinians in violation of international law). They’re struggling to have their most basic human rights respected.

[To quickly stave off another line of attack -- But haven't some Palestinians used violence? -- Of course some Palestinians have used violence. Anyone who reads the news can see that. There's no space here to go fully into all the details, but suffice to say for now, the violence isn't exactly a one-way street. Israel had already killed hundreds of Palestinian civilians, including about a hundred Palestinian children, by the time the first suicide bomber of the Second Intifada struck. I don't support suicide bombings on either moral or strategic grounds -- I think they're both horrifically immoral and strategically stupid -- but I also don't think they would happen if Palestinians weren't regularly treated worse than animals. If you read my book, Chapter 12, the section called "Dinner with a Suicide Bomber's Family," you'll understand what I mean. The section in Chapter 9 called "Suicide Bomber's Family Shunned" also demonstrates how support for Palestinian violence decreases dramatically when there's genuine hope of a halt to theft and violence by Israeli settlers and soldiers, even a temporary and limited one.]

Second, you have to look at reality. Palestinians engage in non-violent struggle against the occupation on a daily basis. From the weekly demonstrations against the Wall that steals land from villages like Bil’in, Na’lin, and Jayyous to the tireless work of Palestinians traveling all over the world to educate communities about the realities in Palestine, I’ve never seen a more politically-active population in my life. They have human rights organizations and NGOs covering every issue from prisoners to health care to water rights. They invite Israelis to march along side them in olive harvests, community works, and demonstrations. They write. They blog. They simply try to keep living under this insane situation while retaining their dignity, hospitality, and sense of humor.

Nearly everyone I bring to the West Bank and show them the situation, before they leave they end up saying in hushed tones, “You know, the only thing I’m really surprised about, given the unbelievable things they have to put up with, is that there’s not more Palestinian violence.” You truly have to see this situation to fully understand how bad it is.

And how are non-violent Palestinian activists treated by Israel? Are they held up as examples for Israelis and Palestinians both to follow? Covered extensively in the Israeli media as great hopes for peace and interviewed about their points of view? Invited to speak at Israeli universities?

Not so much. This Israeli press, like the American one, almost without fail, ignores them completely. The non-violent demonstrations at the Wall are met with tear gas fired by Israeli soldiers at least, lethal force at most. Half a dozen unarmed people have been killed and dozens injured (some paralyzed or left with brain damage) by Israeli soldiers at these protests. Dozens more have been arrested — pulled out of their homes in dead-of-night arrest raids by Israeli soldiers — and held without charge, or under absurd charges.

In one case, the Israeli army produced a photograph that ‘proved’ a certain leader of non-violent activities had been throwing stones at soldiers on such-and-such a date. His lawyers produced his passport. He had been out of the country on that date. Yet if it hadn’t been for this crucial (and lucky) piece of evidence, he might still be in jail today.

My friend Mohammad Othman from Jayyous, a tireless non-violent activist for the past ten years, is in Israeli jail right now, held in solitary confinement in miserable conditions with no charges whatsoever brought against him. He was seized about a month ago at the border crossing between Jordan and the West Bank (Israel controls this crossing) when he was returning home from an educational tour in Norway.

His sentence has already been extended three times, each time with no charge. He has been subjected to interrogations that have lasted entire days. I can tell you from first-hand experience, Israeli interrogations can be intensely psychologically traumatic, and I’m an American with the magic blue passport. Palestinians don’t have a fraction of the protections I have. A Palestinian prisoners’ rights organization reported, “During one of these sessions, an Israeli interrogator threatened to hurt Mohammad’s sister.”

Mohammad Othman

The same organization described his prison conditions as follows:

“Mohammad is currently held in solitary confinement in a small cell which measures only 2 square meters. The cell includes a mattress and a Turkish bathroom (hole in the floor). The cell does not contain a window, which means that there is no natural sunlight or fresh air. Upon his transfer to Kishon (Jalameh) detention centre, he was searched and taken to a doctor for a medical examination, as he got sick in Huwwara provisional detention centre due to poor conditions there. He was given clothes and slippers but was allowed to take clean underwear and socks from his own luggage. During the first days following his arrest, however, Mohammad suffered from especially hard detention conditions in Huwwara provisional centre, where bathrooms are located outside of the cell. Detainees are only allowed to use them freely during short recreation breaks (35 minutes), only three times a day. When the detainee wishes to use the toilet outside of these hours, he or she must call out for a guard and wait until one agrees to take the prisoner out.”

In response to this gross violation of Mohammad’s rights, his friends and supporters have created a worldwide campaign to secure Mohammad’s release. They’ve put together a blog, Free Mohammad Othman, with updates and suggestions for actions you can take. Also, an open letter to President Obama was written and signed by Noam Chomsky of MIT, Rashid Khalidi of Columbia, Sara Roy of Harvard, and many others:

Open Letter to President Obama

October 16, 2009

Dear President Obama:

Martin Luther King Jr. reminded us that “change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle. And so we must straighten our backs and work for our freedom.” President Obama, you promised us change and we believed in that promise. Now is your opportunity to show us you meant it.

We have frequently heard the question over the years, “Where is the Palestinian Gandhi? Where are those working for justice through non-violence?” We must look no further than the jails and cemeteries to find Palestinian peace activists leading the fight against injustice. This is where we will find Mohammad Othman: locked in solitary confinement in a military prison, and held for nearly a month after his arrest without charge or trial. His initial detention has been extended three times thus far, and there remains the possibility of it being renewed indefinitely.

On September 22nd, 33-year-old Mohammad was arrested by Israeli soldiers while trying to reenter the West Bank after spending several days at a conference in Norway. For more than 10 years Mohammad has been an activist for Palestinian human rights. During that time, he has been a leader in the Palestinian grassroots movement against the Wall that has swallowed up his community’s lands and livelihoods.

Mohammad, in the spirit of great human rights defenders like Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., has worked tirelessly over the years to bring his people’s voice to the world. He has embraced and advocated non violent means to effect change – a tactic that was instrumental in bringing about the end of apartheid in South Africa. Freedom from occupation, oppression and discrimination are human rights to which all people are entitled. Mohammad, and many others like him, have done nothing more than work to secure these most basic guarantees – to give his people a chance to live.

Unfortunately, what is happening to Mohammad is all too common. Palestinians working for justice are constantly threatened with arbitrary detention, bodily injury and torture, and even death. Imagine having to fear speaking the truth, knowing that by doing so you put your very freedom at stake, simply because you stand up for what is right and what is just. History has shown us that peaceful activists are often the target of such policies, if only because they pose the most severe threat to the status quo. It happened in South Africa, it happened in India, and it happened in the United States as well.

Mohammad is another casualty of this tactic. It is up to us, the international community, to defend him and all those who struggle for peace and justice. President Obama, if you are serious about forging peace, then we call on you to defend the right of Mohammad and all Palestinians to resist their oppression through non-violent activism. We implore you to pressure Israel for the immediate release of human rights advocate Mohammad Othman and all prisoners of conscience who are being held solely for their work towards justice and freedom.

Signed,

Noam Chomsky, Professor, MIT
Rashid Khalidi, Professor, Columbia University
George Bisharat, Professor of Law, University of California Hastings College of the Law
Huwaida Arraf, Lawyer and Founder of the International Solidarity Movement
Noura Erakat, Human Rights Attorney
Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb
Rabbi Haim Beliak
Audun Lysbakken, Leader of Socialist Left Party’s group in Parliament, Deputy Leader of Socialist Left Party
Sara Roy, Senior Research Scholar, Harvard University
Eitan Bronstein, Israeli Activist
Ramzy Baroud, Writer and Editor
Keith Hammond, Scottish Committee for the Universities of Palestine
Remi Kanazi, Poet and Writer
Petter Eide, President of Norwegian People’s Aid
David Lloyd, University of Southern California
Jewish Voice for Peace
Birthright Unplugged
Jews Against the Occupation, New York City
Students Boycott Apartheid
American Jews for a Just Peace

You can sign on to the letter here.

EXCERPT – Olive Harvest

As promised, in honor of the fall olive harvest, I’m posting an excerpt from Chapter 2, when I harvested olives for the first time in October 2003.

Before you read, you might want to take a look at the about section to see what the entire book is about and how this section fits into the general scheme. You might also want to see the previous entry, which offers maps, pictures, and comics that briefly explain the situation in the occupied Palestinian territories.

If you’d like to keep up with the progress of the book, look up the “Fast Times in Palestine” Facebook group and join it.

To set the stage for this excerpt, in Chapter One I graduated from college, bartended and traveled for a while, and landed rather randomly in a village in the West Bank called Jayyous in the company of two men, a British Muslim named Yusif and a Canadian paramedic named Sebastian. During my first night in Jayyous, I was nervous to be in a place where I had no idea what was going on, but my fears were quickly dispelled by the kindness, hospitality, and sense of humor of the people I met. I was invited to stay the night with the mayor’s son’s family, and the next morning I joined them for the olive harvest.

Now for the excerpt:

The Wall

The next morning, we all got up early and headed out to the farmland west of Jayyous. It was late October and the olive harvest was in full swing. I tagged along to help out, hoping to earn my keep for once. My karmic balance sheet was getting embarrassingly overdrawn.

Jayyous was built on a hilltop, and the land below it gently undulated and gradually flattened out into the coastal plains of central Israel. The Mediterranean Sea was twenty kilometers west of us. We caravanned down the hill in donkey carts and tractors and on foot, excited for a long, fun day in the groves.

Our procession was stopped at the bottom of the hill by a 20-foot-high chain-link Fence* topped with razor wire. Two smoothly-paved access roads flanked the Fence, and the land on either side of the roads was blasted bare and layered with sand. The whole 200-foot-wide structure was bounded by trenches and six-foot pyramid-shaped piles of razor wire. It snaked around the Biblical hills like a contour line in jarring contrast to the ancient aesthetic. A bright red sign posted on it said in Hebrew, English, and Arabic: “MORTAL DANGER – MILITARY ZONE. Anyone who passes or damages the Fence ENDANGERS HIS LIFE.”

[ * In rural areas, the barrier is a fence, as described here. In urban areas, it is a concrete wall punctuated by sniper towers. In this book, ‘Wall’ and ‘Fence,’ when capitalized, refer to the barrier being built in the West Bank by Israel. Palestinians refer to the entire barrier as Al Jedar, ‘The Wall.’ Most Israelis refer to it as the Separation Barrier or Security Fence.]

I was shocked and a little frightened to be confronted by such an aggressive structure on a peaceful olive harvest morning. Everyone else patiently gathered around the locked gate and found places to sit and wait in the hot, dusty morning. I swallowed my fear and followed suit.

I noticed one of the donkey carts had ‘AGAINST TERRORISM’ scrawled in white paint across the back. I heard a boy point to the donkey cart and say something about simsim.

“Simsim?” I asked, and pointed toward the donkey cart. The boy hesitated, then nodded. “So simsim means ‘donkey’?” I envisioned myself learning Arabic one word at a time and slowly developing a native command, like Kevin Costner in Dances with Wolves.

The boy looked at me blankly. One of his friends whispered something, and all the other boys burst into laughter. Seeing my bewildered look, Yusif whispered out of the corner of his mouth, “I think Simsim is the nickname of the boy in the cart.”

I looked at Simsim and winced apologetically. He smiled and shook his head.

I passed some time with another group of kids by drawing on the back of an old envelope. They wrote a little English for me, and I wrote a little Arabic. I spelled my name ‘Bamila’ since there was no ‘P’ in Arabic.

After a while I caught Yusif’s eye and said, “How much of Jayyous’s land is on the other side of that Fence?”

“Most of it. About seventy-five percent. Something like ten square kilometers.”

“Seventy-five percent?”

“Yeah, you can see. The Fence goes right up next to the village. There are places where it’s just a few meters from people’s houses.”

“Where’s the border between the West Bank and Israel?”

“About four kilometers that way.”

I squinted through the Fence in confusion. “Why would Israel build a Fence here instead of on the border?”

“They say they’re building it to stop suicide bombers. But hundreds of Palestinians cross the Green Line every day to work illegally in Israel. If a bomber wants to get through, he can. If he doesn’t, the next one will. If there’s a decrease in bombers, it’s not because of the Wall.”

“So why the Wall, and why this route?”

He sighed as if he had been through this many times. “Jayyous has some of the most fertile land in the West Bank. They’ve got something like fifteen thousand olive trees and 50,000 fruit and citrus trees. They grow mangoes, avocadoes, almonds, apricots. They’ve got more than a hundred greenhouses and six good water wells. Also, Jayyous sits near Israel’s narrowest point. There’s only twenty kilometers between the Green Line and the sea right here.”

My eyes narrowed. “So what, you’re saying Israel is trying to take Jayyous’s land?”

He shrugged. “It wouldn’t be the first time. Anyway, look, once we get through the Fence, there’s nothing stopping us from marching directly to Tel Aviv. You tell me what sense that makes.”

I couldn’t think of any. “How much land was destroyed to build the Wall?” I asked. “The scar looks enormous.”

“Yeah, it was a lot. About 2,500 olive trees were destroyed.”

“Did anybody get compensation?”

“No. Even when Israel offers compensation, no one takes it. It’s never anywhere near the value of what was lost, and it makes it look like a transaction instead of what it is. It would be an insult to accept that, and if you do, it’s considered treason.”

“Has anyone tried to climb over the Wall or tear it down?”

“Electronic sensors can call an army Jeep to investigate any possible breach in minutes. And they don’t hesitate to shoot people on sight.”

A chill went down my spine. It sounded so insane. There had to be more to this than he was telling me. I was glad I would see Dan in Israel at the end of the week.

“Are they going to let us through today?” I asked.

“Maybe.”

“What happens if they don’t?”

“As you see. We wait.”

View of Jayyous’ land from Jayyous. You can see the Wall along the bottom right and snaking toward the center. Nearly everything in the frame is Jayyous land isolated from its owners.

Olive Rain

Two hours later, around 10:30am, when the day was getting good and hot, an armored Jeep turned on its engines and kicked up dust as it powered up to the army access road next to the Fence and parked. It had apparently been sitting only two hundred yards away from us the entire time, hidden by a rise in the land. Two young Israeli soldiers with flak jackets and helmets and M-16 assault rifles got out and opened the gates. We passed single file while our documents were examined. Most of us seemed to get through.

The party that had been postponed at the gate resumed as we forgot all about the Fence and set about the day’s business. Rows of olive trees were evenly spaced on gently rolling hills and hemmed in beautifully by white stone retainer walls. Their leaves were green on one side and silvery on the other, and the olives faded from bright green to dark purple. A fine pale dust saturated the trees, muting the colors to sea foam green and deep lavender. When the wind rustled the trees, the leaves seemed to shimmer.

People began whacking at the trees with wooden sticks to knock the olives onto tarps spread out below. I watched until I thought I had an idea of what to do. After a while, though, I noticed Yusif looking at me funny and asked if I was doing something wrong.

“Well, you’re not supposed to whack it quite so… randomly. It takes some amount of finesse to be gentle to the trees and still get the olives.”

I paid closer attention and soon developed a halfway-decent olive whack.

I noticed a guy around twenty years old with a T-shirt over his head and his eyes peeking out of the collar to keep the sun off his face. Yusif said he was the mayor’s youngest son Mohammad. He was one of the most energetic and charismatic of the cheerful harvesters. He didn’t speak a word of English, so we could only say, “Marhaba!” (Hi!) whenever we ran into each other, but his enormous brown eyes exuded such intense and benevolent interest in everyone around him, I called him Mohammad the Charmer in my mind.

The fact that his lack of English skills was an exception drove home how impressive it was how many people in this tiny town spoke English as a second language. Jayyous was the same size as my home town, about 3,000 people. But in Stigler, Oklahoma, even the high school Spanish teacher didn’t really speak Spanish.

Welcome jugs of ice-cold water under the trees

I got thirsty after a while and went looking for water. Along the way I ran into Azhar, the mayor’s dark-eyed eleven-year-old daughter. Her name meant ‘flower’ in Arabic, and she was ethereally beautiful and unnervingly self-possessed — the type of girl who would have played the child princess in an 80’s fantasy movie. She was peeling a clementine (kalamentina in Arabic — a small, sweet orange). When she finished peeling it, she offered half to me.

“Shukran,” I thanked her in Arabic. She smiled.

Azhar’s half of the clementine was halfway to her mouth when Sebastian wandered by also looking for water. Instead of eating it, she offered it to him.

“Shukran,” he said.

I blinked in disbelief. Sebastian and I weren’t just strangers — we were foreigners who hadn’t even bothered to learn her language before visiting her country. She had every right in the world to be suspicious of us. Instead, she was giving us her food without a second thought. I couldn’t help but think I’d been an ogre as a child compared to her. I wouldn’t even give my little sister half of anything unless someone forced me to.

When I got tired of whacking at trees, I climbed up and combed olives from their shaded inner branches using a little hand-held plastic rake. Even the tallest trees didn’t stand much more than twenty feet high, but within each compact canopy was a vast and unique treasury of olives and leaves and sunlight and space. Olive branches had long been symbols for power, beauty, prestige, peace, and plenty, and it was easy to see why. Olives could be used for oil, pickling, lotion, soap, even fuel. Some of these trees were older than the Renaissance, and combing their willow-like branches felt like a sacrament. Wild herbs and brambles flourished at their feet, and the leaves shimmering softly over acres and acres seemed too diffusely beautiful for this world.

At one point I noticed a lizard high in a tree looking at me curiously. I picked it up and held it in my hand, and it shifted to a slightly paler hue — a chameleon! I jumped out of the tree to show it to Azhar. I moved a black olive toward the frightened animal’s open mouth to see if it would flick its long tongue out or turn black or something. Before I could find out, Azhar stilled my arm. She clucked her tongue, shook her head, and said gently, “Haraam.”

Yusif had told me haraam meant something forbidden by the laws of Islam, or any basically sinful or indecent thing. Harassing a helpless creature apparently qualified in Azhar’s mind. I nodded, tossed the olive away, and let the chameleon go on a white stone wall.

Once a tree was done, people would gather up the tarps, consolidate the fallen olives, twigs, and leaves into a pile, and remove the twigs until it was just olives and leaves. The prettiest green olives were put in buckets for pickling, and the rest would be bagged up, sorted from the leaves in town, and turned into olive oil in Jayyous’s Italian press. It was nice to sit down after standing for so long, and often we would get so deep into a conversation that we’d have the pile clean as a whistle and still be picking at specks and talking away. Eventually someone would come over with an empty grain sack, and we’d scoop them in and break it up and move on.

Always there was the soft, heavy patter of olives landing on the tarps all around, a rich olive rain. It was a pregnant sound that promised good things, not the least of which was this day, chatting and whacking and picking under a clear blue sky.

It was a welcome relief when breakfast was called. Hot and hungry, we gathered around a tarp family-style and drank bottles of rainwater from cisterns and ate bread and jam and hummus and pickled olives from past harvests, home-made falafel and crumbly white cheese and tomatoes and fresh yogurt and halaweh (a confection made from sesame paste).

Some of the younger kids, packs of nieces and nephews and cousins, ran around shrieking and laughing and throwing olives at each other. It reminded me of the golden days back in Stigler when my cousins and I used to climb trees and pick mulberries, gather eggs and shell peas, play by the creek and chase cows on my grandfather’s land.

As I was drinking my tea after the picnic, I happened to glance up at Jayyous perched on its hilltop. The white houses crowning the hill contrasted beautifully with the dark pine trees in the village, the shimmering olive groves surrounding it, and the powder-blue sky. I remembered seeing similar scenes in Renaissance paintings when I was a kid and wondering if places like that still existed. It struck me all of a sudden that this wasn’t merely an interesting conflict zone. In many ways, Jayyous was an enviable place to call home.

After several more hours of picking, a delightful late afternoon lunch, and a last batch of olives loaded into sacks and hauled onto a waiting truck, we headed toward home.

After the day’s gaiety, I wasn’t prepared for what awaited us. The Fence was closed and locked, as it had been that morning. No soldier was manning it. Once again, we had no choice but to put down our supplies, gather around the gate, and wait.

An old woman in a white headscarf glanced up at the most devastated of Jayyous’s once-productive hillsides. Her eyes followed the Fence and its clear-cut and bulldozed perimeter snaking its way around a huge area that used to be home and now meant a threat of death to any Palestinian who dared approach. Her eyes narrowed as she took in the piles of razor wire surrounding the structure, which were designed to corral not goats or sheep but human beings.

“Haraam!” she suddenly exploded and shook her fist at it. “Haraam!” Another old woman patted her on the shoulder. She deflated as quickly as her anger had arisen a moment earlier. She looked down feebly and shook her head.

The entire hillside on the right — which used to be someone’s olive grove — was dynamited, bulldozed, and stripped of trees for the Wall and its army access road

An hour later, it was time for the evening prayer, and there was still no sign of anyone to let us back home. The men laid a tarp down on a rocky ledge, formerly someone’s olive grove, now bulldozed flat. One man led the prayer while the others prayed in their jeans and dusty work shoes, silhouetted against a lovely setting sun. Another man went off by himself to pray next to a six-foot pile of razor wire. As I watched him pray solemnly, imprisoned and humiliated on his own land, I felt as if all the air had been kicked out of my chest.

When it was nearly dark, the soldiers finally arrived. The once-merry villagers lined up somberly, making sure to behave, while the young Israeli soldiers questioned them, checked their documents, and waved them uncaringly through. My shoulders bowed and my head ducked, and I felt a horrified weight of helpless sorrow on my heart. I felt like I couldn’t bear to watch this awful scene, to quietly accept it. But there was nothing I could do.

After a few moments, it dawned on me that I was wrong. There was something I could do, even if it was a very small thing. I leveled my head. I straightened my shoulders. If nothing else, I could at least try to face this situation with as much honesty and dignity as I could muster.

Suddenly I realized something else. I had always assumed, watching scenes like this on the news, that the people who bore such things must either not quite care about life as much as I did, or they must have some kind of supernatural coping mechanism I couldn’t begin to imagine. Because if anything like this happened to me, I expected I would utterly fall apart.

Now I felt ridiculous for imagining such a thing. Here I was, and here were unendurable things happening right in front of me to people who were no different from me at all. They were bearing the situation with dignity not because they didn’t care or because they were saints. They simply had no other options except being beaten down and miserable, which wouldn’t help anyone, or resisting. And this seemed to be a point in time where resistance was probably futile.

To my surprise, I felt energized by a clarity of purpose I’d never felt before. This particular aspect of the global situation was no longer a blank horror. It was merely an extremely difficult series of challenges whose basic units were human beings. Surely enough people of good will could find a way to resolve them. Either way, if the people of Jayyous could go through this every day and still go home and joke around on the porch — and if I apparently could, too, because what else was I going to do, sit around and mope? — I wondered what else I might be able to bear that I never imagined I could.

Of course, I had no idea then how bad things could get. If I had known, I would have cringed at my own naïveté. But I remember how strange and paradoxical it seemed that after witnessing something so awful, the world seemed less blindly terrifying, and how empowering it felt to realize I could go into the world and learn things for myself that no professor could teach — that most probably didn’t even know.