Palestine
Other posts from Palestine
What do I say?
How can I communicate what we have seen here?
The situation is terrible.
But it is hard to describe.
It isn’t attention-grabbing or action-packed.
It’s not a single incident of extreme violence.
You don’t see it immediately.
But stay for a day and you will feel it.
It is a hundred things throughout the day.
Things that are meant to humiliate you.
Meant to control you.
It is grating.
It is intended to destroy your hope.
But the people here are resilient.
They choose to find joy in degrading situations,
To laugh,
To have dignity.
So when you see their smiles you might think that everything is okay.
You’ll catch yourself in a moment of normalcy,
And then a soldier looking down on you from the roof will snap you back to reality.
—
We have stories to share of what we have seen. But I don’t think these stories can demonstrate the reality here unless you understand the context in which they happen.
Al-Khalil (or Hebron) is considered one of the oldest cities in the Levant and is the largest city in the West Bank. Since the 1967 Six-Day War, the city has been under Israeli military occupation. It is a unique city because here the Israeli settlements are mixed in among the mostly Palestinian city. It is a microcosm of the occupation of the West Bank. The dehumanizing, apartheid conditions here are horrible enough regardless of where it is. To add to this, the West Bank is Palestinian land and Israeli settlements are illegal according to international law, yet it feels that international law has no power here and the people have no one to turn to.
To try to give you a picture of the conditions, here are some brief snippets of what we’ve seen and personal stories people have shared with us. This is just from the first two and a half days of being here; I’m sure we will see more.
- Some roads are only accessible to Israeli settlers. What used to be a one-minute walk to your relative’s grave now takes 30 minutes to go around the closed roads.
- As we walked along the road with our local Palestinian guide, an unmarked truck full of armed young men wearing military fatigues slowly followed along at our walking pace occasionally yelling something that we couldn’t understand and trying to provoke us.
- Checkpoints that you must cross to move through the city. It feels like you are an animal in a cage. You never know when it will be closed or when the guard will have a certain mood and not let you through.
- Homes and land are at risk of being stolen by settlers. We’ve seen houses and schools where Palestinians were forced out to make way for Israeli settlements, schools, and military buildings.
- Walking through parts of the city, there is a fence above you, like a ceiling, which is there to protect Palestinians from garbage and other objects thrown down by settlers who live above. This still doesn’t protect people from liquids or gasses which are thrown down.
- Palestinian houses on a street that the Israeli military has closed to only allow settlers’ cars. An ambulance can’t even come to you if you need to go to the hospital.
- Permits are required to go to your farm and pick your olives. Some years, you will not get a permit granted. Even if you get a permit, settlers may harass or attack you while you are picking your olives. That is if they didn’t already steal your olives.
- We had coffee with an elderly woman whose house is right next to an Israeli checkpoint. Her family has been in this house since her grandfather’s time. She’s had soldiers pee on her property. She’s had sound bombs thrown at her house. She isn’t permitted to leave her house at night or on certain days of the week. The soldiers call her names and harass her. They play loud music all night to disturb her sleep.
- Cameras surveil you all around the city. Facial recognition software tracks you.
- Every week on Saturday the settlers take a “tour” of the Palestinian area of the city. The Palestinians call this an incursion. 40+ soldiers with a group of settlers go through the city forcing Palestinian shop owners to close their shops, stopping Palestinians from moving across the city. The settlers feel free to harass the people with the protection of the soldiers.
- Neighbors are cut off from one another because the military decided to block one family’s front door. They are now forced to enter and exit from the rear of their house and take a 30-minute taxi ride around the city if they simply want to get to the street by their front door.
- Soldiers can force you to show them the pictures on your camera/phone. It doesn’t matter if they are legally allowed to do this, because they can arrest you and keep you in prison without revealing any charges against you (a status called administrative detention). So, you must comply.
- You likewise have to be careful what you post on social media, what you wear, or any other political statements, as you can be arrested for any or no reason.
- We saw playgrounds for schoolchildren that had been turned into parking lots for settlers. The playground for the kids is now a small outdoor area with a cage around it.
- Israeli authorities control where and what you can build. The Israeli settlement buildings are more modern. The water utilities are separate, so while Israeli settlements get running water 24/7, Palestinians only occasionally get water and must store it in tanks on the roof.
- The two brothers of a woman we met have been arrested and in prison for almost a year under administrative detention with no charges. She hasn’t seen either of them and only briefly heard one of their voices through a recording that their lawyer made during his appeal.
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