Other posts from Palestine
Maria and I have been back home for about 2 months now. We are slowly adjusting to life in the US after 14 months on the road. We have a lot to process and share from our whole year of travel, but especially from our 10 days in Palestine. There isn’t a day that goes by where I don’t think of the incredible people we met in Palestine and the relentless harassment and oppression that they face.
In this post and the next one, I want to write about our decision to volunteer in Palestine. Writing this is a reminder to myself of how I want to live life back home, instead of just settling back into conventional patterns. In writing this, I also hope it is a call to those of you who care about justice to take a step beyond your comfort zone.
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Before getting into the post, I want to mention that Maria and I are planning on hosting a few presentations/conversations about our experience in Palestine. We haven’t decided on the final details yet, but please let us know if you are interested so that we can gauge the level of interest.
- In Person in Chicago (sometime between Feb 10th and Feb 17th)
- In Person in Seattle (end of Feb, or in March)
- Online
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When we told people that we were going to volunteer in Palestine, we had many people tell us that we are so brave for what we are doing and that we are remarkable people.
I appreciated the encouragement.
But I don’t want to be remarkable or special.
I want to live in a world where it is normal for people to take risks to stand up for the oppressed.
It wasn’t an easy decision for us to go out of our comfort zone and take a risk. But now that we have, it is much easier to make decisions that push the boundaries of what we think we can do. I want to share what some of our doubts were, and what we experienced while we were there. I hope that by doing so I can encourage you to take steps beyond what you are used to in order to stand up for the oppressed.
When Maria and I laid out our plan for traveling in the summer and fall of 2023, we knew that volunteering with CPT in Palestine was going to be a priority for us. My grandfather is Palestinian; he was born in Jerusalem and spent his early years living there. In 1947, his father, Kalil, was killed in a Zionist attack while waiting for a bus at a bus stop. Then in 1948, during the Nakba, his family’s house was occupied by the Zionist entity. After about 10 years moving from Jericho to Amman to Baghdad he followed his brother to the United States for university, soon after followed by the rest of his remaining immediate family. My grandfather was able to return to Jerusalem one time in the 1980s while on a work assignment, but besides that trip, no other family member that I know has returned to see Palestine. For a number of years, I had a strong desire to see the land that I come from, and to try to meet remaining relatives who still live there. So, while traveling for a year, going to Palestine was one of our top priorities.
I had also learned about CPT and met some of their staff members while we were living in Chicago in 2022. I greatly admired the work that CPT does, and they regularly host delegations to Palestine, so this seems like a great plan for how we would go.
Then, a few days before we took off to travel, Oct. 7th happened. War raged in Gaza, and restrictions and tensions in the West Bank escalated. The original CPT delegation that we planned to go on in May was cancelled.
We changed our plans for a November delegation.
Then, 2 months before we were scheduled to arrive in Palestine. Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi was killed by the IDF. She was an activist, from Seattle, who was in the West Bank doing similar work to what we would be doing with CPT.
This stirred up fear. But, we were busy traveling, finding Maria’s family roots in Italy and Greece, so we ignored the fear and continued making plans to join CPT in Palestine.
Then one month before we were scheduled to go, we heard from CPT that they were cancelling the delegation.
At first we both breathed a sigh of relief.
After talking more with our CPT contacts, we learned that they were still inviting us to come join them in Palestine. They had to cancel the delegation because checkpoint closures and restrictions in the city had grown so unpredictable that they couldn’t reliably plan any of the normal delegation activities. But if we still wanted to come, we could shadow the CPT team in their activities, at least when the checkpoints allowed us to get to each other.
With this option on the table, we really had to wrestle with our fear, doubts, and insecurities.
We asked ourselves: Will we be safe*? We don’t have any special skills; What impact can we really make? Are we going to be a burden on the local team? Are we prepared for it? I’m fine with taking a risk, but the problems are so big, and the impact we could make seems so small, so is it really worth the risk? Is it just fear and doubt holding me back from doing something meaningful? Or am I actually ill-prepared and taking a risk for no reason?
We were encouraged by the local team and some other mentors that we don’t need to “accomplish” anything; there is value in us being there and seeing with our own eyes the situation. If we go, seeing the conditions will shape us and we will be able to use the experience to share what we saw with people back home. Being there in solidarity the people would encourage them and give them strength to continue in their daily resistance.
So we decided to go.
And it was the best decision that we made during the whole year of traveling.
I don’t know if we had any immediate tangible impact while we were there. But it was incredibly meaningful for us to be there. The level of oppression that we saw broke my heart in a way that will forever change the way that I see the world. The spirit of resilience that we saw in the people instilled in me a determination to stand with people facing oppression. The people we met seemed strengthened by our show of solidarity with them. They told us that knowing that they have the support of people around the world helps them to keep going in the face of daily oppression. We made deep connections with the local people that we met and with the other Americans who volunteered with us. I don’t know when I will see most of these people again, but I greatly value these new friendships.
And through sharing our experiences online, and conversations since we’ve been back home, we’ve been able to help friends and family understand what daily existence in Palestine is like. As most of the Palestinian activists that we met told us: sharing with people back home is more important than what we can do on the ground in Palestine, since it is the western governments, and especially both parties of the United States government, which give the weapons and the political cover for Israel to continue their occupation, human rights abuses, and every few years their mass atrocities.
The prospects of the end of the occupation and a peaceful resolution for Palestinians and Israelis in the foreseeable future are not promising. And our contribution may have no discernable impact. But as the Palestinian non-violent activist Issa Amro told us “There is not a switch button; it is long-term work. We might not see the end to the occupation, but we hope that future generations will. We are on the right side of history, and we need to protect the land and to protect the narrative.” This struggle must be carried on, because even though it may seem that there are decades where nothing happens, there are weeks where decades happen. Some day the occupation will end, and Issa told us: “when we end the occupation, we will find another just cause to support,” because no one is truly free until everyone is free.
On top of all of this, I was also able to meet three members of my extended family. We met Nabil, Joni, and Rami in their jewelry workshop in the Jerusalem old city, where they make sliver and gold jewelry and souvenirs. Hearing their stories, and seeing the pictures of their families was incredibly personally meaningful for me.
Not everyone should go to Palestine (although maybe you should – CPT has five delegations to Palestine coming up this year).
What is your thing? What is on the edge of your comfort level? How can you stand up for the oppressed.
We don’t have any special skills. Just a deep care for justice and a willingness to take risks.
Take a step.
We end up where we want to go by taking a step first.
Maybe it feels too insignificant or vulnerable. But it is worth it. Standing up for the oppressed is the most meaningful thing you can do.
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In my next post I am going to share a poem/reflection that I wrote during the weeks when we were wrestling with the decision of whether or not to go on the delegation to Palestine.
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* Regarding safety: we were safe while in Palestine, but safety was a concern of ours. For those who may be thinking of going to Palestine, and for those who may have the wrong impression of what the safety concerns are, I want to write a note about what exactly our safety concerns were, and what we experience while there in terms of safety.
What exactly are the risks? Some friends/family were worried about kidnapping/violence from Palestinians. That not what we were worried about. It was violence from the Israeli soldiers and settlers that is the risk. In the early 2000s, our fellow delegation volunteer, Kathie, had armed settlers shoot toward her group to scare them away as they were helping a family pick olives. American activists such as Rachel Corrie and Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi were killed by Israeli soldiers while peacefully protesting home demolition and land grabs. These were the types of safety risks that we had in mind.
While we were in Palestine, our experience aligned to what we were told to expect. We were safe and never felt in immediate danger; direct violence against western foreigners is rare. However, we did face a few high-tension situations and restriction of movement. For example: we were turned away at checkpoints a few times, soldiers gathered to watch us and repeatedly flew a drone close to us as we helped a family pick olives, and an unmarked armored vehicle slowly followed us and the armed men inside taunted our Palestinian guide as we walked along an otherwise empty road.
Book Recommendations
Below are a couple recommendations of books that have influenced my thinking of how change happens, and have helped me imagine my role in it, and helped me see that it is something that I can take part in.
Wobblies and Zapatistas: Conversations on Anarchism, Marxism and Radical History by Staughton Lynd, Andrej Grubacic
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I have recommended this book on our blog before. It is a great book for anyone interested in the history and practice of how social change is made. I wanted to recommend it again, because one of the key themes that runs through the book is connected to the conversation in this post. In the book, Lynd draws on his experience of protesting the Vietnam War, organizing to register black voters in the 1960s, and offering legal services to labor unions during the struggle to keep steel mills open in the Rust Belt; he also draws on historical lessons from varying movements including the American, French, Russian, and Chinese Revolutions, Zapatista cooperatives, early Protestant communities, and South American liberation theology. Through this experience and history, he argues that in all successful revolutions there have been small self-governing institutions that are built in the shell of the collapsing empire. Once traditional central authority breaks down, popular self-acting institutions step up to take their place. Recognizing the critical role of small democratic institutions in social change helps me see that there is impactful work that is accessible to me, and that this work has significance even when the issues feel so intractable.
Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire
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Another theme is Wobblies and Zapatistas is “accompaniment.” That is: to walk side by side on a common journey with the poor, oppressed, and those on the margins of society. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire also talks about this idea. He says of professionals, that once they recognize the unjust position of the oppressed, the action that they take is often not in true solidarity and partnership with them: “Whatever the specialty that brings them into contact with the people, they are almost unshakably convinced that it is their mission to “give” the latter their knowledge and techniques. They see themselves as “promoters” of the people.” This is not solidarity with the oppressed but rather, the professional is “rationalizing his guilt through paternalistic treatment of the oppressed, all the while holding them fast in a position of dependence”. This will not do. Rather: “solidarity requires that one enter into the situation of those with whom one is solidary; it is a radical posture […] true solidarity with the oppressed means fighting at their side to transform the objective reality which has made them these “being for another.” The oppressor is solidary with the oppressed only when he stops regarding the oppressed as an abstract category and sees them as persons who have been unjustly dealt with, deprived of their voice, cheated in the sale of their labor—when he stops making pious, sentimental, and individualist gestures and risk an act of love. True solidarity is found only in the plentitude of this act of love, in it existentiality, in its praxis. To affirm that men and women are persons and as persons should be free, and yet to do nothing tangible to make this affirmation a reality is a farce.”
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