Israel's War on Children: Mohammed's Story

 "Muhammad was a butterfly."

Muhammad al-Hallaq was a 9 year old student, soccer player, bird enthusiast, brother, and son that was murdered by the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) on October the 16th. He was out playing soccer with his friends when an IOF sniper shot him from 200 meters away.

His grandmother described him as a butterfly to demonstrate his insatiable energy through teary crystal eyes and the slight grin of a loving grandparent. She sat beside her daughter Alia, the 33 year-old mother of Mohammad, and her other grandchildren. Alia told us that other family members said she didn't have to keep telling the story, but she wants to do everything she can to make sure no other families have to go through this. Alia's mother and sister have been staying with Alia and her children since Muhammad was murdered.

We drove through Fawwar Refugee Camp and through some Olive Groves before reaching an overlook. The person we were with informed us "there's the school and right over there is where he was shot." The valley drew a winding road until we reached the top of a hill and to the family's house.

 

Inside the home two of Muhammad's siblings were accompanied by his mother and grandmother. Muhammad was the third of five children. They started to recount the tragic day. It was clear that Muhammad was indeed a butterfly with the energy only a fourth grader would have. They told us the story of how he had received a UN backpack that day with an intense excitement. "He was the happiest I have ever seen him." When he was showing his family he saw that his older brother was a little disappointed. His older brother went to a different school and they didn't get backpacks. So Muhammad ran all the way back to school to ask his teachers if he could bring a backpack for his brother.

His mother's guess was correct and only students of the school could get backpacks. Alia unzipped the backpack and pulled out some of Muhammad's work books and showing off his excellent grades. They were so proud of their clever child.

His energy contained a lot of generosity. They told us stories of him throwing out seed and catching birds only to hand to friends to play with. He loved birds so much they kept telling us.

After getting home from school that day he did some work with olives that his father had bought and then said he wanted to visit his grandmother. And even though his mom said "maybe tomorrow on Friday," he insisted and ran off for a fifteen minute visit. His grandmother said "I remember praying for his safety three times as he ran out of the house." Apparently the road she lives on can be dangerous with a rocky terrain, and she was given an urge to pray. He then ran off to play soccer with his friends. About thirty minutes later Muhammad was shot by an IOF soldier. Eye witness reports from the village say the soldier raised his hands above his head as if cheering after getting on one knee to aim and shoot at the crowd of players, hitting Muhammad in the abdomen. Muhammad was then driven to the hospital by members of the village, but because of road closures and road blocks they were forced to go thirty minutes out of the way.

Alia was at a grocery store with her father in Yatta, a bigger near by city, when her uncle called her father. She had a feeling the call was for her so she took the phone out of his pocket. It was her uncle who wasn't expecting her, but asked if she heard about any confrontations with the IOF in Al-Rihiya that day. "I said 'it's Muhhamad,' a mother's intuition, but I knew."

When Alia and her father got to the hospital there were already about a hundred or so people from Al-Rihiya there. This is custom when someone from a community is injured by the Occupation military. The doctors kept Alia from seeing Muhammad as they were still in the ER. Other community members tried to comfort her saying "he will be okay it is just a light injury." She would respond with "my son is not big enough to survive a bullet. Let me see him."

When Alia couldn't see her son she fainted. She couldn't remember how long she was unconscious, but when she woke up she saw a bed rolling past her room. At this point in telling the story she started to pull at her hands and wrists. She said "I ripped out all the IVs the doctors had put in her and ran after Muhammad and his team of doctors." She met them at the elevator which they were taking to the operating room three stories up. They told her every second counts and she needed to let them operate on her son. She let them go, but then she ran up the three stories. She fell three times on the way up the stairs to stand outside the operating room while the doctors tried to save her son.

She got to the OR and desperately waited for news on her son. And then she heard the heart monitor turn into a long tone. She saw a doctor run into the OR with three units of blood, and then a doctor walked out. "Muhammad is dead now."

Her twelve year old son hugged her. She was surrounded by about a hundred of her neighbors. And she was crying and shouting for Muhammad. For her generous and loving butterfly. She fainted again.

"We have had terrible pains as poor people in the past, but this is the worst pain I have ever felt in my life."

While all of this was happening Muhammad's father was trying to get back from his work in a Ramallah grocery store. It took him four hours to drive the what should be hour and half ride, because of a particularly notorious checkpoint called the "container." The family said that those four hours were like four years to him as pictures of his bloodied son were coming through his phone, and he was forced to sit through the checkpoints and meaningless road closures that prevented his son from getting immediate care.

Community members helped to prepare the body and they took it to the family cemetery which sits below their house. Once the father got home from work they buried their nine year old son.

The four year old that was present as this entire story was being told started to cry and Alia through her intensely grieving eyes comforted him rubbing his forehead.

Later on that day we met with some people from the Fawwar refugee camp. At some point amidst a more than informative and challenging conversation they situated the marytyrdom of Muhammad and other Palestinians, children and adults, within the context of the Israeli policy of "collective punishment." 1,001 Palestinians (273 children like Muhammad, the youngest being 2 year old Laila al-Khatib) have been murdered by the IOF since October 7th, 2023. Another man we met told us his 17 year old son was shot by the IOF in December of 2023. People from his village heard soldiers making bets about hitting someone that day, the winner got a coke. The Israeli policy of collective punishment tries to justify these consistent acts of violence that are seemingly random, as well as to justify entire village raids, home demolitions of people accused of crimes, mass detentions, revoking work permits for entire villages, and many other methods that they say are deterrents but are definitively illegal under international law. Some theorist think about collective punishment as both a method of complete and total control (with the settler colonial goal of population replacement) as well as a reaction to the reality that the occupational forces cannot completely and totally quell resistance.

The IOF's preliminary investigation claimed that the soldiers who murdered Muhammad "deviated from rules of engagement." Unconfirmed reports from a local chat said that the soldier that shot Muhammad admitted that he knew he was shooting at children. No one is expecting that there will be any accountability or conviction.

Once Muhammad's family finished telling us the story of October 16th they then walked us into the bedroom Muhammad slept with his four siblings. There was a special blanket with his picture on it now in the place where he laid his head every night. There, too, was his soccer ball, the shirt he planned to wear to prayers the next day, his perfume, his beloved backpack. His siblings haven't been able to sleep in that room since he was killed. Sleeping in their mother's room instead.

There were some drawings on the wall in permanent marker and we asked "was that Muhammad?" The family's eyes lit up and then started to point to every marking on the wall and saying "Muhammad, Muhammad, Muhammad."

When we left the bedroom the grandma pointed to the other bedroom door and said "Muhammad," and then made the motion of a hammer. Apparently he had taken a hammer and made about nine holes in the door. It is clear he will still be present in those walls, in his generous spirit, in his grandmother's kind eyes, and his mother's insistence on telling his story.

Israeli Occupation Forces Deny Muslims Right to Pray

On Friday, October 24, the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) denied over 100 Palestinian Muslims the right to pray Duhr - or noon prayer - at the Al Ibrahimi Mosque in Al Khalil.

Friday, or Juma'ah in Arabic, is the holiest day of the week in Islam. And Duhr is among the most popular times to pray communally at Al Ibrahimi, known by Jews as the "Tomb of the Patriarchs," the place where Abraham, Sarah, and other important figures from Scripture are buried. Al Ibrahimi Mosque is also the place where, in 1994, U.S.-born Israeli physician Baruch Goldstein opened fire on 800 Palestinian Muslim worshipers and killed 29 people. Goldstein is buried in the nearby settlement of Kiryat Arba, where a plaque near his gravesite reads, “To the holy Baruch Goldstein, who gave his life for the Jewish people, the Torah, and the land of Israel.” This grave is a site of pilgrimage for many settlers, and is where Ben-Gvir took his future wife on their first date.

Every Friday in Al Khalil, starting about 45 minutes before the Muslim call to prayer, worshippers line up at the military checkpoint that regulates, and often bars, access to the mosque for Palestinians in the city, both those who live inside and outside the restricted area. For a Palestinian, going through the checkpoint consists of waiting in a large cage-like structure, heavily monitored by multiple cameras, in order to wait to be allowed through a large metallic turn style. Next, they must proceed through a metal detector and show their IDs to the soldier behind the plexiglass box before walking by several other heavily armed soldiers barking orders. All of this is done in order to pray.

At times, walking through the checkpoint goes relatively smoothly. More often, Palestinians tell us, there are numerous delays and even closures, blocking access to the mosque, to shops, to homes, and to everyday life.

On this particular Friday, at least 25 worshippers had lined up by 11:50 for the 12:24 prayer. For no given reason, the Israeli soldiers were only allowing in 3-5 people every 2 minutes - not nearly quickly enough to enable the quickly growing number of worshippers who continued to line up to get to prayer on time. By 12:34, 10 minutes after prayer had begun, at least 96 worshippers were still waiting to be let through the checkpoint; at least 10 had seen the line and left; and at least 4 had been turned away by soldiers. When we asked various Palestinians why the soldiers were holding up the line that day, they all replied with some version of, "They do this all the time. We are used to it. They do whatever they want. They don't need to give a reason."

Proving that the holdup had nothing to do with any need for security, at 12:45, 20 minutes after prayer was over, the soldiers opened the side gate and allowed all 96 Palestinian worshippers through the checkpoint at once. Nobody had to walk through a metal detector. Nobody had to show ID. But all had missed prayer time.

Just another way to make life under occupation as unbearable as possible.

Hope and Hardship Under Ceasefire

Ceasefire, prisoner exchange, and a slow increase of aid to Gaza. What a week that was! After our night in, we backpacked under the stars in a very remote village, near an even more remote house. It was here, some months ago, settlers set a car ablaze and injured a member of the family. It was now Thursday, and the ceasefire had started at noon. In broken Arabic, I asked the teenager of the household, who was bringing us blankets, "So is the war really over?" He smiled a bit sadly and said, "I don't know. I am not Trump, I am not Netanyahu, it is up to them." To call the last two years "war" is indeed a misnomer. Ten percent of people in Gaza have been killed or wounded, the vast majority of whom are civilians. Less than .1% of Israelis have been killed or wounded, the vast majority of whom have served in the military.

Over the course of a week without bombs falling on Gaza, people have indeed relaxed quite a bit, from a tight suspicious sadness to a slightly more freer version of themselves with less pained looks on their faces. There's a flicker of recognition to the people I knew a generation ago, with even a few of the traditional greetings of goodness and peace. There was even a spontaneous dance party in a cave we were staying in with a grandma and her two daughters and one year old granddaughter.

Under the stars, we awoke just before dawn to a train of camels going by on the next hill. With sunrise, sheep were grazing nearby. The donkeys brayed in a perfect fifth, and the sheep's hooves' rhythm on the rocks and the sweeping scenery of hills made me want to write a Bedouin symphony. This lasted about ten seconds, before I remembered I have no composition skills on which to draw.

Thus ended our first night in a firing zone, a place with no firing whatsoever, our driver assured me; it is simply a designation to move Palestinians off the land and more easily deport internationals who come and stay with them. The villages have challenged this designation and it's implications in court for over 20 years, and have lost, it seems, and now wait in nervous anticipation of the day they will be moved off their land and their villages depopulated. The settlers are just anxious to get the process started sooner, so throw in some terrorism of burning cars, attacking villagers and their livestock.

We got a ride to Jerusalem with some Israeli and international Jewish activists touring Masafer Yatta and taking an Arabic course there. We walked along the outside walls of the Old City further into East Jerusalem to rent a car for the weekend. From there we embarked on an adventure to Nazareth, Galilee, and Taybeh, getting to experience a very small taste of the way the occupation affects transportation. Google maps directed us from Jerusalem to around and above Ramallah, to a road that had been blockaded many years ago by the Israeli military and looked like an abandoned amusement park entrance.

We tried two other routes, same thing. “Wow, they really don't want anyone coming or going from Ramallah,“ I mused. We called an Israeli activist we had gotten to know who directed us to go all the way back to Jerusalem to go through the main checkpoint, Qalandia, and then north the ten miles to Ramallah. I had mistakenly thought that since we got the car in East Jerusalem, in the West Bank, and we traveled along area C, that it wouldn't be a problem to get into Area A. That was incorrect -- Israel has functionally annexed area C, as well as East Jerusalem. We were surrounded by Israeli subdivisions and gated communities like you have in your own state. I was frustrated that such a small place is so hard to access, and that Israelis intentionally cut off possibilities of relationship-- the signs in front of area B label the area as dangerous, and area A as forbidden to Israeli citizens. As a result, one can't simply go from C to A, one must go C to B to A, making for a ridiculously inefficient route. Inside Area A are the most warm and welcoming people in the world, and it's like Israel doesn't want its citizens to see that.

In Ramallah we stayed with the other half of our team, who had been harvesting olives in the face of soldiers and settlers, and headed north to Nazareth in plenty of time for mass. More than twice the time we needed. Or so we thought. Again, the first two attempts we made to leave Ramallah were met with road blocks, meaning by the time we got there and parked, people (all Palestinian, no tourists) were coming out of mass. We stayed to pray and look around before getting lunch. We saw perhaps a half dozen tourists total. The Palestinian restaurant we went to had the news on a big screen -- a multicamera live view of people in Gaza returning to their homes, the Israeli prison where all the detainees being released were being held, and the spot where hostages would be released from.

We then went to the Mount of Beatitudes, read the Sermon on the Mount, and then went down to the sea of Galilee. The next morning was the joyous news of political prisoners on buses and hostages released.

"The freedom of the prisoners is the basis for the freedom of the people," says Marwan Barghouti, who is known as the Nelson Mandela of Palestine, and is, as of this writing, still imprisoned. While 2,000 have been released, there are still nine thousand more who are behind bars. 40% of Palestinian men will be imprisoned at some point in their lifetimes, the vast majority without a charge or a trial. (for comparison, in the US, 33% of black men are incarcerated in their lifetimes, and 50% of Native American men.) The vast majority of Palestinian families, 70%, have had a family member imprisoned. This is in Israeli prisons, of course; the crime rate in Palestine is extremely low, less than a quarter of what it is in the US, so while there are Palestinian jails, they are mostly empty.

We had a lovely time in Taybeh, an entirely Christian town with fantastic views not far from Ramallah. The wealthiest town in Palestine is nearby, and the church we went to for mass was well cared for, with new pew cushions and paint on the walls. After mass we were invited by some church ladies to their home. They are neighbors and best friends. They have grown up in Taybeh and returned to retire after living abroad. Their houses were both quite large, and were the first homes we've been in with furniture. We were served nuts and bottles of soft drinks, in addition to the standard tea with sage. Our host's husband had on the news of the prisoner release, and our host explained that he grew up in Gaza. We asked if his 20 relatives, who were all taking refuge in Holy Family Catholic Church in Gaza, were ok. "No one is okay in Gaza," he said, simply. I shared that I followed news of that parish closely, since it shared a name with the parish I grew up in, and that I loved that Pope Francis would call them every night. With that he shared that he had a relative killed when the church was bombed this summer. We discussed the changes they witnessed over their lifetimes. They said that they used to love to go to Tel Aviv and go shopping and go to the beach, but since the movement restrictions in the early 90s, that hasn’t been possible. This is what prompted the move to Australia for one. It turned out her relative ran the new guest house, where we were the first guests! He had worked in tourism for 20 years, and had a dream of starting his own guest house. He had just purchased his grandfather‘s property and began fixing it up when Oct 7th happened , giving him lots of time to perfect it before we arrived. Taybeh Guest House— strong recommendation.

Upon our return to Masafer Yatta, I was invited by our host Sami to be interviewed by Al Jazeera. The guest house near where we stay, a lovely two story complex with lots of meeting rooms, bathrooms, and sleeping rooms, has a demolition order that may be carried out while we are here. I was invited to share why such a space is important to internationals. It is in an area that was supposedly free from further demolition, but the occupation is claiming the possibility of an ancient synagogue gives them right to again remove the whole village. I explained to the reporter that the guest house is famous, that before I came to Palestine people told me about it, and that it is an essential place for visitors and activists to gather and learn about the situation and stand with Palestinians. My two best lines in the interview were, "What do internationals want? Bathrooms! This place has loads of bathrooms." And, "My state is called Indiana because it was set aside for the Indians until the settlers decided they wanted it also. This village in Masafer Yatta has been set aside, and the people told nothing will happen to them, but now there is suddenly a reason." At the end of the interview I expressed my condolences to the journalists for the loss of their colleagues in Gaza, and shared what courageous work they do. They thanked me and said solemnly, "We may be next. Inshallah." I've gotten so used to inshallah as "I hope so," or "I dunno, maybe"; they brought it back to the true meaning with such eloquence. We had just come from Taybeh, where Jesus was with his disciples when it was called Ephraim, before heading off to his death in Jerusalem, so I had already been thinking about resoluteness in the face of death, and then these two journalists, so heroic and steadfast, expressed the words of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, a place we had passed a few days before: "not my will but thine will." I did not expect to be brought the reality of the gospel by two journalists from Al Jazeera.

That evening, we were brought back to the same backpacking location and hiked even further, walking another 20 min on a ridge while a teenager on a donkey carried our bags. We were welcomed into a big scene, as a car carrying a couple with 3 little boys pulled up just as we arrived to the family of 8. Hospitality is ingrained at an early age. The one year old knows to offer us packaged treats, and the 8 year old pours us tea. The 15 year old chats with us in English and we play soccer with the 3, 4, and 8 year old children as chickens and donkeys, sheep and goats, act as onlookers.

While we have been here, a village close to us where we spend a lot of time was raided in the middle of the night. Dozens of Israeli soldiers came and searched homes, made families stand outside in the 2am damp cold, questioning the men as to their political allegiance and at which mosque they worship. The soldiers locked the gate to the village, and zip tied and blind folded 5 villagers, including Sami's dad, and brought them to a random house and left them there to be discovered and returned to their homes.

The families we stay at are often up late, hyper vigilant for any sign on an attack. This stress wears at them. Shepherds are reduced to something more akin to running a petting zoo, unable to take their flocks grazing due to fear of attack, and instead rely almost exclusively on feed. This wears at them. Children grow into adults and abandon their parents' land for the relative safety and ease of life in the city of Yatta, coming back to visit with lots of guilt and worry. This wears at the people. The indignity of settlers trespassing on your own private yard, never mind your ancestral land in general, this wears at the people. The violence of the occupation, which we have witnessed in most every way, also results in an increase in family violence and a cruelty to animals that Palestinians inflict. This has been the hardest to witness. The 20-something son of the head of the household hits his 20-something wife, who in turn hits the family donkey. Children play extremely roughly with each other, with wrestling that can involve lots of hitting and kicking. Curiosity by a three-year-old is met with a severe corporal punishment by his parents. It feels terrible to be asked to be a protective presence against violence, but only violence from the settlers and army. There's lots of family violence around the world, but here it feels very tinged by the occupation and the stress it causes in every aspect of life.

Reflections From Home

 The worst thing that happened to me in the West Bank is that I got chiggers from a very sweet young orange cat at a Palestinian family’s house. Cats are not pets in Palestine, generally speaking, but occasionally become appendages to a family, like farm cats in the US, who aren’t allowed inside but are fed bread and rice or other leftovers from dinner, and otherwise subsist on lizards or other small prey. This cat, like all such cats, is named Biss (Cat), and is the only cat that’s come to snuggle with us during our entire stay. This was before and after supper, while on what can perhaps be best described as the fenced in patio, which functioned as the dining room. This is the only house where we’ve slept in the same room with every single family member, including the father of the house, and there is no place to change clothes. Other locations where we’ve slept outside near men it’s been possible to step a ways away into the darkness to use the bathroom, brush teeth, and change for bed. But at this house, it’s a closed military zone, so being caught outside would get us deported and the family arrested for hosting us. They nevertheless take that risk because they fear settler violence, and if and when it occurs, they want it documented by internationals who can tell the story.

This is the only house of the more than half dozen we stayed in where one really has to sleep in one's clothes, but since we arrive after dusk and depart at dawn, because of the aforementioned closed military zone, it’s not that bad, and one can arrive dressed in sleepwear. Its not that bad, that is, unless cat snuggles have left you with teeny tiny fluorescent red bugs on your skin. The result was 34 bites, all where clothes or skin touch skin most tightly. They emerge after 12-24 hours, and are at their itchiest 48 hours in, but stay itchy for about a week, and the marks seem to last about two weeks. The second time we stayed at this house, my last night in Palestine, I avoided the cat entirely, and still ended up with 6 new bites. We had been fed maqluba the first time we were there, a lovely dish of rice with roasted veggies and optional chicken, spiced with thyme and cinnamon. It was so filling that upon learning we would stay there a second time, we skipped lunch in anticipation of a big dinner that night. It was a school night, and the girls were doing homework when we arrived. School is only three mornings a week this year; last year it was cancelled entirely. Israel collects taxes on imports and exports to/from the West Bank, and is supposed to turn those over to the Palestinian Authority, but has not done so in full or regularly in the last two years. As a result, teachers haven’t been paid in full or regularly, and class time is reduced. The mom seemed more stressed than the last time we were there, and hit her ten year old repeatedly. When we were last there, the ceasefire had just been declared, and there seemed hope that the bombing of Gaza would stop. The second time we were there, Israel had just bombed a bus of 11 people, killing 7, and the ceasefire seemed beyond fragile. The family called a relative in Gaza, and it seemed like we wouldn’t be having supper at all. The relative did his best to reassure them that aid was trickling in, and people were returning to their homes, albeit destroyed homes. Somewhat assured, the mom went to make tea and soon after 9pm, we were called out to the patio for the quick supper of bread, olive oil, and za'atar, with tea and sage.

She was right to worry. The next morning, hours after we departed at sunrise, two Israeli soldiers in Gaza were operating a bulldozer to clear rubble from streets they had destroyed, and hit an unexploded ordinance that the Israeli military had dropped during the war. It exploded, killing them. Israel blamed Hamas, and instantly started dropping bombs all day, killing over 40 people. This may happen repeatedly, as there are 20,000 unexploded ordinances in Gaza. Just as I finish writing this, I see two Palestinian boys were injured by an explosion of another one of the 20,000 bombs, all of which could go off at any time.

In coming to the West Bank, many people feared for my safety. For many, there was some confusion that I was going to Gaza. US support of Israel has been so absolute that there’s confusion about what and where Palestine is. This is intentional. “There is no such thing as a Palestinian,” Golda Meir famously said, a sentiment echoed in Bezalel Smotrich‘s recent claim about the invention of the Palestinian people. The best way to grasp the situation is to understand it as one of settler colonialism, where an immigrant population displaces a native population in a quest for land and resources. Any resistance to that process is met with overwhelming violence. This has been the history of the US, which in recent decades is being re-enacted in the Middle East. We have become so relatively accustomed to the neocolonialism of multinational corporations across the globe that it’s genuinely shocking to see a mostly 19th century progression play out in the 21st century. The sentiments of US General Sherman in 1868 are found all over Israel towards Palestinians in the Gaza Strip: “The more Indians we can kill this year, the less will have to be killed the next war, for the more I see of these Indians, the more convinced I am that they all have to be killed or be maintained as a species of paupers.”

Currently, 157 of 193 UN countries recognize Palestine as a country. The Vatican, though not a UN country, does as well. The US does not, and this informs so much of what we’re presented on Palestine. The US may be the last country on earth to recognize Palestine, after Israel does.

The only moment of real fear I had the entire month was our second afternoon in Masafer Yatta. We had filmed that morning a teenage settler trespassing with his sheep onto the land of the family we were with, the sheep taking some bites of olive branches as they went by. In the afternoon, the same young man was back without the sheep but with two other settlers, one a bit younger and one a bit older. The older one had an M-16 around his neck, casually. We had seen plenty of armed settlers in the Old City of Jerusalem, but from the yard of a Palestinian family pushed toward removal, it hits different. They walked through the family’s land, but just outside their fenced in terraced backyard, and appeared to be on the move elsewhere. As the two younger ones were unarmed, I thought they may just be on their way to a cafe at a nearby settlement, taking the most direct route for ease and to project dominance, but not looking for violence. We nevertheless warned the village down below that they were on their way. The village took a collective, “Aw, hell no!” approach to the situation and immediately came pouring out of their homes, school, and places of work. We could hear their screams of indignation from about an 1/8th of a mile away. Young boys of about 7-8 immediately ran up the hill to get us, urging us to join them. The family told us to go, so we started down the rocky hill a ways, until I had a clear view of the situation and could start taking pictures. The boys urged me to keep running, but I indicated I needed pictures first. Zooming in, I saw a line of 30 villagers, mostly women and children, facing off the settlers who had the audacity to walk through their village. This was samud, the steadfastness I had heard so much about. I lingered a bit, tying my shoes, not wanting to run towards a man with a gun, and still fearing the possibility of a massacre. By the time I got there with my 7 year old companion, the settlers were moving on. I expected to see such things every day, or worse, and am glad to report that I did not. Overall, its much more peaceful than your own American city, even here on the edges of removal.

Having the comparison of 26 years ago, before 9/11, before the second intifada, before the apartheid wall, before the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, before the Arab Spring, before we all became addicted to our phones, made me question always, how much of this is the usual expansion of urban life, of Denver now stretching to Colorado Springs, of people moving off the land into the city, and how much is because of the occupation? I was in shock at the expansion of Jerusalem, the takeover of East Jerusalem, and absolutely devastated to see the wall, the way it cruelly cuts into Bethlehem and cuts out Olive groves of Palestinian families, annexing them in a waste of concrete. I wept to see the many hotels and souvenir shops that had annoyed me as a college student now shuttered. Absolutely no one was in the street. I was in a zombie apocalypse. I started shaking and crying and couldn’t keep walking. Then Tariq Zoughbi was beside me, whom I had last seen as a five year old, and was now a grown married man, looking exactly like his father, Zoughbi Zoughbi. His steadiness somehow allowed me to walk towards the Wi’am office, where a beautiful lunch awaited, along with baby Rafiqie, the youngest Zoughbi, who was now 26 and an engineer from Purdue. Zoughbi’s characteristic gentleness and humor has been inherited by both his sons. Their self-possession somehow lifted my spirits, and look in awe at how they are able to continue in the face of this devastation. Like the glaciers--if you're able, go to visit, while you still can.

Caves and Cranes: Development and Self-Determination

Just over a couple hills here in the southern West Bank and the landscape quickly turns to the desert. Nights get even colder and even clearer. As we slept on a rock facing the south we had to be told just how far we could see. Lights line the mountain tops almost looking like shelves of white Christmas lights. "No, that's Jordan, and in between one of the mountain gaps is the Dead Sea." Turn slightly to the right and you can see lights from a '48 town. Military bases and buildings dot the skyline. A view of borders, displacement, violence, and development. And a couple of houses from families trying to remain on their land.

When we went on the tour with ICAHD a few weeks ago they made a stark point that the construction crane was a symbol of Israel and its economic/development prowess. "The crane symbolizes and says, 'look what we can build, look how Western we can be, can the Palestinians do that?' No, but what they don't say is the laws, zonings, and regulations that the occupational forces use to prevent Palestinians from doing just that if they wanted to."

The more time we spend in the Southern hills it starts to feel like a struggle between caves and cranes. Between tents and internet towers. Between two different kinds of developments. One of self-determination, autonomous-cooperative communities, and listening to the land, and the other built on subjugation, apartheid, and imperialist development.

On drives around town we have begun to hear historical stories about how shepherds used to shepherd for three or so months sleeping in caves with their sheep before returning to a village center. Here a group of families or just one could take care of about 1,400 sheep (the cluster of villages totaled about 700 people to 18,000 sheep). These nomadic or quasi-nomadic communities did not utilize cities in the same way we do, and they did not also utilize borders and property lines in the same way America and Israel have enforced. For Bedouin and other nomadic communities they didn't utilize borders at all. In fact it was the Zionist, with agreement from the British mandate, that changed how land was bought and sold in historical Palestine. During the Ottoman rule if a landlord bought or sold land they were not necessarily able to evict the villagers living on that land. If you bought a village the villagers came with it. There was not a complete separation of the land and who cultivated it (taken from Illian Pappe). Until the Zionist insisted that that change and property laws became more exclusive and total. It is clear that in the South Hebron Hills there is a struggle over property lines and resistance against the settlement process of stealing land, and over time you begin to see that it is also a struggle over a way of life. Like most indigenous struggles throughout the world, what is being fought over is not simply land, but also an economic way of life, subsistence, and thus a method of development.

A family member predicted that this season of Olive Harvesting would be the worst ever on record. Not simply because of settler violence during times of harvest, but also because of the consistent refusal of Israeli soldiers to allow Palestinians to care for the trees before harvest.

Climate change and drought get added to the mix, and the trees need more care, but illegal settlers and the army stops the Palestinians for providing that care. He predicted only a five to ten percent yield from what harvests usually average. "Expect a $100 a bottle," someone else quipped. When you put together the battle over borders and land in the context of the battle over olive trees and sheep (one serving as food and the other gives back fertilizer) it reveals a battle over ways of life and a struggle over which economies people are forced to interact with.

Mohammed El-Kurd asks us to stare the Palestinian resistance fighter in the eye. He demands that we don't "de-fang" them by insisting they be "perfect victims." Meaning that they we insist they be fully cooperative, nonviolent, and timid. What does it look like to refuse to de-fang families and communities that insist on holding onto not only their land but also their way of life? And, thus also their economic being that, without violence, could offer alternatives of self sufficiency, autonomy, and cooperation with the land that settler colonialism needs to destroy?

The ICAHD tour made the point that the most important part of Israeli social development is utilities. Staring at settlements all day you can see this. Through their houses without water tanks on top (proof they have waterlines), through their radio/cell phone towers, through the non-indigenous trees, through the sidewalks, paved roads, and garbage pick up. The hoarding and exclusivity of utilities not only serves to make life more appealing to people that want subsidized lives, but also as a way to make life harder on Palestinians in a hope that they leave. Utilities can be viewed as the social dispersal of vital resources. Utilities then can be a weapon against ways of life and an insistence on living under different economic models. In the US water bills (and debt), energy bills (and debt), having to have a cell phone to work, public transportation (and lack thereof), and many others are used as tools to further displacement, gentrification, and imperialist development. Same is true here in Palestine and enforced with more militarized and gruesome ways. And thus, surviving and insisting on your own methods of social resource dispersal is not just an act of resistance, but a threat to the occupation.

This refection is based partly on thinking about the people we meet through the lens of Clyde Woods and his book Development Arrested, especially how he highlights the struggle against imperialist/capitalist enclosure and methods of development for people in the Mississippi Delta throughout all of history. It is also an attempt to reflect further on the question of, "Why?" That one word question bounces around your head so often when visiting families and cities in Palestine. "Why are people picking olive trees so threatening?" "Why would they attack shepherds?" "Why?" Because settler colonialism always needs complete and total economic control, and all alternatives must be squashed. It also must be perfect yet its process never ends. This perhaps is also where the "Why?" that gets asked in Palestine also echoes the "Why?" that gets asked about when bulldozers come to violently evict and clear encampments, when twelve agencies show up to raid an apartment building in the middle of the night, and when the United States federal government makes it legal to drill on the spiritual lands of Oak Flat. One part of the "Why?" is simply because the generous and gracious people that live and insist on staying here are a threat to the violent settler colonialist social order. I don't want to not understand them as such.

Roots of Resistance: Olive Harvest in the Shadow of Occupation

On Thursday, October 23rd, about 100 citizens of the Municipality of Sa'ir, a village about five miles northeast of Al-Khalil, marked the opening of the olive harvest season by attempting to harvest their olives in a location from which they have been blocked by the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) and settler violence since October 7, 2023. They were joined by at least 20 journalists and 6 international volunteers, who had responded to an urgent appeal from the Sa'ir Committee for Lands Threatened with Confiscation.

The call was for all farmers and landowners to participate widely on that day, to make the 2025 olive harvest season a "message of strength, unity, and cooperation." The Sa'ir Committee had extended a "special invitation to all local and international journalists" to attend and cover the event, which they hoped would convey the "true picture of the farmers' resilience and determination to remain on their land."

The invitation was written by Yusef, our host and one of the coordinators of the harvest. In September 2024, the house that Yusef had lovingly built with his own hands was stolen by illegal Israeli settlers, who kicked out Yusef and 16 of his family members. This expulsion was part of a broader campaign of forced removal. Since October 2023, Yusef shared, 43 families - 450 people - had been expelled from the Sa'ir area. From the street, we could see Yusef's house up on the hill, as well as several of the illegal Israeli settlers who had now commandeered it.

Immediately upon arriving to the groves closest to the illegal Israeli outpost, the harvesters were stopped by the Israeli army. At least seven soldiers, armed with live ammunition and two military vehicles, blocked the Palestinian harvesters, journalists, and international solidarity activists by showing them paperwork that now declared the Palestinian land a closed military zone. Other Palestinians slightly up the road from the Israeli army rushed to try and pick as many olives as possible, but only harvested one or two trees before getting evicted by the IOF.

At least 16 soldiers, some armed with rifles with tear gas attachments, and others with live ammunition, forcibly marched the group - at least 40 Palestinian harvesters, 20 journalists, and 6 international solidarity activists - down the road for a total of 40 minutes, stopping along the way to pull different harvesters out of their groves and prevent them from picking their olives. Members of the group, including at least one international solidarity activist, were shoved by Israeli soldiers, who shouted multiple times, "Your field trip is over. Move!"

During the forced march, two soldiers on a hill on the side of the road cocked their guns and aimed them toward the crowd, while illegal Israeli settlers observed the scene from the hillside.

 

Once the group was outside of the so-called "Closed Military Zone," between 16-20 soldiers and five military vehicles formed a blockade of the road for at least two hours, refusing to allow anybody to pass and return to their fields. Two small groups of Palestinians, likely the owners of the groves, did continue to harvest right near the soldiers, but nobody else was allowed to join them. Several illegal Israeli settlers came down from the top of the hill to attempt to harass the Palestinian harvesters.

After about two hours, most of the Palestinians left, unable to harvest their own olives. Other farmers climbed the steep hillsides to harvest in areas outside the so called "Closed Military Zone," but unfortunately the harvest was extremely scarce in those locations. Some Palestinians are predicting that, between the drought and the intense violence from the IOF and illegal settlers, the olive harvest this year will be only 5-20% of what it normally is.

Over and over, Yusef expressed the desire of the villagers to live in peace, to harvest their olives in peace, and to remain on their land. "We inherited this land from our ancestors. We are eating from the soil and we will remain here."

As the invitation from the Sa'ir Committee declared, "Let us all stand united behind the blessed olive tree, a symbol of peace and steadfastness, and make this a day that expresses our deep connection to the land and our identity. Together we protect our land."

Activism on the Edge

 "Hello, they beat this man and took him away for no reason. We don't know where they took him."

"It is the eighth day of the curfew and I am not allowed out of my house. They don't even allow us to get babies' milk, bread, or diapers."

"No one went to school. This is terrible for the kids."

"The soldiers are here at my house. They are taking my car."

These are just some of the messages we regularly receive from Arej (pronounced Areej) Abdel Karim Al-Jabari, a Palestinian mother of nine and social activist who lives in the Wadi Al-Hussein neighborhood of Hebron - the only Palestinian city with an illegal Israeli settlement in the middle of it. Arej lives on the border between of an Israeli-controlled territory and a Palestinian one. Often confined to her house by the frequent curfews imposed on her Palestinian neighborhood by the Israeli military, Arej has been committed since 2007 to assisting her neighbors through the documentation of the "crimes of the occupation," letting the world know of the horrific conditions under which Palestinians in Hebron are forced to live.

"What makes me photograph is the injustice that the people - the children and the women - are exposed to," she says.

Hebron is a sacred place to both Muslims and Jews, who believe it to be the burial place of Abraham and other important figures from Scripture. Due to its religious significance, Hebron has become a stronghold for the religious extremists within the illegal Israeli settler movement, who believe that the Jewish people have a divine right to control the West Bank, and who believe that a "Jewish return to Hebron is historical justice."

Arej has lived in her house since 1999, just two years after Israel and the PLO signed the Hebron Protocol, dividing her city - the second largest in the West Bank - into three distinct areas. Area H1 comprises 80% of the city and is under Palestinian civil and security control; Area H2, under Israeli military control, comprises 20% of the city and includes the entire Old City of Hebron, once the commercial center for the entire West Bank. 40,000 Palestinians still live in H2, and are subject to its exceptionally complicated fragmentation through the presence of military checkpoints, barbed wire, concrete barriers, surveillance cameras, military zones, and illegal Israeli settlements. Arej lives on the border between H1 and H2.

Still yet a third section of Hebron is referred to as the "restricted area," where 700 Israeli settlers live illegally inside the city. Here, Palestinian residents are forbidden from driving or even walking on certain roads. The presence of the Restricted Area, heavily guarded by numerous checkpoints, military watchtowers, and soldiers, makes movement in the entire city of Hebron extremely arduous for its residents. What was once a 5-minute walk from one side of the restricted area to the other now requires a 30-minute taxi ride around. As a result of such restrictions on movement and commerce, as well as extreme military repression and settler violence, thousands of Palestinian residents have lost their source of income and have either moved away from Hebron or are living in poverty.

Still, 40,000 Palestinians, as an act of nonviolent resistance to their own ethnic cleansing, remain in H2. Through their steadfast refusal to leave, these Palestinians have prevented the 700 Israeli settlers in the Old City illegally from taking over the entire area.

And yet, such a form of resistance takes a toll. Palestinians in the Old City are subject to daily marches of heavily armed soldiers; each week, dozens of soldiers clear the streets of Palestinians in order to make way for Jewish visitors from around the world to tour the city they believe will soon be entirely theirs. For the last two years, Areej has been confined to her house from Thursday night to Sunday morning by an Israeli military-imposed curfew. "This means," she says, "that residents are in their homes and it is forbidden to open the doors and windows."

Last week, due to the Jewish holiday of Sukkot, the Israeli military would not allow Areej or any of her neighbors to leave their houses for eight full days. "This is in addition," she adds, "to the assault on residents in their homes, searching them and beating them." Two weeks ago, they confiscated her car due to "security reasons." Such abuse, she tells us, has dramatically increased since October 2023.

Frequently, Areej photographs the military harassing and detaining Palestinian men outside of her home. "They detain them for no reason and torture them for eight hours," she tells us.

From her window, Areej documents this harassment with her camera and posts the videos on her Facebook and TikTok pages. While most of her followers are Palestinian, she also reaches people in the U.S. and elsewhere.

Arej feels strongly about keeping the hope of her community alive during a time when spirits could be so easily broken. For several years, she has run month-long knitting circles for women out of her house. "To relieve some of the pressure," she says. Especially for "mothers who see their children being tortured." Using yarn donated from various locations, Arej teaches the women to knit baby blankets, sweaters, scarves, and various other necessary items.

Arej also runs a summer camp for children, providing activities and food during a time when there is not much else for children to do. The children send gift packages down to other children in Masafer Yatta - the South Hebron Hills - who are actively being pushed off their land.

When asked what she wishes people in other countries knew about life under occupation, and how people abroad can support her work, she says, "I hope that the international community can stand by me and support the activities I do for women and children. I want friends to know how we suffer, to watch my documentation videos, see my work for children, and help complete my mission."

"There is an impossible dream for women," she adds, "which is to go and perform Umrah [an Islamic pilgrimage] in Saudia Arabia. They want to go pray, but the financial amount is large. I hope that those who care about them will help them achieve their only dream." She also hopes that another car will come her way so that she can cease being confined to her house and once again be a support to the rest of her neighborhood.

Arej says that she has become a target of soldiers because they know that she "films and exposes their crimes" and that they are "waiting to arrest me at any moment."

"But I am strong and they will not defeat me."

To follow Arej and her work, or to donate:

TikTok handle is @m12345677777777777777 (https://www.tiktok.com/@m12345677777777777777)

Instagram: @areejjabari6 (https://www.instagram.com/areejjabari6)

A Fraught and Beautiful Pilgrimage

 Since we have been on the ground, our team of four has been split in half, serving at two very different sites, experiencing different faces of the same genocide. Two have been in Masafer Yatta, the South Hebron Hills, staying with families who are under daily threat of expulsion, forced removal, and vicious attacks by illegal Israeli settlers. That team sleeps in tents, simple one room houses, or caves at night and keeps watch over the hills by day, looking out for possible attacks or theft of livestock.

The other two have been assigned to Al Khalil, the city of Hebron, where we have been asked to monitor checkpoints and be present during the weekly settler incursions into the city. This team has also been asked to participate in some of the ongoing month-long olive harvest, traveling to various locations around the West Bank where villages are organizing large group harvests in order to support families who are vulnerable to attacks (which is pretty much everybody now).

Wanting to reunite and reconnect with each other and see some of the sites of Palestine, our team recently took a two-day break together to Nazareth and Taybeh. Nazareth, while technically inside the nation-state of Israel (which many Palestinians refer to as '48 - the year that much of Palestine was stolen and taken over by settler colonialists) is still very much a Palestinian town. It's just that the Palestinians here - 20% Christian and 80% Muslim - also have Israeli citizenship. According to the Gospels, Nazareth is the place where the angel Gabriel asked Mary if she would be willing to be the mother of God. It is the place where Mary, herself living under the occupation of an outside colonizing force, said, "yes." 

To get to Nazareth and to visit the Sea of Galilee, our Palestinian friend recommended that we rent a car, which we did. Half of our team picked up the car in Jerusalem and drove to Ramallah to meet the other half - an enormous lesson in the occupation's tactic of restriction of movement. Though Ramallah is only 10 miles away from Jerusalem, it took our team 3 hours and many frustrated attempts at navigating roads closed by military checkpoints and other military roadblocks to get there. Neither google maps or the Israeli app "Waze" would navigate us inside the Palestinian civilian-controlled Areas A or B, and so we had to rely on calling Palestinian friends and getting various pieces of advice before finally driving through the massive and intimidating Qalandia checkpoint. The next morning, thinking we had solved the issue, we attempted to leave Ramallah (area A) and travel to the Israeli controlled territory toward Nazareth. Once again, it took us 2 hours just to leave the Palestinian city, encountering more road closures and checkpoints enforced by the Israeli military.

We were lucky. As internationals in a rental car, we had the yellow "Israeli-only" license plates, basically a free ticket to travel through checkpoints in a special, speedier lane. Palestinians with green and white license plates are under much more scrutiny when traveling into Jerusalem; and most Palestinians are not allowed into Jerusalem at all, though it is their capital and only mere miles away.

Once inside '48, we drove along modern highways lined with both Israeli and U.S. flags - the close relationship of these colonizing forces on display for all to see. We felt relief entering the more Palestinian town of Nazareth, exploring the Church of the Annunciation, and eating a lunch of falafel, hummus, bread, and veggies before putting our bags down at a quaint hostel inside the Old City. After a nap, we headed out to the Mount of Beatitudes where we drank wine and read aloud the Sermon on the Mount before traveling to the Sea of Galilee. There, we reveled in a gorgeous waterfall and sat on the rocks while noticing Palestinian men nearby fished from the same body of water where Jesus called his disciples.

 

The next day, Monday, was a joyous one for so many. With the signing of the peace deal, 20 living Israeli hostages were released from captivity in Gaza, and the bodies of those hostages who had been killed (most by Israeli fire) began to be released as well. In turn, 1700 Gazans who had been kidnapped by the Israeli military were also released and reunited with their families, as well as 250 Palestinian political prisoners. Sadly, 150 of those released were immediately deported to other countries and not allowed to reunite with their loved ones.

We traveled back into the West Bank to the Christian village of Taybeh (an Arabic word meaning good or delicious), to visit the only craft brewery in the Middle East. It was easier to get back into the West Bank this time, as we were driving through Area C. (Fully controlled by the Israeli military, Area C constitutes 60% of the West Bank and is likely to be annexed by Israel soon). Still, the Israeli app "Waze" would only direct us to the outskirts of the village, where we encountered a huge red sign warning us that entering a Palestinians village would be "Dangerous" to our lives (example pic here).

We got to spend a few hours at the brewery, sipping different types of delicious beer and enjoying the stunning view. We got a tour by the owner, Madees, and listened to the story about her Palestinian father who moved back from Boston to Taybeh after the Oslo Accords of 1994 to start a family business, believing peace was on its way. We learned that each year since 2005, Taybeh Brewery has hosted an Octoberfest Weekend with live music, food, beer, and fellowship.

For almost twenty years, Octoberfest in Taybeh was a huge event, attended by people from all around the West Bank and a boost to the local economy. Unfortunately, since the start of the war in Gaza two years ago, Octoberfest has been cancelled. "People don't feel like celebrating right now," said Madees. "Also, with security so tight, people have lost their jobs and don't have the money."

Though we had been planning to move on to Ramallah that night in order to be closer to the car rental return, we learned that there were extra road closures and settler attacks on the roads due to the prisoner release. And so after wandering around Taybeh, we decided to stay the night at a guesthouse and go to Monday evening mass, having missed it the morning before due to our delays.

Unfortunately, the road closures still had a huge impact on our evening. The owner of our guest house - unbeknownst to us - had been working in Ramallah that day and was stuck for 2 hours at a checkpoint, unable to return to Taybeh until 8 pm to get our rooms ready. Unsure of what to do after Mass, we were so grateful to be invited by two Palestinian women (neighbors, one of them a relative of our guest house owner) to their home for tea while we waited.

One of the women had lived in Australia for 35 years with her husband, but had recently moved home to Taybeh to retire. "See how they treat us here?" she asked. "Nobody in the whole world would stand to be treated this way." When I asked her whether she ever considered returning to Australia or to another country where one of her three children lived she immediately replied, "Never. This is my home."

We met Abu Jaber (name changed for safety), the husband of the other woman and the owner of the house where we had tea. Abu Jaber is originally from Gaza, and was watching on his TV news of the ceasefire and the joyous reunion of political prisoners with their families in Ramallah. Noting this, I asked him if he still had family in Gaza. "Yes," he replied. "Is your family OK?" I asked. "Nobody in Gaza is OK," he replied.

When the owner of our guesthouse finally arrived, he joined us for tea before taking us to his newly completed guest house where he brought us to our rooms for the night. We were the first guests! Since the start of the war, Abed's (name changed for safety) employment had decreased from full to part time. And so he spent his free time fixing up his grandfather's old house in the beautiful village of Taybeh. It was stunning and welcoming. He and his wife cooked us an incredible, traditional Palestinian meal of maqluba, using herbs from their garden. We awoke to a gorgeous spread of bread, hummus, yogurt, beans, cucumbers, olive oil, za'tar, coffee, and eggs from their hens - a delightful meal to send us on our way back to our placements for our remaining two weeks.

Nowhere on earth have I experienced such amazing hospitality or stayed in such beautiful hostels as in Palestine. And yet, their economy is struggling because nobody is visiting. Israelis tell the world that it is dangerous to enter a Palestinian town or village, though it is only dangerous because they make Israelis make it so.

If you ever feel so inclined, I highly recommend you to visit. My prayer is that Christians from around the world travel here in such droves that it becomes impossible for Israel to continue to lie about the reality of this oppressive occupation. My prayer is that Christians from around the world travel here so often that it becomes normal for us to together marvel at the beauty and the deep Christian history of this Palestinian place. My prayer is that Christians from around the world stand in solidarity with their Palestinian sisters and brothers and demand an immediate end to Israel's brutal ethnic cleansing of Palestine.