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.
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