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.

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.

 

Despite Ceasefire, Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine Rages On

Many of my friends at home are asking me how folks here in the West Bank are taking the news of the Gaza peace plan. Based on what we are observing here, our assessment is that those talks have absolutely no meaningful impact on the ongoing ethnic cleansing of the West Bank except, perhaps, supporting an acceleration of the violence. Illegal Israeli settlers and the military seem to be desperate to grab the land now, while they still have a chance. Every morning, we wake to learn of a new kidnapping or killing of Palestinian youth or home demolition that happened in the night, as well as regular invasions by the Israeli military not only of refugee camps and small villages, but also of cities under full Palestinian control. While the world's eyes are on Gaza, Israel is working rapidly to complete its annexation of the West Bank. It seems they will not stop until all of Palestine is theirs.

Yesterday, our team joined a large Palestinian family in a village north of Ramallah to help them harvest their olives. It had been several years since they had been able to harvest from some of these trees - the location is so close to the road that they are very vulnerable to attacks by illegal Israeli settlers. Such attacks have become increasingly vicious in the last several years. Gangs of young men in their teens and twenties armed with automatic rifles and metal pipes feel emboldened to beat up Palestinians and international observers alike, at times using live fire, knowing that they will not be prosecuted. Despite these risks, this Palestinian family felt that our team of five internationals could be enough of a protective presence to allow them to go out to their fields. Thankfully, there were no incidents, and we harvested from dozens of trees.

Tomorrow and the next day, we join more harvest events. Given the area and the day, we expect to be met with violence from the military and perhaps illegal settlers as well. Pray for us.

Due to the rain today, there were no active harvests for which protective presence was requested. Instead, we have been staying put in the city, doing laundry, writing, and catching up with an old Palestinian friend! We have been receiving regular updates and photos from Al Khalil, our first placement here and a place to which we hope to return.

In Al Khalil, both yesterday and today, the Israeli military forced Palestinians and internationals off the streets of the Old City, using concussion grenades and the threat of live fire to do so. They did this in part because it is currently a Jewish holiday - Sukkot, a week-long harvest festival. On Jewish holidays in Al Khalil, illegal Israeli settlers and other Jewish visitors take over the streets, and it is not safe for Palestinians to be in their own city. This year, the Palestinian Ministry of Education shut down school for the entire week - already open only three days due to financial constraints - in order to keep the children safe from soldiers and settler violence. Like snow days. But much, much worse.

Illegal Israeli settlers decided to celebrate the holy festival this year by taking over a Palestinian building in the old city and establishing it as a new illegal Israeli settlement. Above the shop of our Palestinian friend fly several Israeli flags. We are not allowed to take pictures of this new outpost because it is in front of a military base. If we are caught photographing military bases or one of the many, many checkpoints that encircle the city like prison walls, we will be immediately deported. It would seem that the Israeli military does not want the reality of what they are doing to be known to the world.

If the United States government refused to fund Israel's military occupation of Palestine, this ethnic cleansing would end tomorrow. This conflict is not a religious one or even a complicated one. It is settler colonialism - a nation-state choosing to destroy and replace the Indigenous culture of the land that already exists in order to extract resources for a capitalist, and in this case Zionist, society. For those of us with U.S. citizenship, we have the choice to refuse to fund this project. We can refuse to pay federal taxes that fund the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.