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.

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.

Olive Harvest: A Dangerous Resistance

"Why do you think the Israelis continue to destroy this beautiful land by building up so many monstrous checkpoints and dropping so many bombs?" I asked our Palestinian driver, a long-time nonviolent activist leading our caravan of over 60 internationals, Israelis, and Palestinians heading to the olive harvest. Despite a life-time of activism, this man has been more careful lately with his resistance after having recently spent an unimaginable six months in Israeli prisons, suffering untold abuse.

"They want to make us all leave," he responded. "They want to make it so unbearable for us here that we choose to leave, so they can take all the land for themselves."

 

We were on our way to Beita, a Palestinian village north of Ramallah, (read about Beita's amazing history of organized resistance here) to assist families in harvesting their olives. A joyful family event that takes place for about a month each fall, olive harvesting has become a major symbol of Palestinian resistance to the Israeli occupation. Every year, Palestinians risk arrest, injury, and even death by harvesting olives on their own land. Soldiers prevent Palestinians from harvesting by randomly declaring large tracts of land "closed military zones," arresting and disappearing anybody who enters their own fields. Illegal Israeli settlers viciously attack Palestinians and international observers, beating them with metal pipes and shooting at them with live fire.

The area's Popular Committee (the name given to the multiple Palestinian grassroots networks organizing the nonviolent resistance to the ethnic cleansing) had coordinated the international support for day. The hillside where we would be harvesting was full of hundreds of trees, and close by were several new illegal settler "outposts" - groups of trailer homes used by ideological Israelis to stake claim to land. Though the more than 225 settler outposts are illegal even by Israeli law (all Israeli settlements, even the 134 Israeli sanctioned ones, are illegal according to international law), continue to be defended and protected by the Israeli military.

Upon our arrival, we learned that three Palestinian villagers had already been beaten by illegal Israeli settlers and taken to the hospital. About seven soldiers brandishing automatic weapons - their fingers on the triggers - met us at the top of the mountain. Aggressively, they barked out their declaration that Palestinians were now "forbidden" to access certain tracts of land where they could harvest their own olives. Though we stayed where they told us to, the soldiers soon unleashed sound grenades and tear gas upon our group anyways as a form of intimidation, and stood watch as a menacing group of seven illegal settlers harassed our group. One journalist with our group was shot in the foot with a tear gas cannister, and needed medical attention.

Throughout the morning, as we warily harvested olives, several military and settler security vehicles continued to drive around us, demonstrating how the Israeli military is in collaboration with the movements of illegal Israeli settlers. More soldiers arrived to let us know of new areas of land that were now also "forbidden" to harvest from.

After a few hours, chaos broke out. On a hill across the way, illegal settlers firebombed a Palestinian vehicle - a new land rover - that was being used to cart olives down the mountain.

Large flames and plumes of smoke consumed the car as a group of about 30 masked illegal Israeli settlers carrying clubs and pistols began attacking Palestinian harvesters with stones. About half of our group moved toward the harvesters and the burning car to offer protective presence while the other half stayed back to stay with other harvesters, to film, and to take cover. As we watched more illegal Israeli settlers move along the ridge, we heard live fire and shouts of "Get down! Take cover!"

"Yalla! Let's go!" shouted our Palestinian organizers with urgency, as they ushered us down the steep, rocky hillside. We ran from the live ammunition for about 15 minutes, helping one another slide down breaks in the rock terraces, until Palestinian vans picked us up and brought us to our vehicles parked safely at the bottom.

Members of the Palestinian Popular Committee who had been interacting the most closely with the settlers brought us hot sandwiches that they had prepared for us in advance. We counted our numbers to make sure all were safe.

A total of twenty were injured, eleven Palestinians taken to the hospital. A Palestinian suffered a gunshot wound by an Israeli settler; and one solidarity activist was evacuated to a hospital after having been beaten with batons by Israeli settlers, breaking her arm. A total of eight cars were set on fire, and one ambulance was flipped over.

"This is what they have to experience every day," remarked one stunned international volunteer. Most of us were at a loss for words. Later that evening, we read the news dispatches of similarly violent olive harvest events around the West Bank. (See full list of injuries at Beita, as well as attacks from around the West Bank on that SAME DAY here.)

As we were driving to the next site where we would harvest the next day, I asked our driver if the day had gone as he had expected. "Yes," he replied soberly. "We expected the violence. But it was good to have so many of us. It gives the villagers courage to continue."

And continue they have. The very next day, the villagers of Beita returned to the hillside to harvest and show that they would not be intimidated.

Unfortunately, as it has happened in almost every harvesting location around the West Bank in the last couple of days, the military prevented the harvest from continuing.

Given such a violent start to the olive harvest season, it is looking like this year harvesting olives will be a dangerous form of resistance for Palestinians. Those who choose not to harvest because of fear of violence will lose their groves due to Israel's absentee property law.

Many people here believe that the ceasefire Israel was forced to sign in Gaza, while a relief for so many, will now cause the Israeli military and illegal settlers to focus their attacks on the West Bank, and speed up their plan of ethnic cleansing. It has already begun.

Rooted in History, Al-Khalil Under Attack

 Standing in the center of the shop in the Old City of Hebron, known as Al-Khalil to Palestinians, stands a 300-year old sesame press. Hisham, the shop owner, lights up when we ask him to talk about its history. Hisham shows us a photo from when the press was in use and operated by camels, and points out the various parts of the building that were used to process the sesame seed into various products - from oil to tahini to something like halwa, the sweet dessert so well-loved in the area. Before the sesame press was in the building, however, possibly even as long as 800 years ago under the Ottoman Empire, olive oil was made there. Standing there in the presence of such history, I feel the immensity of what it means to try and keep this history - these stories in place - alive.

After studying in England and working as a dental engineer, Hisham came home in 2014, when the Hebron Rehabilitation Committee offered to restore the old stone building to once again be a destination for tourism and culture. "If the HRC was going to restore this shop, my father wanted to make sure one of his sons was here to run it. I was the obvious choice."

Hisham shows us a display of gorgeous blown and painted glass for sale.

Back in the 1980s, he tells us, they would take the glass blown in Hebron and drive it to their friends, relatives, and colleagues in Gaza to be painted. "It would take just under an hour," he says. Since the increasing enclosures of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, however, that routine changed drastically in the last 25 years. "We had to take the blown glass to the border of the West Bank in one car, then go through a checkpoint with all of our materials and transfer them into another car in order to drive through Israel. Then we'd do the same when we got to Gaza." Since October 2023, however, all of that movement and exchange of craftsmanship has stopped. The blown and painted glass for sale in the shop is all old, and people in the West Bank and Gaza Strip remain trapped in place by the cruel Zionist project of colonization and military occupation.

Although Hisham continues to open his shop every morning and greet people all day with an "Ahlan wa Sahlan - Welcome!" he struggles to make a living. Like most of the stores in the once bustling Old City, there are more and more days that Hisham's shop remains completely empty, and isn't even visited by one single customer. Hisham, as well as all of those who stay to run their shops do so not only as an act of resistance to their own ethnic cleansing but also out of a deep love for their homeland.

Hisham is just one of the shop keepers we have been asked to visit on Saturday evenings, during the weekly invasion of illegal Israeli settlers and international Jewish visitors - many from the U.S. - who have come to tour the old city. For the last fifteen or so years, starting at around 4 or 5 pm, dozens of heavily armed Israeli soldiers and their APCs (armored personnel carriers) clear the streets of Palestinians and international journalists. Between one and three soldiers armed with live ammunition for every Jewish tourist force Palestinians to close their shops or wait out the scenes of violence.

During one such terrifying invasion, our own team witnessed a soldier harassing an old man and his 2-year-old grandson. The soldier forced the 2-year-old from his tricycle and then drop-kicked the bike across the street. The grandfather asked us to send him the video we took of the abuse, hoping a complaint could be made somewhere. Sadly, the complaint will almost definitely go nowhere - another shopkeeper we have befriended showed us the damage done to his son's car from one of the APCs, but when he has complained in the past, he was told by the illegal settlers, "If you complain, next time I will do the same damage to your face."

Every morning here, we wake to learn of the many nightly bombings and invasions that have taken place by the Israeli military in Palestinian neighborhoods, towns, refugee camps, and villages across the West Bank, some of them nearby. Such violence and destruction continues to force people into poverty. Children continue to beg us for money, and shopkeepers are desperate to have us into their empty shops to purchase their wears.

It is clear that the Israeli military, led by its government, is determined to continue their practices of utter brutality until they gain complete control over all of the land here, and that they are willing to use consistent violence and dehumanizing tactics to get what they want. It is hard to sustain hope that a just peace will ever be possible.

Hope and Resistance

 At the conclusion of our morning tour with ICAHD, (formerly known as the Israeli Committee Against House Demolition and now an international coalition resisting Israeli apartheid), our tour guide Chaska- a local Israeli activist who has been working for decades to end Israel's illegal occupation of Palestine - painted a bleak picture of the future of the Holy Land. "We are nearing the end," she said. "This situation has to end at some point. And the way things are going, it is looking like Israel will succeed in not only in the total colonization of historic Palestine, but also in the normalization of that colonization. It will be much like the way the United States colonized Indigenous nations on Turtle Island, pushing the Indigenous people onto smaller and smaller island reservations, and making that completely normal." (We hope to give a fuller description of this informative experience in a future blog).

Our guide's prediction, which felt like a punch in the gut to me, is not unfounded. It is grounded in her decades of experience watching her government encroach deeper and deeper into the West Bank, stealing more land for the construction of bigger settlements (some with populations as large as 50,000) that are connected to one another through a network of roads and closures that make it impossible for Palestinian towns to remain contiguous with one another, systematically demolishing more and more Palestinian homes, and making life so difficult for Palestinians in the West Bank and Jerusalem that it becomes increasingly desirable for them to move out of their historic homeland and become a part of the diaspora.

Later that day, as we rode the bus to Bethlehem to visit a few friends and elders in the Palestinian nonviolent resistance movement, I shared with my team how hard it had been for me to hear this. Listening to, and seeing with my own eyes, all the facts on the ground, it seems quite possible that such a dystopian future might actually come to pass. I wondered aloud whether our hosts in Bethlehem, who had been bearing the brunt of this reality for a long time, would agree that they had no future in their own homeland.

The bus dropped us off at the Bethlehem checkpoint - a mechanized opening through the monstrous, 30-foot high wall that snakes in and around the entire West Bank. It was quite easy to get through, as we discovered, as the Israeli army encourages Palestinians to leave Jerusalem. (It is much harder to return.)

As it had been over 16 years since I had last passed through this way, I was somewhat stunned to be confronted once again with the overwhelming force of this wall that enforces and concretizes apartheid rule. The experience of walking in the shadow of this imposing symbol of oppression overwhelmed us all; one of our team members who had lived and studied in Bethlehem 25 years ago broke down and wept with grief and anger as she witnessed the destruction of this place so beloved to her.

We then visited Wi'am, the Palestinian Conflict Transformation Center. Zoughbi Zoughbi (a Notre Dame graduate!) and several of his family members hosted us for an incredible lunch. Over chicken, falafel, hummus, bread, tomatoes, olive oil, and za'tar, we learned of their own mixed family's experience of the occupation. Since 2019, Israel has refused to allow Zoughbi's wife, an American citizen, to return to the West Bank to live with her family, despite having lived there most of her life. His two sons, one an engineer with a Masters degree from the U.S., have returned to Bethlehem to work as volunteers, with next to no pay, in solidarity with their father, because they believe not only in nonviolent resistance, but also in the importance of standing against the ethnic cleansing of their people, and remaining rooted in their homeland.

Speaking of the increasing enclosure of their beloved city, they pointed out their vulnerability. "We are like sitting ducks," they said. "The soldiers have threatened that if we do not fall in line, we will be the next Gaza."

The Zougbhi family witnessed to us what hope and resistance look like in the face of indescribable oppression. Despite the attacks on their marriage, their employment, and their physical well being (all direct attempts by the Israeli government to make life untenable in Palestine), they have chosen to stay rooted in their family, the community they love, and the land to which they belong - all while offering incredible hospitality to those of us who traveled to stand with them.

Part of the Zoughbi family's resistance includes a contagious sense of humor. Lookout over the domineering wall just a few hundred feet from their home Zoughbi Zoughbi pointed out a growing Walnut Tree. "We hope the roots of this Walnut tree grow so large," he said with a smile, "that it will break the 'wall' into nuts."

After saying goodbye to the Zoughbis, we walked to the Palestine Museum of Natural History, a stunning new project being built by Dr. Mazin Qumsiyeh (a biologist and geneticist who was recently nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize) and his wife. As one of his many acts of resistance to what he calls the "monoculture" of Zionism and the Israeli nation state, Dr. Qumsiyeh insists on studying, collecting, nourishing, and displaying the vast and beautiful biodiversity of Palestine - so that visitors and Palestinians alike can continue to fall in love with both its people and its ecology.

Dr. Qumsiyeh shared a story of one of his first acts of nonviolent resistance: in 1988, when the Israeli military banned Palestinians in the city of Beit Sahour from owning milking cows, he organized a dairy collective of people who literally hid a herd of 18 cows, which were deemed a "threat to Israeli security. "Later, when Palestinians in Bethlehem refused to pay taxes for their own occupation, the Israeli military surrounded the Church of the Nativity in a siege that lasted 49 days. Dr. Qumsiyeh and others recruited and organized internationals to stand with them and break the siege through nonviolent resistance, forming what is now known as the International Solidarity Movement or ISM.

Today, Dr. Qumsiyeh uses that same creative energy to organize volunteers at the museum to plant olive trees, cultivate herbs and vegetables, care for injured owls and other wildlife, experiment with hydroponics, and tend the land with care and determination.

Looking at the newly planted trees and other creatures on the land it is clear that those who are bringing this project to life envision for Palestine a future of beauty, flourishing, and meaningful life.

The struggle is not over yet.

Serving in the Garden

One of the most dangerous places we serve in Masafer Yatta, our location in the West Bank, is what is called the Garden. It is not a garden in the typical sense but rather a massive platform of stone, rock walls, shrubs, struggling olive plants, cacti and dirt. 

The view, however, is incredible. One can see a panorama of sloped grazing farm land, the local village and an illegal Israeli settlement. The family who owns the garden has worked the land for decades and holds a 100 year-old deed for it. Twice a day, he takes his goats and sheep out to graze, 6:30 to 10 AM and 4:30 to 7 PM. Two of us accompany him because he is harassed daily by Israeli settlers, soldiers, military or some combination thereof.

The point of the harassment is to push him off his land. It would be easy to give up after decades of persecution but this man and his family do not. They are practitioners of “samud,” steadfastness. Generations before them have resisted, therefore, they resist, always nonviolently. 

The farmer keeps going out into the garden to feed the sheep and goats, knowingly facing harassment. Each day before we serve in the garden, the farmer treats us to cups of warm sweet tea and perhaps a treat. Then we follow the animals and him to the garden, maintaining a short distance. 

We are to be the buffer between the harassers and the farmer. At some point, settlers, police or military approach us and ask for passports. They photograph them or take them even though that is forbidden by the United States government. They research our backgrounds to see if we are Palestinian sympathizers or members of organizations Israel considers terrorist. The irony of a nonviolent peace organization ever being considered a terrorist organization is not lost on me.

The conclusion of these interactions can result in a wide-range of possibilities from simple harassment to deportation. I had been enjoying the landscape and photographing the view when a settler told border patrol I was filming the illegal guard post on the farmer’s land. Border patrol took my phone, looked through the photos and discovered I had only shot panoramas and photos of my friend. They returned my phone and my passport and warned me not to photograph the empty guard post because it is classified.

Despite these disturbing interactions, we have the satisfaction of protecting the farmer who is able to do his job. In addition, we can look over the landscape, and enjoy the natural beauty of the West Bank and build relationships.

Why do Palestinians resist and persist under such stressful circumstances? Faith, history, love of land and samud. I see it in the farmer’s body as he contentedly crouches on a rock, sipping a coffee, smoking a cigarette, watching his sheep and goats graze.

This is his legacy.