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.
