October 26th–October 31st, 2018: Ben Berman, a Buffoon in Black Boots with a Big Backpack, Begins on a Bus

I was ready as I’d ever be. I had my new fancy backpack (about 30 pounds stuffed), new boots, and had taken a set of typhoid immunization pills over the course of the past week. My dear dad dropped me off at the bus stop at the bottom of the hill on Franklin Turnpike around 3:50 PM. To be honest, I felt pretty silly waiting there, with my tall overstuffed backpack, big boots, cowboy hat hanging off my shoulder. I thought I looked kinda like a buffoon. I had imagined my departure to feel more epic, but after all this build-up, months planning for all this travel, here I was just standing at another bus stop like any other. I suppose it was just the new experience of it all–I just haven’t traveled this intensely before. My dad chuckled when he realized my sweater was really the only extra layer I’d have in for November & December in the Holy Land. We’ll see.

The bus arrived, I stumbled on with all my stuff, and we took off for Port Authority. It was a fairly uneventful ride, with some of the usual traffic around the bridge. At Port Authority I weaved my way between the indifferent crowds, descended underground and found my way to a metro line that took me up towards the Bronx, where I would crash with childhood middle school & Jewschool friend Andrew Shapiro (“Shaps,” as he’s known to the Mahwah crowd). The main entertainment in the subway during my visit is a rat casually meandering on the edge of the platform, its bald tail dragging along behind it like a sad little string of licorice. A bunch of people (myself included, of course) whip out our phones to document the event. A couple folks scream and back away, most people are unfazed and don’t give a rat’s ass (sorry, couldn’t resist it). Ah, how defenseless we are without our traps. The little goomba lazily steps away from the edge as the train pulls in. Subway rats give even less of a damn than pigeons do.

I almost forget to get onto the train, I’m too busy still observing the wildlife. I squeeze myself onboard, and apologize to the people around me when my giant backpack gets in their face. Again, most don’t really mind; it’s the subway. I realize this and relax, already starting to feel more comfortable in my boots & backpack than I did a couple hours before. I get off at my stop and walk about a half hour to Shaps’ place. Shaps is out when I arrive, but he had told the doorman to let me in ahead of time. He set up an air mattress for me, bless him. I sit down and take out the turkey sandwich* my dear mom packed me and start writing about the exciting past few hours, though it’ll be a few weeks before I finally tap it out online here in my phone after coming to terms with the fact that I won’t get access to a keyboard anytime soon. Shaps gets back some time after I fall asleep.

*Oh yeah, I broke my seven-year pescetarianism in September in preparation for the adventure. Figured it’d just make things easier while traveling, will probably go back to some form of vegetarian after.

The Big Apple to the belly of the beast: Saturday 10/27, NYC & Washington, DC.

We wake up at 6:30 and we start chatting and joking as if we had last seen each other yesterday (it hadn’t been since March). Eleven people in Pittsburgh also wake up at varying times, not knowing it will be the last time they do so. We make our way to the Eastern bus station, where we leave at 8:30 and get in a little past 1 after traffic. We catch up more in-depth on politics and our personal lives. During the several hours of our ride many great and terrible things happen to people around the world, but mid-morning in Pittsburgh, a white supremacist who doesn’t deserve to be named kills eleven Jews in a synagogue during Shabbat morning services. The day after, the Chief Rabbi of Israel doesn’t refer to the congregation as a synagogue in his statement, instead calling it a “Jewish center,” because they are not Orthodox.

Upon arriving, Shaps and I take a Lyft (a slightly less unethical company than Uber, we tell ourselves) to the office of Eyewitness Palestine, the organization we’re going in our delegation with. Our driver’s put in the effort and decorated her car for Halloweekend. There are a little over twenty of us at the orientation for our delegation. Most of us have spoken to each other a bit online in a few video calls since September. What’s most striking about the group is the age range–some of us are finishing up college, while others are lifelong activists of all sorts in their 60s and 70s. Many of them, it becomes clear as we all start getting to know each other, have been on human rights delegations and trips to other countries and places in the US over the years, places like Colombia, Chiapas in Mexico, Standing Rock, South Africa, Appalachia, central Asia. My fellow travelers most certainly do not believe that Israel is the only state in the world that cares about human rights as much as a New York City rat cares about, well, anything. And the program leaders of Eyewitness Palestine make sure to emphasize this as well, that the persecution of Palestinians is of course not exceptional, not the only injustice in the world.

Eyewitness Palestine was originally Interfaith Peace Builders, a branch of the century-old international Fellowship of Reconciliation, a Christian nonviolence organization. It grew large enough to become its own nonprofit about ten years ago. You can find more information about it online, but the last point I’ll highlight is that EP makes sure to design its trips to not just be passive “conflict tourism,” of the kind that I warned against in this journal’s intro. Our delegation is intentionally in solidarity with the Palestinian people as a whole (not any one particular political faction), and we go with an express mission to tell people back in the US what we see and to advocate in solidarity with them from within the US (the largest giver of military aid to Israel, almost $4 billion a year now). Orientation gets underway. I won’t go too deep into the details, as the orientation is a private process only for delegates traveling with EP. Most of it is getting to know each others’ backgrounds, and examining ourselves in preparation for the responsibilities of the trip. We go into some background on the state of Israel & Palestinians to make sure we’re all on the same page, and come up with some guiding principles for our group as we travel before closing with dinner.

Shaps heads off to meet a college friend while I head to a bar to meet my older cousin Ethan, his girlfriend Ronit (now fiancee as I edit this, mazel tov guys), and my second cousin Nick for game 4 of the World Series. We bond with some other bar patrons over mutual wonder at Craig Kimbrel’s pitching stance (#weirdflexbutokay). Shaps meets me back at Ethan’s place later after exploring the wild nightlife of the District of Columbia. Ethan’s lucked out–he’s got an expansive view from his side of the building, including the Washington Monument (or the Bill Clinton Monument, as I call it).

Also, I also noticed a few minutes ago that I’m not consistently writing in the past or present tense, oh well.

Istanbul (not Constantinople): Sunday 10/28, DC. and Monday 10/29, Istanbul & Tel-Aviv

Shaps & I raid Ethan’s freezer for bagels the next morning before thanking him and Ron it as we head back to the EP office for the rest of the orientation. We go over our upcoming itinerary in more detail, and go over the basics of getting through Israeli security. Most of this I will also not go into detail on, but we do pledge to not loudly talk about freeing Palestine on the plane, as there will definitely be undercover Israeli security agents on the plane into Tel Aviv. Some of us are not sure we’ll be allowed in due to public affiliation with BDS, especially with Israel’s recent crackdowns, but we remain hopeful. The vast majority of past EP delegates have made it in, even if some did face extra questioning.

Our group busses to Dulles Airport after a quick dinner, and heads to the gate for our Turkish Airlines flight at 11 PM. Onscreen before takeoff, the main characters from the Lego Movie, including Lego Batman, sing and dance in Turkish the usual script about airplane etiquette and safety “It’s a party in the sky with Turkish Airlines.” I’m ready to start sleeping before getting jetlagged by 7 hours, but they start serving dinner right as soon as we’re in the air, so I kick back and watch some Better Call Saul with Turkish subtitles while having my second dinner, like a hobbit. After sleeping, I later culture myself with some Turkish rap and classical music, the latter of which is characterized by pieces with nationalistic titles like “1453,” “The Fall of Constantinople,” etc. They also have a full copy of the Quran available on the screens. We land in Istanbul close to sunset. The many minarets and domes come into view as we descended, and many large star & crescent flags hang from buildings. We have an hour to connect with a quick flight to Tel Aviv. From my flying so far, I’ve seen that each city does have its identifying landmarks and geography, but from a plane high above at night, all cities look the same, just a cluster of lights, like fields of glittering fruit.

Security at the Tel Aviv airport isn’t that tight (granted most of us are white and/or don’t look like Arabs or have Arabic names, the most likely way you’ll face extra questioning). Most of us don’t even get asked any basic questions at all, in fact, no “what are your plans for your visit,” no “how long are you staying for.” The guy who checks my passport is on a call over Bluetooth with a friend or relative and just nods me through without a second look. I remember as a kid airport security interviewing my parents and I (ostensibly white American Jews) in detail, asking me the name of our temple and rabbi. We meet our Palestinian guide for the next week-and-a-half, Said (that’s sy-EED) on our bus that takes us on an hour rude to the Holy Land Hotel in East Jerusalem, right near the ancient walls of the Old City (remember folks, this is an area of land just about the size of Maryland). At the hotel, I shave off the last of my goatee & stash, beginning my planned year-and-a-half of growing it all out (with some needed trimming here and there, of course). Shaps & I also mind to throw any toilet paper in the bin, not the toilets–while the bathrooms are in pretty good condition, our trip leaders told us that many pipes are still from Ottoman times and get clogged by toilet paper. We’re in Palestine.

Also, it seems like I’ve settled on mostly using the present tense.

An undivided divided city: Tuesday 10/30, Jerusalem/al-Quds

Alright, no more paragraphs on subway rats and Turkish Lego Batman and toilet paper–now I’m getting into the actual meat and potatoes of travelling. I will try to keep things light-hearted and uplifting most of the time especially with exploring Palestine and its people, but again, the next few entries will get pretty depressing at times. Sorry, it’s not my call that the state of Israel is enacting a widespread military occupation of every aspect of Palestinian life. There will be a lot of info thrown in these entries due to the nature of the trip. I will do my best to relay it well by the principles I laid out in the intro, though I will still miss much and not do all of it justice; I still have to try.

Jerusalem is another one of those cities that so much has already been said about. What I will quickly remind us all though is that this city is REALLY old, folks. The first construction in the area is dated to around 4000 BCE, some six thousand years ago, by Canaanite peoples even before the ancient Israelites. Over the course of its history, Jerusalem has been attacked some 52 times, captured & recaptured 44 times, and besieged 23 times. We start off Tuesday morning with a tour of the Old City from Said, who is very well-learned on the history both ancient and modern. On our way to Herod’s Gate we pass our first Israeli settlement in the eastern city, perched on top of a police station, with lines of Israeli flags strung up. Upon passing through Herod’s Gate, we are met by another on a fenced hill on the other side of the street from some Palestinian food markets. We can see the Israeli guards and a playground behind the bars.

As we walk through the narrow passages of the city, we are passed by many youths racing up and down the old stone ramps on bikes and motorcycles. Several full-sized trucks and cars also occasionally squeeze their way through the maze of the city, and we fling ourselves against the walls to let them pass. Arabic graffiti covers much of the walls, along with uniform stenciled paintings of the Dome of the Rock and the Kaaba. And of course, there are the stray cats sauntering all around the alleys. All the tightly-packed hole-in-the-wall shops are charming, staffed by their eager merchants, especially the food markets, but much of it is extremely touristy, which makes sense; this is one of the holiest cities on Earth we’re talking about. Many shops capitalize on tourists and pilgrims of all stripes–they sell religious items related to all three main religions, and IDF t-shirts are displayed next to Free Palestine ones.

Several throngs of chanting Christian pilgrims from all around the world pass us as they follow the Via Dolorosa, the (alleged) path of Jesus toward his crucifixion, ending at The Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which is packed; our group doesn’t even attempt to get inside. The Via Dolorosa has changed a few times over the centuries, especially with the many crusaders in the Middle Ages. Said tells us how over a dozen Christian sects are represented in the city; there’s even a Mormon school. We also pass a very rare Armenian Catholic institute (Armenians usually follow their own church) that’s now in the Muslim quarter, after the non-Catholic Armenians didn’t want the traitorous Catholic Armenians to be near them. We pass by more settled buildings with their Israeli flags. We also see some old run-down structures being renovated by workers from the Islamic Waqf (a sort of semi-public religious property fund, kinda hard to describe) so that Israeli settlement groups won’t buy them up at low values.

Right after lunch, we get on our bus with Fayrouz, a guide from the organization Grassroots Jerusalem (for all people we meet, I will only be giving their first names, unless they are already a more high-profile figure in Palestine & Israel). She takes us on a long tour around East Jerusalem for the rest of the afternoon. The roads of the city wind through the hills like a tangle of squiggles drawn by a child. My parents have told me that I vomited from car sickness in the city one summer when I was a little kid, though I don’t remember. As we begin today, we pass Arnona, part of which is on land occupied in 1967 and is literally in front of the UN Headquarters, a symbolic middle-finger to the entire international community. The new US embassy (previously in Tel Aviv but moved upon Trump recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel) is also in Arnona, making it a double middle-finger. Many of the settlements seek to be on higher ground in the city, while Palestinians are in lower areas like the Silwan neighborhood we descend into. You can tell which areas are Palestinian by the large black containers on the roofs–those are used to collect rainwater, as the Palestinians have limited access to water even within cities. Recently, the Israeli government put 22 Palestinian homes in Silwan under demolition order to build a new park. Trash completely overflows the dumpsters, spilling into the streets–while many Palestinian residents work as garbage collectors for the rest of the city, such services too do not benefit Palestinian areas like Silwan as much. Many Palestinian buildings, in Jerusalem as well as throughout the West Bank Area C and inside “Israel proper,” are built without permits, as the Israeli authorities rarely approve Palestinian applications for them. Fairouz tells us that in Jerusalem, 94% have been rejected in the past six years. This then gives Israel the chance to claim that subsequent building demolitions are legal under this system, or when Palestinian property gets declared “state land.” We see in Silwan that the Palestinians are barely even able to make their own parking lots, having to improvise in cleared dirt areas. And when their structures are demolished, the Israeli authorities also fine them to pay for their own demolition.

We also make our first stop of the trip at The Wall. I first remember seeing it in 2010 in the distance from a hill overlooking Jerusalem. Our tour guide then just gave it passing mention, casually saying that it was “controversial.” Today, we stop at a point where it cuts off an old road to Jericho. Fairouz tells us that here as well as all over the West Bank, the Wall cut off Palestinians from much of their land; it lies not even on the border of the Green Line, but within the West Bank, cutting off almost 10% of what’s technically supposed to be part of the West Bank. Much of the Palestinian economy has suffered as a result, as they lose agricultural land and can’t sell their goods to markets on the other side. The Israeli state claims that the Wall reduced Palestinian suicide attacks during the Second Intifada in the early 2000s, but it clearly has helped Israel grab more land, and Fayrouz points out that as said suicide attacks decreased, there were (and still in fact are) many gaps in which Palestinians could still cross the border. I will be writing more on the Wall at other points on the trip, but indeed since then we have seen several parts of the Wall in the West Bank where it is not that high, or even just a line of fences and not concrete, and plenty of Palestinians climb it every day to work in Israel, where more jobs are available.

We stop at one overlook of the city, where you can really see that there is no clear divide of East and West –it is just a political and administrative division, a legacy of the 1948 fighting between Israel and Jordan. Fayrouz goes into detail on the cruel bureaucratic nightmare that is the residency laws system for Palestinians in East Jerusalem. She says “residency” and not “citizenship” because Palestinians of East Jerusalem and the rest of the post-1967 occupied territories are of course not allowed Israeli citizenship, even though they are under the Israeli government’s control and Israeli citizens live all around them in the city. The Israeli government requires that Palestinians constantly prove that their “center of life” is in East Jerusalem: their housing, their utilities, their work, their education. Israeli police have been known to randomly burst in to Palestinians’ homes in the middle of the night to check if there is fresh food in the kitchen, that clothes look worn and beds used, to prove that its residents are in fact consistently living there. Under all these arbitrary regulations, 15,000 Palestinians have thus had their Jerusalem residency status revoked since 1967. The Palestinian Authority (PA) also helps enforce this system.

We finish at one more overlook where we can see parts of the Ma’ale Adumim settlement bloc extending east towards Jericho. In the valley, we can see some of the land of Khan al-Ahmar, populated by a couple hundred Jahalin Bedouins. Many of the Jahalin used to live in the Arad area of the Negev/Naqab desert before the Israelis evicted them in 1952 (yes, that’s over three years after the end of the first war). Since 1967, they have seen much of their grazing lands restricted by the occupation. Not giving them a break, Israel recently put out a demolition order for Khan al-Ahmar for not having permits, which was further given the go-ahead by the Israeli High Court. The final annexation of this land into the Ma’ale Adumim bloc would fully cut the West Bank in two for Palestinians. However the government just postponed the order in October, after significant publicity and international outcry (including Israeli activists camping in the village in solidarity), showing that the state does back off when there is enough pressure. Fayrouz concludes by telling us more about Grassroots Jerusalem’s work. She gives us some background on how international NGOs often don’t listen to the people on the ground they want to help, and that aid from any other government often comes with the requirement that donated funds must be used on that country’s companies. So Grassroots Jerusalem has gone for a more independent route, from pure crowdfunding, to creating and selling politically conscious tourist resources for Jerusalem, and giving tours like ours. The organization’s other projects include a legal clinic for Palestinians trying to navigate the Israeli laws and policies for the city and education initiatives for children. After saying farewell to Fayrouz, our group returns to the hotel for dinner and our first evening debriefing together.

For the some dozen activist groups the delegation meets with, I’ll be providing links where you can donate to them online. If you are able, it is a small way to support these steadfast people working every day to at least slow the colonial regime tightening around them. Please also feel free to share these organizations with friends and allies who you know would be interested in donating. Here is the link for Grassroots al-Quds: https://www.grassrootsalquds.net/grassroots-jerusalem/supporters

Behind the wall: Wednesday 10/31, Bethlehem, Nahalin, and Battir

We get in our bus the next morning and drive past the Wall through the main checkpoint into Bethlehem. Because we are a tour bus with yellow Israeli license plates, we are able to pass through easily. It is a pretty big moment for those of us who have never been in the West Bank, but I realize more than ever that the land doesn’t change from one side of the Wall to the other; it is all the same, as it always has been. In just our first day, I begin to notice that the winding roads of Jerusalem are child’s play next to the roads in the sharp hills of the West Bank. But our bus driver Adnan navigates them with a cool ease, only showing frustration whenever we’re stuck in traffic in the cities throughout the trip, honking his horn with abandon and grumbling in Arabic at other drivers.

We drive to the Dar Jacir area in the north of the city, to the building of the Palestinian Heirloom Seed Library. The folks who work with the library seek to preserve traditional Palestinian crops and promote Palestinian self-reliance through agriculture. Mohamed, who is speaking to us on behalf of the organization, shows us some of the seeds of plants that the Library works with. They work with local farmers and teach youth about agriculture. Mohamed tells us that their philosophy is to be independently “acting, not reacting to the occupation.” Even so, they cannot escape the fact that they are farming under tough circumstances. As water gets harder to come by, especially due to Israeli diversion of aquifers to the settlements and the Negev desert, they must “water-train” some plants to grow with slightly less water each season. The street near the main checkpoint is one of the most consistently teargassed spots in Palestine, with protests against the IDF often breaking out every Friday; another member of the Library shows us a crate full of tear gas canisters that have landed in their gardens. Several of them have “Made in USA” printed in them; the ones I held hailed from Jamestown, Pennsylvania. I guess a lot of manufacturing has gone overseas, but at least we can say we still make tear gas canisters. Mohamed tells us that the Library has recently been looking into how certain fungi can take toxins like those from tear gas out of the soil.

We then ride south to the Tent of Nations farm, of the Nassar family, where I will be volunteering for a month after the delegation. It is near the village of Nahalin, and the mountains and valleys around it must be truly beautiful to wake up to every morning and see the sunset, though several settlements now sit on the surrounding hilltops. One of them, Neve Daniel, is extremely close, and we pass its new yeshiva (Jewish Orthodox school) on our way in. Efrat, where my aunt Adele lives, is just over that hill. There is a roadblock that’s been put up by the Israelis on the road between the farm and the highway; the only road going into the farm is from the other direction, from Nahalin. We get out of the bus and climb over the rocks, concrete, and soil to get to the farm. One of the delegates who’s been in the West Bank before remarks that such roadblocks can be found everywhere, and that she and some Palestinians removed one several years ago, but the Israelis put up another just days later. We are greeted at the gate by a few dogs and a volunteer from the US, Steven of Pittsburgh. We talk politics briefly. Steven’s Indian-American, and is interested in learning more about connections between anti-Muslim oppression. He tells some of us that this year has been called the year of the lynch mob in Indian, with Hindus beating dozens of Muslims to death, as right-wing Hindu nationalism rises under Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Modi and Benjamin Netanyahu (the right-wing Israeli Prime Minister) have unsurprisingly become pals over the past year.

Daoud Nassar, one of the main siblings who run the farm, welcomes us into the meeting cave. When the family started the farm in 1916 they built several structures half- or completely underground, though in recent decades the Nassars have had to design more of their buildings this way due to the Israeli authorities putting out demolition orders for their other structures. I’ll be going much more into detail about the farm and the Nassars’ story during my time here next month, but I’ll share the big picture and some of Daoud’s comments now. The state of Israel declared the farm to be state land in 1991. Israel is know to do this throughout Area C (land completely understand Israeli military and civil control), especially on strategic hilltops. Israel uses the fact that many Palestinians who have lived in villages and farms on the land for years don’t have documentation proving its status to justify such confiscations. The Nassars are a rare case, having documents going back to the Ottomans, the British, the Jordanians, and even Israel post-1967, but the Israeli military court still said the papers weren’t legitimate, and so the family has been in a legal fight for over twenty-five years now. Daoud and his family launched the Tent of Nations project in 2001, to bring in international volunteers to help the beset farm. Within a few years, the volunteer presence fully deterred Israeli settlers from harassing the farm. The last major incident was around 2002 when settlers uprooted dozens of olive trees in retaliation for the family getting the Israeli authorities to stop building a road through the farm’s land. Daoud still distinguishes between such extreme ideological settlers and those Israelis who move into the settlements for economic reasons. Even with the end of settler attacks though, the IDF has not relented. While soldiers are unlikely to roll in tomorrow and demolish buildings while internationals are present, in 2014 they did uproot several hundred fruit trees just ten days before the harvest, even after the Israeli court accepted the Nassars’ initial appeal against the farm being confiscated as state land. Israeli settler groups have also tried bribing the family to by the hilltop land–they at one point told the Nassars that they would write a blank check, that the Nassars could name any price. But Daoud says that their home, their land is their identity. He references the Bible passage I Kings 21 (the family is Christian), which tells the story of how King Ahab tried to get the farmer Naboth to sell his inherited vineyard to the king.

Daoud goes on to share his larger ideas and the Tent of Nations vision. He says that everyone is misusing their religion, even though peace and love are at the core of all faiths; Jews, Muslims, Christians alike. A settler from the US Daoud once encountered told him that the family may have physical documents, but the settlers have documentation from God. A Christian fundamentalist also told him that the land is destined for Jews. Daoud acknowledges that Israeli Jews have grown up in Palestine, in Israel as well as in the settlements, for a few generations now, and this is functionally their home now too, even if their leaders have ruled it by force against the Palestinians. He also emphasizes what we started to hear from Muhamed at the Seed Library, and what we will continue to hear from most of the Palestinians we meet on the rest of the delegation: Palestinians cannot afford to just wallow in a victim mentality, in self-pity and hopelessness. But Daoud says that violence only begets violence, and so advocates for a positive, nonviolent resistance to occupation. “Nonviolence is a strength, not a weakness,” he stresses. The Tent of Nations’ main mantra is “We Refuse to Be Enemies,” though Daoud admits that it is hard to tell this to many other Palestinians living under occupation.

We break for a fantastic lunch overlooking the hills before Daoud’s brother Daher gives us a tour around the farm. The farm is not allowed to connect to water and electricity systems, so it runs on solar panels donated by a German NGO. They have compost toilets and showers to conserve water not just for the environment, but out of necessity. Despite all this, it is truly amazing how much they are able to grown through their work. They have vineyards if grape trees, almond, apricot, fig, and of course plenty of olive trees, though most have already been harvested. A few volunteers are pruning the olive trees in preparation for the next season. Daher shows us another cave that has portraits of some of his family printed on a wall–through his father Bishara, and back to his grandfather Daher, who started the farm as Daher’s Vineyard one hundred-and-two years ago now. We learn more about some of the project’s activities, including a summer camp for local children, garbage clean-ups and recycling, and a women’s empowerment initiative teaching computer skills and English to women in the village, especially since they can help their children on homework. Nonviolence has to be more active than just drinking a cup of tea and singing songs of peace, Daoud adds. We end at the farm’s shop, where they sell their own wine, dried fruit, and nuts. You can find out more about donating to the farm here:
http://www.tentofnations.org/support/

Feeling hopeful after the first half of the day, especially when the first afternoon in Jerusalem was depressing, we go back into Bethlehem, only to have our spirits brought down again as we see the Wall up close from this side. Bethlehem has one of the highest unemployment rates in the West Bank. I’d guess it could be factoring in all the refugee camps, or because it’s so close to the Wall, which as we now know is a death sentence to the economy particularly for those living closest to it. More of the signature black rainwater tanks crowd the rooftops. There are also crowns of iron beams sticking out on top of many houses, especially in refugee camps; Said tells us that these are put in place by families for the next generation to build further floors for themselves. We get to the most heavily graffitied part of the Wall, with overlapping portraits and slogans. The pictures I will include tell it much better than words can. Some food and fruit juice sellers (“Make Juice not War”) have strategically parked themselves at the foot of the Wall, where many travelers political and apolitical, must come through. There are also shops, including the new Walled-Off Hotel designed by legendary graffiti artist Banksy, that sell apartheid-themed souvenirs. The Palestinians running these businesses are naturally using any opportunity they can to make a living, but it really brings about a sense of permanency to see the situation reach the point of commodification. The man running the juice stand tells some of us in English how he was recently in prison for throwing a Molotov cocktail at the IDF after soldiers killed his father, and though he’s trying to work now, he has to pay extra to support his child who’s in the hospital due to tear gas. “What am I supposed to do?” he repeatedly asks. I may not be getting his story entirely correct, as I just wrote down later what o remembered, but such stories can be found in the lives of half the people walking down a street in any Palestinian city. While much of the graffiti, especially the new giant portrait of Ahed Tamimi, is inspiring and shows resilience, the whole feeling of despair and the unyielding presence of the Wall is a stark contrast to the determined positivity we encountered at the Seed Library and Tent of Nations that morning.

However, we finish the day on another uplifting note in the nearby village of Battir, at the Terraces Cafe. We cannot see many of the historic farming terraces climbing the hills around us in the dark, though we are able to see an ancient Roman stone pool fed by a small aqueduct coming down one of the hills. One of the restaurant owners, Hassan, strongly reminds us how many Palestinians do not just want sympathy, to be looked at as victims, but to be recognized for their resiliency. We learn how many villagers fled during the 1948 war, but about thirteen led by a Hassan Mustafa stayed behind to make the village look inhabited. They made dummies out of rocks and would, with sticks to look like weapons, and positioned them strategically to make the Israeli militias think the village was guarded. They then lit candles in the houses, and hung up laundry and walked their cattle during the day. One of our group members, Whitney, compared it to how the kid tricks the two burglars into thinking the house is full of people in Home Alone. The Israelis didn’t attack the village, and after the guns fell silent the remaining villagers went to nearby refugee camps in the West Bank to tell everyone from Battir that they could return.

Since then, Battir has continued to embody sumud (the Palestinian concept of “steadfastness” in Arabic). Hassan Mustafa originally established the building of the cafe as a girls’ school, though it fell into disuse at some point, turning into a garbage dump. Present-day Hassan then tells us how he and local farmers and cooks got the idea to turn it into a restaurant, so they all got together and started small. 75% of the village’s land is now Area C; the route of the state of Israel’s Wall threatened to go through and destroy much of the historic terraces in the late 2000s. But the villagers appealed to UNESCO to get the site declared a World Heritage Site, and Israel was forced to redirect the Wall. We are served several filling platters of maqloubeh (literally “upside-down”), a traditional Palestinian dish of chicken, rice, and vegetables clumped together in a giant pan before being flipped over onto the platter. Hassan offers us some pastries and chocolate (it is Halloween back in the States, coincidentally) on our way out.