I am writing this back at home now, at the end of December, now that I finally have a keyboard! (the typing I did for the first entry was all with my thumbs on my phone while I was still in Palestine) This next entry is extremely dense, and I promise the next will be less so. There is a huge amount of information from my time with the delegation, and I have cut some of it down by simplifying it and limiting my own commentary (though some personal commentary is what makes writing about travel by anyone unique), but I felt it would be wrong cutting out most of what I saw and learned—the stories of these people, their work, and their communities have to be heard, even though I of course can’t tell it as effectively as they do themselves. You can also see I’ve finally started uploading pictures, so that should help.

In the footprints of the Nakba. Thursday 11/1—the remains of Lifta (near Jerusalem), and Jaffa

In the morning, my companions and I take our bus to the remains of the Palestinian town of Lifta, where we meet Umar, our guide from Zochrot. Zochrot is an organization of Palestinians and Jewish Israelis researching the villages from which Palestinians fled or were expelled by the Zionist militias in 1947 & ’48 and were never allowed to return to. Umar has interviewed some of the surviving Lifta refugees. As we descend into the empty town’s valley, he tells us that the emptying of Lifta was gradual, over several months, starting in December 1947 when the Lehi militia attacked a coffee shop in a part of town higher up in the valley, killing six Palestinians. Over the next several months, more residents fled whenever the gunshots of Lehi and other Zionist forces flew down into the valley from higher up. The last of them left in May 1948 when they heard about the massacre of Palestinians at nearby Deir Yassin, now one of the more infamous of the massacres committed by Israelis, acknowledged by even the most pro-Israel historians. What often gets overlooked is not only the direct impact of such massacres on its victims, but the further impact of their shockwaves that pressured Palestinians to flee in fear of similar atrocities happening to their villages. There are no signs that Lifta’s residents themselves fought back inside the village with guns or other weapons.

After the state of Israel’s establishment, the government of the new state settled some of the incoming Jews (mostly Mizrahi, from around the Middle East, Greece, etc) from other countries in cleared Palestinian towns like Lifta, though most didn’t stay long as living conditions weren’t that great. In the 1980s abandoned Lifta was known as a meeting spot for gangs. We walk through the town’s old mosque, which had been named after one of Saladin’s soldiers from the Second Crusade. Its water spring remains; we pass a group of Israeli teenage boys, probably pre-army age, diving and swimming in it. The land is now the Mei Naftoah Nature Reserve, and some Israelis have scratched out the Arabic on signs around the site. You can donate to Zochrot here at https://zochrot.org/en/content/18.

We then ride northwest to the city of Jaffa. We pass through Ramle and Lod, from which Zionist forces expelled most non-Jewish Arabs in 1948. Said tells us how the Palestinians still there today face home demolitions even within Israel, and receive less services from the government. Small walls also divide Arab and Jewish neighborhoods within the cities. In Jaffa, we meet first with the indefatigable Dr. Ruchama Marton, who has been working in solidarity with Palestinians for decades, especially since co-founding Israeli Physicians for Human Rights (I-PHR) in the late 1980s. PHR sends groups of Israeli and Palestinian physicians with Israeli citizenship to the Gaza Strip and West Bank to volunteer and perform operations in hospitals, give lectures, and bring medical supplies. Ruchama speaks about the obstacles Palestinians face daily with a sardonic bluntness that I feel comes from having to hear for so many years all the bullshit many Israelis use to justify the state’s crimes. She tells us that she wanted PHR to be not just a vague humanitarian organization, but an explicitly human rights-focused one that doesn’t try to pretend that the moral issues can be separated from the political structures. Ruchama also emphasizes that PHR always aims to consult with Palestinians themselves, to truly cooperate and not just patronize. Trust is not so hard to develop, she adds, if activists genuinely show on a personal level that they are in solidarity with people; Ruchama strongly felt this when she and other activists went to Hebron in 1994 to help Palestinians injured in Baruch Goldstein’s massacre.

Ruchama says that Israelis don’t want to acknowledge that they don’t have “the most moral army in the world,” that they are comfortable and don’t have to worry about the occupation on a daily basis. Other Israelis have called her anti-Jewish and anti-Semitic.  She believes that tactics like BDS is one of the few ways that Palestinians and people and groups who support them can actually put pressure on the Israel to change. When Yitzhak Rabin cut the budget Palestinian medical services as the First Intifada started, Ruchama met with the BBC in Britain and got journalists to report on it; Israel then partially restored the budget. When one of us asks her about hope for the future, she sarcastically shoots back that she doesn’t have hope, but then smiles very slightly (one of the few times we see her smile) and says that while many Israelis are becoming increasingly right-wing, more Israelis are also protesting against the government, joining demonstrations in Palestinian villages, and refusing to serve in the army.
You can donate to Physicians for Human Rights at http://www.phr.org.il/en/make-a-donation/.

We all grab a quick bite at a solid Palestinian falafel spot before meeting with Abed Abou Sh’hadeh, a well-spoken young Palestinian recently elected to the city council for Tel Aviv (to the north) and Jaffa. He tells us more about Palestinians living within Israel and Jaffa. For many centuries Jaffa was a major port in the eastern Mediterranean, a site of agriculture and trade, and grew into a major cultural center of the Arab world as well. Abed says that while Jews, Muslims, and Christians mostly got along well with each other in Jaffa before the 20^th century and Zionism, it’s important to not over-romanticize the past. There were still some tensions, though often more between families than between religion; stronger ethnic and religious identities are historically newer. After 1948 Arab Palestinians in the new state, while given citizenship, lived under a separate military law system up until 1966, and for the first few years especially the Israeli government seized more land from them (especially Bedouin), in addition to the land seized from refugees outside of Israel under the 1950 Absentee Land Law. In Jaffa, most Palestinians were concentrated in the Ajami neighborhood, and Israel actually had some of the many Jews coming from other countries move into Palestinians’ houses while they were still living there. Clinical depression and drug addiction rose in impoverished Ajami, and Jaffa to this day is where most of the drugs that fuel Tel Aviv’s party and nightclub culture come from.

Abed tells us that now gentrification, just as bad an omen for those living in racialized poverty in Israel as it is for those in the US, is the new obstacle for the Palestinians as Jaffa is developed for Israelis (and some newly middle-class Palestinians) running from high prices in Tel Aviv. Ajami residents were given “protected tenant” status by Israel only for a couple generations after 1948; now third-generation Palestinians are having trouble proving their ownership of houses they’ve lived in their whole lives, and are being evicted. Abed was elected as part of the Jaffa List party, which has Palestinian and Jewish members—he feels that engagement in local politics can make a difference, and improve Ajami and other Arab parts of Israeli cities without excluding them. Some disagreement is beautiful, he adds, and things will never be perfect, but he speaks of an attainable “equality of space and time,” beyond just abstract ideas of human rights and “coexistence” (it really should just be existence, he says). We thank Abed for his time and insight before returning to Jerusalem.

Another day in Jerusalem. Friday 11/2—Jerusalem

We spend the next day meeting a few more activists in Jerusalem. Khaled and Inbar, two IDF refusers, come to our hotel in the morning. Khaled is a Druze Palestinian citizen of Israel, and was in prison for two months after refusing to serve back in 1999.* While Muslim and Christian Palestinian citizens of Israel are exempted from the IDF, Druze are still mandated to serve along with Jewish Israelis. Since the 1950s, the Israeli government has designated Druze as non-Arab and non-Muslim, and promoted affinity between Druze and Jews in the education system.  Some Druze in Israel have embraced Zionism and the army, while others like Khaled have resisted it. Many of the Druze vote more leftist in Israeli elections and protest against the government’s policies within Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza; most recently hundreds have turned out against the new exclusivist nation-state law passed earlier this year. Khaled however thinks many of them protest that law for the wrong reason—that many want to be included in the Israeli national identity, rather than they are against Israel’s persecution of other Palestinians. Even so, hundreds of Druze have refused to serve in the army over the years, some with the support of Irfut, an organization Khaled helped found several years ago.

*It is very hard to explain the Druze well. There are an ethnoreligious group of less than 2 million worldwide, most in Syria and Lebanon. They have a monotheistic Abrahamic faith in which Jethro, the father-in-law of Moses, is the most important prophet. The Druze religion shares much in common with Shia Islam, but are also very syncretic, pulling from some Greek and Hindu philosophies.

Inbar has just turned 18, and is in the process of refusing her draft. She is fortunate in that she comes from a politically leftist family, so she doesn’t have much tension with them over it; her sister refused to serve 10 years ago, and her father, while he did serve in the army, refused to be stationed in the Palestinian territories and went to prison. She says that in Israeli society, even just the idea of refusing is hard for many teenagers, touching on some of what Ruchama said. Most who refuse do so for mental health reasons. In addition to the social pressure, those who refuse also lose out on government benefits like easier mortgages, scholarships, and college admittance. Israeli law also criminalizes not just the act of refusing, but encouraging others to refuse. Inbar is in process of applying for exemption as a conscientious objector, though most conscientious objectors who get off usually do so because they are overall pacifists, not because they are politically against the occupation. Some soldiers who come from poorer families also defect so they can work to earn more money, as the IDF’s stipends during service don’t amount to much. Last year, Inbar joined dozens of graduating Israeli high school students (many of them anonymous) in jointly signing the public “Senior Letter,” to articulate why they are against the occupation and to show other Israelis that they have the choice to not partake in the army’s atrocities against Palestinians.

We had a few free hours around lunchtime. Shaps and I go to grab some falafel in the Old City. I made sure we went to a less tourist-filled place. I was concerned that the man working there might not speak as much English, with not much English on the menu, and was rather awkward as I ordered. But as Shaps ordered, I realized that the man knew English quite well enough to interact with customers. Of course he would; English-speaking tourists must still come through his place often enough on this crowded Old City street, even if not as many as in the bigger tourist spots. Classic overthinking Ben. I have to say that in addition to traveling with all the other Americans with the Eyewitness Palestine delegation, it is great having someone I already know with me these first two couple weeks. I’ve traveled before, and getting around at least the cities in Palestine and Israel really isn’t that difficult, but it’s good to have Shaps, especially as he was just traveling around much of central Europe for a month this past summer. He reassures me that in most cases, locals in shops and restaurants know enough English in a lot of places—just speak clearly and not too quickly (though speaking condescendingly slow is the other extreme to avoid).

That afternoon our group goes through the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, one of the areas with the most cases of Israeli settlers actually moving into Palestinian homes and taking them over, legitimized by the courts. Just about every Friday night Palestinians as well as some Israelis in solidarity with them gather to protest the settler movement and the government that promotes it. We head to the Sunbula fair trade organization’s shop. Formed during the First Intifada, Sunbula works with over a dozen groups of Palestinian handcraft artisans, helping them find tools, materials, and markets for their products. Their store has handwoven cloths, bowls and dishes carved from olive wood, and handmade jewelry. You can buy some goods through Sunbula online at https://www.sunbula.org/index.php.

We do some early holiday shopping before heading back to our hotel where we meet with Mohammed, a soft-spoken but passionate activist with al-Qaws. al-Qaws was founded to support queer Palestinians of all sexualities and gender identities (their website in English at least uses the phrase “queer” pretty interchangeably with “LGBT”—I forgot to ask him about what terminology most Palestinians prefer in Arabic). The organization works with mental health shelters and counselors in schools, and also operates a hotline for queer Palestinians to call for any kind of support. They have hundreds of volunteers across Haifa, Ramallah, Jaffa, Jerusalem, and Nablus, with plans to begin operating in Gaza. Mohammed tells us that al-Qaws focuses more on supporting queer folks socially, and on changing people and their mentalities in Palestinian society at the local level, and not as much on fighting for laws political rights. That isn’t to say al-Qaws is completely apolitical—he also says that it is about being anticolonial, intersectional, working across the many kinds of borders put up by the Israeli state. Mohammed adds that they are against the pinkwashing of Israel—the idea that Israel is a haven for queer Arabs, even though plenty of queer Palestinians continue to suffer under occupation just as much as their heterosexual fellow Palestinians do. He also mentions that homophobia in Palestine often comes from secular people, not just the conservatively religious. We express our gratitude for Mohammed before breaking for dinner. You can donate to al-Qaws at http://www.alqaws.org/news/Support-alQaws-Kickstart-the-Next-10-Years?category_id=0.

A message from the west, and a journey to the north. Saturday 11/3—Jerusalem, Jenin, and Nablus

We all finish packing in the morning for spending the next several days in the West Bank. Before leaving, we gather in the hotel’s meeting room for a video call with Rawan, a friend of one of our delegates who lives in the Gaza Strip. It takes some time to get a connection to her, even though she is only some 40 miles away, but it gets through eventually. Rawan is a teacher and volunteers with the Gaza Community Mental Health Program. She fills us in on all aspects of life in Gaza. 98% of water is now not drinkable, and is the biggest source of daily anxiety. Her family has to buy more expensive drinking water every two weeks. Electricity regularly cuts out for more than half the day. Many hospitals are barely standing, and there is always a shortage of medicine and supplies. Doctors often work without receiving their pay for stretches of time. Israeli troops shoot at farmers who get too close to the border trying to work their land, injuring and sometimes killing them. Due to the destruction of infrastructure and power plants, water near the shore has become polluted and so fishing boats sail further out to sea, but the Israeli warships then shoot at them for getting too close, sometimes killing them. The blockade by sea has also been tightening in recent years after the discovery of offshore natural gas fields. Lately, US funding cuts to UNRWA (the UN agency that handles Palestinian development) have hurt education and medical and mental health services.

Palestinians try not to make their oppression into a contest—“it’s worse being a Palestinian in the West Bank than in Israel, it’s worse being in Gaza than in the West Bank,” etc.—drowning is still drowning, no matter how deep the water is. But listening to Rawan’s updates on life in Gaza is more dismal than anything we’ve seen so far, even if we can’t directly witness it. Much of it some of us have already read accounts about, but hearing it live from someone on the ground is more striking than just seeing it on the news. Still, through our call her face somehow has a brightness that refuses to be dimmed, her voice a resolute steadfastness. Rawan says that the area is full of motivated and inspired people who feel they just have no future, which is why they participated in the Great March of Return at the borders earlier this year. She finishes by saying that the situation is neither completely hopeless nor completely hopeful—echoing again that similar dichotomy we’ve been hearing from other Palestinians.

After signing off with Rawan, we get into our bus for a drive back into the West Bank north to Jenin, in the north, for the annual Olive Harvest Festival organized by the Canaan Fair Trade group. Again, our tour bus is able to drive past most checkpoints quickly. Said also informs us that Israeli checkpoints are not as constant around Palestinian cities as they used to be—the Palestinian Authority forces have been doing more of the IDF’s work themselves. We also see that settlements can be industrial, not just residential, as we pass some polluting Israeli factories are incentivized by lower taxes, rent, and environmental regulations. I try to take in the beauty of the hills and valleys in spite of all the rampant settler-colonialism. We pass some Palestinian limestone quarries around Nablus before getting to Jenin. We take a short tour of the site’s olive oil factory. Our guide tells us that before Canaan Fair Trade helped organize farmers together, they didn’t receive as much money for their crop, but now more of the money is getting to them. We have lunch surrounded by Palestinians from nearby towns. There is music with a charismatic man singing Arabic songs, and many of the men begin to dabke, kind of stepping dance often done in circles. Hana tells us that men and women dance in separate circles in more traditional communities (not unlike Orthodox Jewish and other traditional cultures within the US), though today there just one of men. They invite us to join them, two of the particularly merry dancers sometimes pulling us into the middle, so I get to show off some of my own (very basic) dabke moves my friends Amira and Salma taught me in college. As the festival wraps up, we go back to the bus and drive a little ways south to Nablus. Our hotel is in a nice old stone building with open courtyards. We have dinner and do some wholesome debriefing as a group before most of us call it an early night. Also, Canaan Free Trade runs an awesome online store: https://www.canaanusa.com/shop/.

Working the land. Sunday 11/4—Nablus, Tulkarem, Asira Shamalya, and Ramallah

Last night was an early night because many of us wake at 3 AM for an optional meeting.  We ride east to the Tulkarem workers’ terminal into Israel, where many Palestinians have already been awake for a few hours (if they went to sleep at all in the first place). Some 20,000 Palestinians cross here in the early hours of every morning to go to jobs within Israel, where the better economy (the economy that’s not crisscrossed by walls, settlements, and checkpoints) provides more opportunities, and many more go through one of the other five such checkpoints. Hundreds though simply risk climbing over or around the Wall at some of its less watched points instead of waiting at the checkpoint for hours, further showing that the Wall does not fully stop Palestinians from crossing the 1949 border. It’s still dark when we arrive, and chilly in the November night. An entire marketplace of food and drinks has been set up leading to the checkpoint, providing the workers with dinner, a midnight snack, or breakfast, or some combination of the three. We walk through this dimly lit corral of food stands, briefly warmed by the smoke from some of the grills and fryers. Such pop-up markets can be found leading to many checkpoints around the West Bank.

We approach the fences of the checkpoint and meet Mohammed Bledi, a leader of the Palestinian New Unions, who tells us more about the situation of Palestinian workers within Israel (and on West Bank settlements). Bledi’s English is limited, so Hana translates for him, speaking loudly over the din of the thousands of workers filing through the entry gates next to us. Most of them get to this and other workers’ checkpoints around 3 AM, and the whole process of getting to their jobs can take up to seven hours even if their job is only an hour away from their home. They often don’t return until 7 PM. Bledi tells us that the Tulkarem terminal is new and better than the previous one—before this one, people could be crushed to death on the fences on their way to work. After the entry funnel we can see, they get to a room with sixteen doors, usually not all opened at once, before getting their documents, fingerprints, and iris scans checked. Some are randomly chosen to be strip searched. Even for those who have workers permits, the process and rules are often arbitrary depending on which soldiers are running the terminal. As Bledi is speaking to us, several Palestinian men who have been turned away by the Israelis come up to him at various points for advice on their rights. One of them had renewed his work permit before it expired, but since he now had two permits, the soldier said they cancelled each other out and that he would not be permitted to enter.

The challenges they face are not unlike those of migrant workers in the US and around the world, though here they face it as strangers within their own land. More workers who die on the job in Israel are Palestinian, as they end up taking the more dangerous jobs, like underground or hi-rise construction, and they do not benefit as much from Israeli worker protection laws. By law they are supposed to get the same minimum pay Israeli workers get—250 shekels ($70) a day—but often only end up with about 100 shekels. Mohammed Bledi demonstrates his awareness of other injustices around the world, saying that he knows it is hard for workers, migrant or not, in the US too, and mentions cases like the Haymarket Strike in Chicago. He insists on buying us all coffee before we leave. The sun has now risen on the terminal and the market beside it. All the migrants have finished going through, and the foodsellers in the market are beginning to pack up in the clearing smoke of their stands. One of us, Harry, buys a bite from some of them, and upon realizing he’s American they start to sing Drake’s “Kiki” with him, complete with the dance of course, at 6 AM outside the Tulkarem checkpoint. A last thing to note is just how divided Palestinians are, not just between political parties, but within movements as well—some Palestinian workers view parts of the New Union as corrupt or ineffective, and are part of others, and even some within the New Union have many disagreements as well. This is of course not unique to Palestine, and is the case of many workers around the world; the people and groups we have met with by no means speak for all Palestinians, yet it is still worth learning from them.

We drive back to the hotel in Nablus, where some of us go back to catch another hour or two of sleep, and the rest of us go straight to breakfast. I’m delighted to find they have a bowl full of persimmons. Afterwards, Hana takes me, Shaps, and a few others around Nablus’s Old City. Nablus was originally the Roman “Neapolis,” but that because Arabic doesn’t have a “p,” it became Nablus over time. Its old city has the same charm of the winding stone alleys, walls, and archways of other old cities, but is much less touristy than those of Jerusalem or Bethlehem. We stop by a spices and herbs shop that has been in the owner’s family since his great-grandfather, and we can see the generations in photos on the wall. And last, of course, is a stop at a sweets place that sells knafeh. Knafeh is found across the neighboring countries of the Levant, but Palestinians insist that the best is absolutely found in Nablus. Hell, the main ingredient is called Nablusi cheese. It’s this divine warm pastry with gooey cheese in the middle, often with pistachio and other nuts sprinkled on top, usually finished with drizzles of natural sugary syrup. There are two main varieties—“rough” and “soft”—the first shaped more like a roll with a crunchy shell, and the second more flat without the crunch, and Hana tells us how Arabs debate which is better. Words really can’t describe how great the stuff is if you haven’t tasted it. I’m partial to the crunchy variety.

We take some for the other delegates back to the hotel before getting on the bus for our next stop, the farm of the Yasin family part of the village Asira Shamaliya. The Yasins and Asira Shamalya are lucky in that most of their land, being close to Nablus (Area A), is also mostly in Area A, though some of it is Area B & C. Israel has confiscated some of the Area C land in recent years for a military base. They have noticed rainfall getting scarcer each year, and some of the family members we speak to have actually foregone getting jobs elsewhere (one of them has a degree in computer science) in order to help on the farm. We have a great lunch outside and help harvest some olives for a few hours. The work of harvesting the olives is simple enough: you pick them off the branches and let them fall onto the tarp on the ground, where they get collected into buckets later. Or you climb up on a ladder of the boughs and whack the branches with a stick, causing them to cascade to the ground much quicker. The trees’ branches are tough; they can take it just fine. Soon I’m up there with some of the farmers and other volunteers ferociously whacking away every time I spot a cluster of the tree’s fruit anywhere.

“It is very hard to do, yes?” one of the Palestinians, Ahmad, jokes to us. While the basic task isn’t hard by itself, it does take a lot of endurance to do it all day long, and I’m proud to see a blister start developing between my two fingers from using the stick. “You know Jon Snow? Winter is coming,” Ahmad grins as chilly winds blow through the trees at one point. I’m not sure he and a couple of the other men my age were Yasin family members or not—he said he’s been working on this farm for a few years. Being high up in the trees was probably the time I was ever in the most danger in Palestine, after being in the bus on the winding roads through the mountains (though Adnan would never have let the bus slide off the road and over the edge). After the branches are bare (save for the leaves), we gather the olives on the ground. The best way of doing this is pulling up the tarps so all the olive fall to the center and then funneling them into buckets and big bags. The harder olives that fall from certain trees are kept separate to be used for making soap like some of what we saw in Nablus, while the softer olives will get used for oil. One of the farmers comes with us to drive to one of local olive processing sites. Pickup trucks from farms all over are bringing sacks full of olives to run through the complex system of machines.  As the sun begins to set, we drive south for Ramallah for dinner at the fancier Casablanca Hotel. Shaps and I join Charlie (who lives in New York state and has also heard of Mahwah) and some of the others at one of the nearby luxurious restaurants that characterize Ramallah and try some araq, a kind of licorice-tasting spirit found across the Middle East and the Mediterranean.

Poverty and drought by design. Monday 11/5—Ramallah, Jericho/Ariha, and Bethlehem

Over breakfast, I discuss with some of the others, especially Hubert, how our hotel is representative of Ramallah, the Palestinian Authority’s capital, as a whole. It’s very ritzy-looking at first glance, with the pretty rainbow lights at the entrance at night, stone courtyards with an outdoor pool, a capacious lobby with a tall ceiling, a large welcoming staff, and giant rooms for all of us, with a kitchenette-like corner and four beds for all of us even though we were just two people to a room. But if you look more closely, you can see that major parts of the dining room’s ceiling are missing, paint is chipping off the walls, some of the lamps don’t work, wood tables are scratched up, the courtyards have junk stashed away in them. And we definitely recognize some of the leftovers from last night’s dinner being served on the breakfast table. The staff sort of just stand around mingling with each other, and it seems like we’re the only guests. Perhaps we’ve caught them in the off-season as winter approaches. The whole thing is gilded. It feels like it represents the corrupt and inefficient Palestinian Authority that so many Palestinian writers and activists like Mourid Barghouti talk about, not to mention all the extravagant but neglectful (neglectful at the very least) postcolonial Arab dictatorships that many Arab people themselves loathe. Hubert and I weren’t really trying to complain—the hotel suited our needs fine, we were just noticing the humorously dystopian scenario around us. This clearly isn’t the norm of all Palestinian hotels; the ones we had stayed at in Jerusalem and Nablus were great, not trying to pretend to be fancier than they were.

After breakfast and some of this smug observational banter, we drive to the Palestinian Hydrology Group’s offices to meet with its director, Abdel Tamimi, a genial older fellow. The PHG does lobbying and advocacy, approaching the issue of water as a human right, and doesn’t distinguish between Israelis or Palestinians as deserving of that right—“God doesn’t recognize borders,” Abdel says. It also does policy-focused research, especially on the future impacts of climate change on agriculture, and works with farmers across the land, advising them on how to best use their limited water, and on how to make use of wastewater. Abdel gives us a crash course on PHG’s research, showing us maps of how the Wall cutting into the West Bank separates Palestinians from almost 40 wells they get aquifer water from. More water from the Jordan River and West Bank aquifers on average go to settlers than Palestinians (about 70 L per day for Palestinians and 250 L per day for Israelis), including for agriculture. Even with the water Palestinians do get, it is often less treated and salinated, especially in Gaza. The IDF often demolishes Palestinian pipes, rainwater collection, and treatment infrastructure in Area C land for not having permits. Abdel does not support war to free Palestine, but says that violence will rise if Palestinians continue to live under such desperation. He believes some boycott tactics can put pressure on Israel, but believes in boycotting only institutions and colleges in West Bank settlements, not within Israel’s main territory.

We are then able to get an audience at al-Haq with the one and only Omar Barghouti, co-organizer of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement (BDS). Palestinians have of course been using boycotts as a strategy against the Israeli state since the 1980s and the First Intifada; BDS was organized in 2005 with over a hundred different Palestinian civil society groups calling for it at the grassroots level. We have a wide discussion on how Israel’s oppression of Palestinians relates to the experiences of black South Africans, as well as Native Americans and black people in the US; some aspects of Israel are just as bad as apartheid, while others are not as bad or even worse. While the anti-apartheid movement targeted South Africa much more widely, Barghouti emphasizes that BDS is more focused on institutions and companies—within and outside Israel—that are complicit in crimes against Palestinians, rather than on Israeli individuals who do not directly contribute to such oppression. The goals are very clear—an end to the occupation of the West Bank, an end to the siege of Gaza, and the right for refugees to be able to return to their land within Israel, regardless of whatever a final political solution looks like. He also touches upon how Palestinians are very divided politically, but that BDS is something that more Palestinian activists are united on. Some two dozen states in the US have passed extremely anti-democratic laws against boycotting Israeli companies, but they are beginning to be challenged based on the First Amendment. Barghouti acknowledges that the world is looking darker, not just for Palestinians (for whom things have already been dark for a while) but all over with the rise of fascistic right-wing populism (often accompanied by increasing anti-Semitism) in many countries. And as Trump and company praise Israel’s West Bank Wall and repression of Gazans and African refugees, and as Richard Spencer admires Israel as an ethnic nation-state, it becomes clear that people part of this far-right tide can be anti-Semitic and pro-Israel at the same time.

After the meeting with Omar Barghouti, we drive a little ways south past Jerusalem and about an hour east to Jericho, through the desert mountains and into the Jordan River Valley, to see in person more of what we learned from Abdel Tamimi. Two Ramallah-based activists, Fares and Suhar, accompany us. We pass by many Bedouin communities that are threatened with or have already experienced home demolitions, including Khan al-Ahmar. The view as we descend into the valley is truly breathtaking. The Dead Sea lies a little to the south, and more mountains rise across the Jordanian border. In distant hills around us, we can see some monasteries and churches, including the site where some believe Jesus was tempted by Satan. The valley is fertile and there used to be many more Arab farms and gardens all over Jericho—the city name literally means “fragrant.” But being in Area C the farmers have less access to freshwater, and much of the land has dried up, affecting more water-intensive plants like banana trees in particular. Empty lots and plots of land pockmark the city, like missing teeth. A local farmer we briefly speak with tells us that many kids drop out from school to help on their families’ struggling farms. The partially stated-owned Israeli water company Mekarot has taken control of access to water sources. Fares and Suhar show us one of the dried-up streams that used to flow from a spring up through 2003, and the Mekarot pipes surrounded by fences and barbed wire that take the remaining water out of the ground. While Israel then provides water to nearby agricultural settlements like Na’omi, Palestinians have to pay five times as much as Israelis do for the water in their land. It is clear that while Israel has “made the desert bloom” in the Negev desert, in Zionist lingo, it has done the opposite for Palestinians of the Jordan Valley and around the West Bank. As the sun sets, we drive east back towards Bethlehem again for the night.

Back in Bethlehem: existing as a refugee. Tuesday 11/6—Bethlehem and al-Walaja

We waste no time leaving our hotel the next morning and going to the offices of Badil, a refugee rights organization, and meet with one of their members, Ahmed, a bright young energetic guy despite the tough work he does every day. Much of what he tells us we have learned and seen already, but he does a good job of putting it in the context of continuing displacement across the land since 1948. Ahmed gives more details on internally displaced refugees within Israel who can visit but not move back to their original homes, and on how Palestinian refugees outside Israel & Palestine also face heavy discrimination, especially in Jordan and Lebanon. He of course mentions the impact of the latest cuts to UNRWA, and closes by saying that he acknowledges Jews have lived in Palestine for centuries—the problem is Zionism. We then go out into the city to meet refugees face-to-face. Our first stop is Aida refugee camp, at the Lajee Community Center, where we meet with Shatha, who works with the center’s environmental program. Half a dozen Israeli security towers surround the camp, along with a system of surveillance cameras. Shatha shows us some footage of Israeli troops cracking down on protestors with overwhelming force, even though people caught filming soldiers can be jailed and fined up to thousands of shekels. She gives us a quick tour around some of the camp. We can see a playground below and a soccerfield with nets hung over it—this is to keep out the tear gas canisters. The Lajee center runs music and fitness programs, community health clinics, and helps create rooftop gardens. You can donate to Lajee at http://www.lajee.org/index.php/donate.

After lunch, we are joined by Murad from the Dheisheh refugee camp, where he help runs a community center similar to Lajee. But before seeing Dheisheh, Murad joins us on the bus to the nearby village of al-Walaja, which is actually on the Israeli side of the Wall around Bethlehem even though it’s technically in West Bank territory. We meet a villager who shows us the sites of some building demolitions, several of which happened in September. Murad translates for him as he tells us that much of their land has been confiscated for the nearby Gilo and Har Gilo settlements over the years. In the valley we can see more construction on the Wall, which will further enclose the village, enabling Israel to connect Gush Etzion settlements to Jerusalem further north. Fences cut off their access to the Ein Hanya spring (now an Israeli national park) and farmland. While most villagers have traditionally been farmers, many of the men now work jobs like construction within Israel, and have to go through a commute through a checkpoint like the one we saw at Tulkarem.

We go back to the Dheisheh refugee camp with Murad. About 15,000 Palestinians live in the area of one square mile, refugees from 1948 and their descendants. While all refugee camps started as tents, over time their residents built solid homes, each new generation’s family adding a new floor on top of the old. Through the camp’s strong sense of community and self-government, there is very little crime. People use the walls of buildings not just for political graffiti but as a kind of forum, for writing basic public announcements; Murad tells us that some of it dates back to the 1980s. Like in the Aida camp, the people of Dheisheh get water through their pipes every two weeks, which they store in tanks for the next two weeks, and they can also collect rainwater on the roofs, as the city is within Area A, under Palestinian control. Despite all the repression protestors face that Shatha told us about, as we walk through the camp many people great us enthusiastically when they realize we are American. The kids especially love the opportunity to use their English—“Hello!” “How are you?” “Yo!” They don’t mind that we’re from the country that supplies their occupier’s weapons; they just seem to be glad that some foreigners are visiting and acknowledging them as humans, not as terrorists or aid recipients.

Murad takes us back to the Laylac youth center, where we have dinner. We meet Naji, the center’s director, who tells us about its vision of radial social work on empowering youth to run community projects. Laylac does similar work to Lajee, but seems to have a more unique system. They have no membership fees and bureaucracy, depending mostly on volunteers, some of them international (there are a couple from Catalonia while we’re there). Naji and the community view the system of voluntarism as a way of shaking off the post-Oslo era of NGO funding, which leads to people’s values becoming focused around money. They run themselves democratically, with the camp’s youth themselves deciding what they want to work on. They are also creating partnerships with organizations in the US and North America like Jewish Voice for Peace. Murad emphasizes that Palestinians of Dheisheh and all over do not want to be seen as passive victims, as shoeless refugees, but as people who just support one another, besides fighting for their rights. His dream is to drink beer on the beach in Haifa. We all split up for a night of homestays with a few families in the camp, though some stay in Laylac’s guest rooms. I say goodbye to Shaps, who’s leaving early tomorrow morning so he can be back in Manhattan to teach his class Thursday. I go with several other delegates to the home of Murad and his family. We meet his parents, wife, a Jew from the US. They met when she first came to Palestine. They’ve made their house look quite nice on the inside, in contrast with the gray concreteness of the camp. It’s been another tiring but enlightening day.

(Note–there is a boring and pretentious overall intro, and an intro specifically for this first Palestine trip, before this post further down the page. I suggest at least dragging yourself through the Palestine intro for more context on the land and people as I travel)

Just another bus ride, the Beginning of the Beginning: Friday 10/26, Mahwah, NJ & New York City