Report Three: Ramallah and Jerusalem

Saturday & Sunday, May 28 – 29

These two days took us through some of the many complexities and contradictions of the situation here.

On Saturday we met with a group of Palestinian students at Bir Zeit University and on Sunday with a group of Israeli students from Hebrew University.  Both groups were knowledgeable, articulate, and spoke with conviction.  And they spoke from different realities.

On Saturday, we drove to Ramallah and Bir Zeit in our air-conditioned bus with Israeli license plates.  At the Qalandia checkpoint outside of Ramallah, we moved smoothly and easily to our appointments and back, except for a 30-minute wait in traffic.  On Sunday we returned to the same site with the Israeli group Machsom Watch (Checkpoint Watch) and entered Ramallah as most Palestinians do.  We walked through what felt like a cattle shed, through turnstiles and a security check, to be checked and processed by soldiers once going in and twice coming out.  Again, different realities.

On Saturday we spoke with Rita Giacamin, the Director of Birzeit University’s Institute of Community and Public Health, and on Sunday with Gila Svirsky of the Israeli Coalition of Women for Peace.  Both are deeply committed to ending the occupation and achieving a just and stable peace.  Yet even there, two different realities.

Here are several pieces from our delegation participants.

Jeremy Lucas:

Tamer, a student at Bir Zeit University in Palestine, told us about his circle chair dance.  In the dance, he choreographed a circle of chairs on stage, with him inside.  The dance is one of captivity.  This is his way of expressing in art the experience of the Wall and the occupation.

Tamer is a first-year student at Birzeit and is a member of a dance troop in which he finds an outlet for his anger, frustration and sadness.  He was not full of rage at Israelis; on the contrary, he expressed compassion and pain that they lose their youth through mandatory military service.  "I feel sorry for them; they do not get to grow up, their life is taken from them whether they like it or not."

The innocence of Tamer's face was all I could think about as the Israeli soldier from Tucson, Arizona, boarded our bus at Qalandia checkpoint to see our passports as we traveled from Ramallah back to Jerusalem.  The young man carrying a machine gun looked like a "Mr. Football" and I couldn't help wondering what his life could have been like.  Could he and Tamer have been friends at a school in another time?  Is there hope that they could be in the future?

Later in the day, we heard that 72% of Palestinians are under 30 years of age.  A few days earlier, we had seen hundreds of new Israeli soldiers graduating from training in an elaborate graduation ceremony.  None of them could have been over 25.  Children fighting children in wars they did not start and feel powerless to end, without a victory for one side or the other.

Peggy Ray & Ilise Cohen:

This evening, we met with five Hebrew University students – Jewish Israelis and an American Jew. We discussed several topics, including their thoughts about the conflict between Israel and Palestine. It was important for us to see the complexities and differences of understanding within this small group of Israelis and Jews. Not only were we seeing with our own eyes the impact of the Wall, exploring the effects of occupation, and hearing the voices of Israeli leftist activists, but now we had a chance to see the impact of the ‘separation’ in the way the Israeli students understood the details of the occupation.

One of the students said that he did not think the Wall was necessary, but was reminded by one of his friends that a year ago, he had  thought it was a good idea. What are the moments of change and transformation that take place as fear settles and dissipates? Does the Wall provide certain protection so that some Israelis who were originally in favor of it can now say they are against it? Does it give a form of false security, or are the claims that there have been fewer suicide bombings and terror attacks true enough to justify the Wall for Israelis who just want a ‘normal life’?

Another student talked about how Israelis define settlements. She spoke about the ‘neighborhoods of Jerusalem’ when referring to many of the communities (settlements, according to international law) we had just learned about and seen circling Jerusalem on the ICAHD settlement tour.

There were moments when many of us wanted to share our photos, explain what we had already seen, link the gap between what is intellectually known about the situation and the specific effects on Palestinian families every day. But we listened, and spent time in listening circles over dinner with the students so that we could speak with them more intimately. It is courageous for these students to engage on these issues, among people who are specifically here to witness and speak to the injustices of the occupation and to meet with Israelis and Palestinians who are working against it.

Peggy Ray:

Women have been central to the Israeli peace movement, especially since the beginning of the second Intifada.  On Sunday, we had lunch with Gila Svirsky who talked to us about some of the activities of the Coalition of Women for Peace.  A feminist view of peace work, she said, is not about separation of Israelis and Palestinians, but about future cooperation and undoing the militarization of Israeli society.

I was particularly interested in outreach programs that women have developed to Russian and Mizrahi Jews.  According to Gila, Russian-speaking Israelis comprise 17% of the population and mostly support a strong army and iron-fisted suppression of the Palestinians.  She characterized their newspapers as extremely right-wing and racist.  After consulting 120 Russian Israeli women, the Coalition of Women for Peace have begun consciousness-raising work about Russian feminism, equality, and stereotypes of Russians which brand all the men as Mafia types and the women as whores.  Then the coalition asks women to relate their own oppression to that of Palestinians.

With Mizrahi Jews, those who have come from Arab countries, coalition members talk about the social cost of military policies.  In particular, they note that $1.5 billion is spent to subsidize settlers and compare this with the distressed economic situation of Mizrahi Jews.  They ask how peace could make a difference to them.

Women also have launched a campaign on the theme of security, asking "What is security, really?"  A strong army is not bringing security, they contend.

Peggy Ray & Ilise Cohen:

This afternoon we were given a checkpoint experience by Nurit Steinfeld of Machsom Watch.  Machsom Watch is a group of Israeli women volunteers who go to the checkpoints, establish a presence there, and observe what is going on.  Starting with only a few women, the project has grown to 500 women visiting 46 checkpoints every day, twice a day.

The Israeli army has sanctioned the women’s presence so that the army can report problems to the women and occasionally ask Machsom Watch to intervene and contact army officials.

Some of the women of Machsom Watch have developed specialties in dealing with various forms of harassment.  For example, Palestinians get exorbitant fines for minor traffic infractions, like a missing headlight or failing to wear a seatbelt.  Palestinians have to pay these fines at an Israeli Post Office, but this is impossible since most do not have a permit that allows them into Israel. One Machsom Watch woman spends her entire time helping people pay fines by going to Israeli Post Offices for them.  Beyond such small services, Nurit believes their presence alone does make soldiers more careful about what they do.  Some soldiers are cooperative, others resentful, but the women are clear that the young soldiers are also victims of this system.

Nurit first took us to the Qalandia checkpoint where the Wall has been routed down the center of the road, splintering Palestinian East Jerusalem and de facto annexing more of ‘greater Jerusalem’ to Israel.    One Palestinian woman crossing the checkpoint explained to us that while it used to take five minutes for her to visit her sister, it now took four hours. 

Nurit took us to the home of Dr. Sami, a physician who had been having trouble getting to his hospital since the imposition of some checkpoints. His house sits on a bank just above the Qalandia checkpoint and almost immediately adjacent to the Wall. The trip to work that used to take Dr. Sami thirty minutes now takes him an hour and a half – on good days.

Although Dr. Sami was not present, his daughter Rawan told us about what happened to her family in 2000 after the start of the second Intifada.  Some boys were using a space near their house as a base for throwing stones at Israeli army positions in the nearby Jerusalem airport.  Although the family did not encourage the boys in this endeavor, one day Rawan’s mother spotted a sniper and decided to warn the boys of his presence.  When she stepped outside her door she was shot in the side of the head.  The prompt intervention of her physician husband saved her life, but in an essay she wrote for school, Rawan calls the day “The Moment I Lost My Childhood.” She will soon graduate from secondary school, and she told us she wants to leave the country for college.  “I’ll go anywhere,” she said, “even if it has to be Somalia!”

We learned that the Israeli army had cut down fruit and almond trees in the family’s yard, claiming the boys were using them for cover.  More recently, the government has expropriated more land to build the Wall and cut down more trees – a total of 180.   “It used to be a paradise here,” Dr. Sami’s wife said.  “Now it’s like a desert.”

We then visited the Palestinian village of Al-Khader, south of Jerusalem.   All roads leading into Al-Khader are fully ‘closed’ to the village except for one.  Roads become ‘closed’ when the Israeli army uses cement blocks or earthen trenches to make the roads impassable.  Additionally, throughout the West Bank, cars can travel on well-paved roads only if they have Israeli yellow license plates, but not if they have the West Bank green plates that designate a Palestinian vehicle.

Even the one road that villagers can currently use to access their village has been made impassible by mounds of dirt, rocks and pieces of concrete that have been heaped across the road to block it. To use the road, Palestinians have to take a taxi as far as the blockage, then walk over or around the roadblock while carrying packages, small children, and whatever else they have.  After five minutes, villagers arrive at the other side of the blockage; there a small fleet of taxis is waiting to take them the rest of the way to their destination.

The walkway around the blockage is lined with vendors selling fruit, nuts, ice cream, drinks and other goods to people trying to make their journey more bearable. Resourceful Palestinians were doing whatever they could to deal with an impossible situation.