Report 5: Hebron, A Settlement, Nonviolence in Bethlehem
Tuesday May 31, 2005
Sabeel & Liberation Theology
This morning we met with Sabeel, a Palestinian Christian organization that focuses on liberation theology to understand and address the occupation. According to their purpose statement, “liberation theology seeks to provide a holistic vision of God’s redeeming activity in the midst of the current reality faced by the Christian community of Palestine and Israel.”
Initially developed by clergy in Latin America who were responding to colonial oppression, liberation theology is utilized by Palestinian Christians to help make the Bible relevant in relation to the oppression, violence, and discrimination they face on a daily basis. Scriptures that tell about the Israelites liberation from slavery in Egypt, young David’s defeat of the mighty Goliath, or Jesus’ life under Roman occupation, strengthen Palestinians faith as they struggle for justice, peace, equity, and human rights.
Sabeel (Arabic for “The Way” and “Spring of Water”) also works to promote awareness among the international community about the presence of Palestinian Christians. In our meeting, we learned that over the last several decades the number of Palestinians living here has significantly declined due to the pressures they have faced from the Israeli occupation. Cedar Duaybis, one of the founding members of Sabeel, shared with us her story and her steadfastness to remain here in Palestine “no matter what happens to us.”
Hebron – City of Conflict
After our visit with Sabeel, we headed immediately to Hebron, which is in the West Bank, south of Jerusalem. One of our delegate’s shares her experience:
Donna Nassor:
"When we arrived in Hebron, it felt like we were entering a war zone. The two main roads were blocked by Israeli military. We found an alternate route. All around, I saw the rubble of destroyed buildings, graffiti, broken-down vehicles, and garbage in the streets. When the bus could no longer get through, we got out and began to walk. I could feel my heart pounding.
Most of the former Palestinian inhabitants of the Old City of Hebron have fled. It is not hard to understand why. There is a heavy Israeli military presence in Hebron to protect the approximately 500 Israeli settlers residing there. We were warned to be careful and aware of our surroundings. Our group stayed close together as we walked toward the Ibrahimi Mosque/Tomb of the Patriarchs. When someone noticed settlers up ahead, out of fear of their disapproval, warnings were whispered throughout the group to be careful and not take pictures.
Life in Hebron appears to be difficult for the Palestinians still there. In what used to be a thriving marketplace in the Old City, we saw a small number of vendors trying to sell their sparse wares. Up above, we observed garbage that had been throw from the windows of settler apartments onto wire mesh covering the walkways where Palestinians were trying to earn a living.
In the Old City, we met with Zleikha Muhtaseb, a Palestinian Muslim woman running a program to help children cope with their living situation. We also met with members of the Christian Peacemaker Team, a group of volunteers living in Hebron who strive to provide organizational support to persons committed to faith-based nonviolent alternatives in situations where lethal conflict is an immediate reality. 
As we listened to stories of mistreatment and violence perpetrated against the Palestinians by the Israeli military in Hebron, we began to hear what we first thought to be gunfire somewhere close by. Our speakers ran up to the roof to try to figure out what was going on. We later discovered that the noise came from children’s firecrackers. It was a brief glimpse into the life of those living in Hebron. When we finally left Hebron, I felt a great sense of relief –along with a great sadness for those I left behind."
Tekoa - a West Bank Jewish Settlement
Our day ended with a visit to the settlement of Tekoa in the West Bank. Founded in 1977, the settlement has approximately 300 families, many from the United States.
Bruce Brill, a settler living in the region, stepped aboard our bus and gave us a tour of Tekoa and several neighboring settlements. Homes ranged from trailers to large stone houses with verandas. We saw community centers, schools, and shops. As we drove, Bruce shared how he and others living there preferred to use the term village, rather than settlement, to avoid the association with the cowboys of the West in the U.S. He explained that the settlers here are more like Native Americans (living on their God-given reservation) than the cowboys.
Two of the settlers he introduced us to were organic farmers from Maine who are working on sustainable agriculture. During our brief visit with this couple, they shared with us why they had moved to this particular area on the West Bank and a little bit of their vision. “The community is founded on pluralism, tolerance, and diversity.” They explained that they are here “to foster autonomy for the Palestinians but the Palestinians are not evolved enough to deal with our being here.”
At the end of our tour we were invited into the home of one of the settlers and shown slides of the community and its history. A violinist, Bruce, says he “believes in violins, not violence.” Like all settlers however, he carries a gun for protection. Before we left, Bruce gave us each a copy of an article he had written detailing a plan to address the Palestinian suffering by transferring them to Iraq.
For many of us, this visit only whet our appetites to know more about the people who have chosen to make the settlement their home.
Wednesday June 1, 2005
Remembering in Deir Yassin
The Palestinian village of Deir Yassin, the site of a notorious massacre of Palestinians by Jewish armed forces in 1948, today is home to patients of an Israeli mental hospital. In a pleasant park next to this hospital, we met with Eitan Bronstein, director of Zochorot. Zochorot is an Israeli organization that believes that the mental balance in Israeli society requires bringing the memory of what happened to Palestinians in 1948 into public consciousness. In Hebrew, Zochorot means “remember.”
The truth that 531 Palestinian villages were destroyed in 1948, driving 700-800,000 people from their homes, has been erased from Israeli memory. For example, most Israelis today believe that Arab villagers left their homes in ’48 because their leaders told them to. However, according to Eitan and the research of Israeli “new historians,” there was a definite military strategy on the part of the Jewish leadership at the time – Plan D – to occupy and destroy as many villages as possible. (It’s worth noting that since 1948, Palestinian and international scholars have long been discussing and documenting the nature of the Palestinian exodus – and the details of Plan D).
There is also an Israeli myth that, in Eitan’s words, “Israelis are clean fighters – we attack and we fight, but we don’t kill defenseless people.” However, the Deir Yassin massacre was not a unique event and not even the biggest one. Deir Yassin became important when news of what had happened there spread, leading many Palestinians to flee for fear of facing the same fate.
Zochorot believes that an essential step for making peace must be Israeli acknowledgement of Palestinian refugee rights, including the Right of Return that has been a sticking point in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. “We believe that we must take responsibility for what our fathers did or there will never be reconciliation between people,” Eitan told us. In order to help initiate such a process, Zochorot organizes commemoration ceremonies at the sites of vanished villages, gives talks in schools about “al-nakba” (Arabic for “the catastrophe” of the 1948 exodus), and is working on developing a Web site and an educational center in Tel Aviv.
Last April, Zochorot commemorated the massacre at Deir Yassin with a ceremony featuring testimony from a Palestinian woman survivor who had many of her family members killed before her eyes. They also created a memorial with the names of 93 known victims, laid flowers there and then read all the names. Deir Yassin is directly across a valley from Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum we visited a couple days ago. The people of Zochorot call for the creation of a truthful and visible memorial in Deir Yassin that could clearly be seen from Vad Vashem. Such a memorial, they believe, would enable reconciliation to occur.
Bethlehem - City on a Border
Following the meeting with Eitan, we headed for Bethlehem. Before us stretched out the variously named “Security Wall,” “Separation Wall,” “Apartheid Wall,” “Wall of Death” over the hills, as far as the eye could see. It was stunning. The massive, almost completed complex at the narrow opening of the Wall at the entrance to Bethlehem will soon serve as one of six or seven permanent border crossings between the West Bank and Israel. We learned that it will operate almost entirely by magnetic computerized cards that will: 1) allow Israelis to monitor Palestinians every movement; 2) almost entirely remove the need for a human presence (ie. Israeli army or border police).
Everything about the place attests to the permanence of the Wall. (We recall a recent news story reporting that Congress has included $50 million for Israeli checkpoints in a recent budget and feel outraged once again that our tax dollars are paying for this occupation – and directly for these checkpoints in the Wall).
Proceeding to the Church of the Nativity, we learned that the economy of Bethlehem, highly dependent on pilgrims and tourists, has been devastated as a result of the second intifada and its violent suppression. The church itself was the site of a 39-day siege in 2002, after Palestinian militants took refuge inside.
Said to be one of the oldest in Christendom, the church reflected earlier political disorder. Built by the emperor Justinian in 521, it was modified by Crusaders when they took the city. In an early Palestinian example of non-violent resistance, dating back to the Turkish conquest of the city, the Christians reduced the entrance of the church to a small doorway in order to keep the Turks from riding their horses inside.
We visited the grotto honored as the birthplace of Jesus and found a beautiful Catholic service being sung in Latin.
Holv Land Trust - Nonviolence in Action
In the afternoon we visited Holy Land Trust, where we listened to an intensely thought-provoking presentation by director Sami Awad, nephew of Mubarak Awad, who was a leading educator and organizer of nonviolent resistance in the first intifada. Sami posed the question, “What if the occupation ended tomorrow?” to emphasize the need for proactive community-building and the strengthening of democratic institutions within Palestine, as part of its movement towards liberation and sovereignty.
An educator in nonviolence, Sami explained nonviolence as a constructive force, empowering individuals and communities, and not merely an obstructive force against an oppressive system. For example, he proposed that nonviolence is not Palestinians destroying the Wall (which would only be rebuilt again and again), but rather making the Israeli population want to take it down in recognition of the Palestinians’ equal right to be here on this land.
The vision of Holy Land Trust is to transform civil society, through teaching peace-building in the schools from kindergarten on, mass organizing, and creating/using the media (such as the Palestinian News Network, http://www.palestinenet.org/) as a tool for nonviolence and democracy. Sami elaborated on the history of Palestinian nonviolence, underscoring that nonviolence is not a Western import, but indigenous to Palestinian culture, and also pointed out that Palestinians have engaged in nonviolence for a long time without using the label “nonviolence.”
Daher’s Vineyard - Holding Out
We spent the late afternoon and night at Daher’s vineyard, the land of a Palestinian family that is under threat of confiscation by Israel. The Daher family has been fighting to hold onto their land for 14 years. They have lived on it, farming grapes, olives, and almonds since 1924. Unlike many other Palestinians who sealed land transactions with a handshake, the Daher family obtained written proof. These documents from the British have allowed them to continue their struggle for this long. Anton, a teacher of Christianity in Bethlehem, related a time when he challenged a settler about documented rights to the land, and in response the settler referred to the ultimate legitimizing document: the Bible.
When the sun set and the lights of the surrounding settlements came on in the panoramic valley, the intimidation closing in on the Dahers’ home was profoundly and graphically illustrated. At eye level, on every hilltop, were yellow and white lights glaring from new settlements that look like a cross between a U.S. suburb and military housing – uniform, homogenous, imposing, neatly lined houses with armed guards on constant alert.
Many of us marvel at how the members of this family maintain such warmth, open hearts, such humor and generosity, in the midst of such a bleak, uphill, asymmetrical battle. They open their home as a “Tent of All Nations” for people from all over the world to visit, learn, show solidarity, and “build bridges not walls.”
Report by Eswan Keyes, Donna Nassor, Gretchen Merryman-Lotze, Peggy Ray, and Zara Zimbardo
