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Tarqumiya

It’s 3:45 in the morning and a humid forty-five degrees. So, I guess you could say that no one is at their best at Tarqumiya checkpoint. Tarqumiya is one of the massive terminal checkpoints permitting passage from the West Bank to Israel. It could be an international border crossing. A line of turnstiles admits travelers into an open paved area from where they funnel into a zigzagging lane leading inside. But only one turnstile is open. The crowd waiting to pass are Palestinian men with Israeli work permits. And inside, only four people, employees of a private security contractor, are checking permits. By the wait times, it’s easy to see that’s not enough. The crowd forms a wide queue bunched together in front of the one open turnstile. They seem to be straining against air the width of one man’s outstretched arms and a little further. The man in question is a stout Palestinian in a ripped jumpsuit and faded high-viz vest. He’s responsible for attempting to keep this crowd of men in line. At first, he’s successful. He seems fearless, halting the crowd with his body thrown between rushing men. His arms define that invisible line as he yells something that sounds like, “Back up, back up, back up!” The queue listens for a while, stopping when he tells them too. Then those in the back start surging up on the sides. The queue turns into a pulsing crowd, taking over the platform where we stand. When next he lets them go, they don’t stop for anything. The disturbance (it isn’t mayhem, they aren’t a mob) lasts about a half hour. Some men climb over the twenty-foot-high fence to skip the turnstile. Most just keep pressing towards the front. At the climax, voices are raised. Hands pound on sheet metal dividers. A few limber men climb up on the roof of the little shelter we’re under. Our translator becomes uncomfortable and tells us we should move. So we wade out of the crowd and walk down the fence a ways to a viewpoint where we can continue counting. The crowd didn’t frighten me, but I can’t complain of the smoke-free air by the fence. This daily checkpoint crossing is routine for many Palestinians who work inside Israel. I’ve been known to complain about my fifty-minute morning commute for work. Now add a long wait in the cold dark and a rushed checkpoint crossing out the other side. That is, if you haven’t wound up on a security black list or had your employer cancel your permit overnight. Then another bus ride to whichever city you work in, sometimes an hour or more away. This commute can add four hours to the workday. It leaves the men little to no time for family, let alone recreation. Seen in this light, it’s easy to understand the anger of men waiting in the cold. Around six-thousand passed the checkpoint in the three hours we counted. When we left, the queue still stretched a hundred yards past the turnstile. And after working ten or so hours, they’ll cross back over. Men will go home, see their families, and get some sleep before waking at three AM and doing it all over again. Just one way of many in which the occupation restricts movement and access in the West Bank. ------- I am serving on the World Council of Churches' Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme in Palestine and Israel (EAPPI) as an Ecumenical Accompanier. Any views or opinions contained herein are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of the WCC. Please do not forward or use any part of this communication without permission. Thank you.

#palestine #westbank #checkpoint #human rights

The gang's back together again. #ChristmasinJordan #peaceonearth

#peaceonearth #christmasinjordan

Thanksgiving at Al Aqsa. #jerusalem #alaqsa #domeoftherock

#domeoftherock #jerusalem #alaqsa

(Dis)connected Snippets of a Weekend in Tel Aviv

.1. The bus is mostly empty the morning I start my trip to Tel Aviv -- older women with sunworn faces, a few university students, a father and his son, me and two or three other travelers. When we pull up to the Beit Jala highway checkpoint, only the younger Palestinians disembark to have their IDs checked. The father steps off, telling his son to stay in his seat with a hand gesture. The boy looks to be around twelve or thirteen at the most, and from where I sit two rows back on the opposite side, he's nearly invisible in his seat against the window. Two soldiers board after a few minutes and make their way down the aisle, glancing at passports and IDs, asking the foreigners where they're from. When the first one comes to the seat where the boy waits, he stops. His voice immediately starts to rise as he gestures at the boy, then the door immediately across from him, his free hand making the quick up and down motion most people would interpret as a command to stand up, the other hand resting on the automatic rifle slung across his chest. The soldier is speaking Hebrew at this point, which most likely the boy doesn't understand; looking a little nervous, he stands up and holds out a rolled up piece of paper. When he stands, the soldier slams his fisted hand against the back of the empty seat and yells for the boy to sit down, this time in Arabic. The boy sits, quickly, and the soldier keeps yelling, a lot of words I don't understand. He takes the paper from the boy and gives it a cursory glance before asking where his father is. The boy points toward the door but can't really point out his father since the soldier is blocking the aisle and doesn't want him to stand up. The soldier keeps asking, "Where's your father?" The older woman sitting with her daughter just across the aisle from this scene finally interjects, "His father is there, down with the others," and points to the man standing in the short line below. The soldier leans over her, looking out the window, then turns back to the boy, speaks again in his almost-shout, drops the rolled paper on the empty seat, and turns to me. I hand over my passport, opened to my picture with my Israeli visa card below. "Where are you from?" His voice is deadpan, expressionless, as if I hadn't just watched him shouting at a boy with his hand on his excessive weaponry. He hands my passport back before I answer, his eyes already scouting out the back of the bus, which is empty, before he turns and moves back up the bus and exits. A few minutes later, the line of people who got off for ID checks are all back in their seats. The boy's father sits down heavily. Neither of them say anything. .2. A small hope that the people who say the tide are turning are right: graffiti in Tel Aviv, the stencil sort that's gone up all over the city -- "There's no pride in occupation." .3. The hostel I'm staying at for my weekend hosts a pub crawl, and since the nightlife here is supposed to be so iconic, I go ahead and spend 80 shekels on it. The only other girls in the group are New Yorkers, an exchange student in Amman and her sister and brother-in-law come to visit. The rest of the sober group contains two lovely men from France. Then there's the pre-gamers who are smashed before we start: six or seven guys from Germany and three Americans who just finished their Birthright. Our guide got back from India earlier that morning and says his biggest hobby is urban agriculture. We head to the first bar, which is right next door to the hostel, and I grab a table with the girls and their brother, where we nurse beers and talk about Jordan and, with our voices lowered, the refugee and economic crisis there and the steady occupational violence here. It's a relief to me to be drinking with someone who sees things that I see, because so far I've met a lot of party tourists and laid-back residents who don't seem to think about the occupation at all, which is easy in Tel Aviv because you don't really see it. In a break of our conversation I overhear the Jewish American guys talking. "Hopefully no one gets stabbed tonight," the one who introduced himself as Rudy says; he's definitely the drunkest of all the pre-gamers (spoiler alert: later in the evening he'll spend all his time hanging off the necks of my new friend and I, not exactly because he's interested but because he literally can't stand without support). "Oh, yeah, that's not really likely," one of the other guys says, mentioning something about security at the clubs. "It happened today," Rudy says, ignoring him, "two people stabbed when they went to pray. It's happening every day." He sits down heavy on a bench and leans against the wall, shaking his head, eyes closed. "Every single day. You see them celebrating on Instagram and shit, proud of themselves for killing us, every single day." One of his friends sits down and puts an arm around his shoulder, and my conversation picks back up, and I stop paying attention to the side drama. It's true, two settlers were stabbed outside a synagogue near Tel Aviv that day; when I heard, I'd quipped sarcastically to myself, "Maybe the violence just follows me," because Tel Aviv had been quiet for weeks before this, and I've been in Bethlehem hearing sound bombs and seeing reports of teargas and arrests and home demolitions and shootings in and around the city. And without exaggeration, I can say that does happen every single day. My brief view into Rudy's world, though, showed a place where those attacks are all retaliatory and justified, or maybe even nonexistent. How there can ever be peace between these peoples, when what they see is so completely opposite, is a good question. .4. A black car pulls up beside me as I'm leaving Tel Aviv, walking to the bus station with my pack. The man inside talks at me in Hebrew (apparently I can pass for local in Tel Aviv, based on the number of times people addressed me in Hebrew without pause). I say I don't speak Hebrew, and he says, "Oh, I was just wondering if you know any gay after-parties around." At 8:30 AM. On Shabbat. Then he asks where I'm from and says "Usually I'm into boys, but you're so cute. Don't you want to ride around with me for a bit and have some fun?" And I begin sputtering with laughter, attempt a polite no, say goodbye, walk away, and die laughing. The absurd, as reality. Pretty much sums up much of my experience in these parts.

This shirt was a gift for my sixteenth birthday. Back then it was about self-love, self-care, looking at a mirror and seeing someone whose life was worthwhile and meaningful. Then I spent some years thinking it was about the world, how loving others is an act of transformation. Now I look around and cross my arms over my chest, because the slogan seems glib and cute and something a sixteen-year-old would say, and I'm twenty-four and staring down a separation wall and awkwardly politely smiling at a soldier after he checks my passport and awkwardly rudely avoiding eye contact with the umpteenth young man hitting on me in the street (you know Bethlehem is short on tourists when it's me they're catcalling). So maybe this shirt now falls into the category of my sarcastic clothing choices (#) but I'll still wear it. More than ever these days I need that reminder that loving the world starts with self-love and acceptance, and I cannot make peace around me if I am full of unresolved turmoil. #selfiesunday (now that's what I call anticlimactic)

#selfiesunday

Kudos to you, whoever you are. #bethlehem #carintree #mabrouk

#carintree #bethlehem #mabrouk

The face of someone who just climbed the Snake Path at Masada in average time. Yes, the red of my shirt and face were matching, and I was proud to be average. #Masada

#masada

Sometimes I look up from the street just inside the Damascus Gate and see soldiers standing along these ramparts. Most of the time I don't look up. #jerusalem #Damascusgate #alaqsa

#damascusgate #jerusalem #alaqsa

That's the nature of collective punishment. If you integrate yourself into the population, you will be included amongst them when the hammer falls. The crime I commit is the crime of presence, of witness. If I remove my body and my conscientiousness and my eyes, then there is no crime and no punishment. I have that choice.

The crime of presence

My eyes are still dry and stinging at the corners, eighteen hours later. Yes, teargas makes you cry, because your eyes are burning and keeping them open to make your way back up the street is nearly impossible. I can cover my nose and my mouth with my scarf to lessen the effect somewhat, but there’s no remedy for gas in the eyes. By the time I backtrack to the intersection where all the cars are turning and hail a taxi, my nose is dripping, my eyes are red and tears drip down my cheeks, the dry burn in my sinuses has given me a headache, and my throat feels raw.

Welcome to Bethlehem.

A little bit of background: I didn’t come seeking out a clash. Neither did 95% (or more) of the people on the street that was teargassed. It’s 4:45 in the afternoon/almost evening on a Saturday, meaning it’s the end of Shabbat and the weekend and people are out doing what they typically do – grocery shopping, errand running, business as usual. Me, I’m attempting to walk back to checkpoint 300 in order to catch the bus on the other side so that I don’t have to endure the lengthy highway checkpoint for the other bus. I’ve just finalized an apartment for the next month, and I’ll move in on Tuesday and start Arabic lessons on Wednesday, and it’s just nice to be walking and taking public transport and getting used to normal city things again.

Well. Here in Bethlehem, teargas in the afternoon is a normal city thing. Sound bombs and rubber bullets and live ammunition are normal city things. If you’re anywhere close to the checkpoint (read: soldiers), then collective punishment is a normal city thing.

Checkpoint 300 might not have been officially closed, but no one will drive through the clouds of teargas to use it, so effectively, one of the two entrances to Jerusalem is blocked. So I take the taxi to where I can catch the other bus, the one that winds through Beit Jala till it connects to Highway 60 and eventually back to the Damascus Gate. I don’t like this bus, and it’s not just because it can take more than a half hour to get through the checkpoint. It’s because when the bus stops in front of the soldiers, all the Palestinian passengers file off, and when I stand up to exit, they all tell me to stay on the bus because I’m a tourist. That’s the official stance. Palestinians off the bus to be searched. Anyone with a western passport who doesn’t look Arab, stay on the bus and flash your passport at the soldiers when they patrol up the aisle.

Despite my intentions to exit the bus this time, I sit back down when the girl across from me tells me to stay on because I’m a tourist. Why? Because I have a habit of not drawing attention to myself, because I tend to follow the rules when I’m already nervous, because I’m afraid and not as confident as I may seem, and yes, I am ashamed. I am angry and ashamed and my eyes are still burning.

So. Two instances of collective punishment, one in which I am included, one in which I am exempt. I am no more innocent or guilty than the vast majority of those experiencing these things alongside me, not unless the crime for which we are all being punished is the existence of Palestinians on lands desired by the Israeli government. And why else would they tell me to stay on the bus, quiet and comfortable in my seat while the residents of the city are lined up and ID-checked and searched under the elements? So it stands to reason that the teargas isn’t meant for me, and that’s why they try to get all the tourists out of Bethlehem by afternoon so we don’t see it and feel it, and it stands to reason that I have to choose to be exempted, by staying in my seat on the bus and avoiding the roads anywhere near the checkpoint.

Because that’s the nature of collective punishment. If you integrate yourself into the population, you will be included amongst them when the hammer falls. The crime I commit is the crime of presence, of witness. If I remove my body and my conscientiousness and my eyes, then there is no crime and no punishment. I have that choice.

And that can’t be said for the others. Yes, there are some young men and boys who throw stones or shoot marbles out of slingshots. They are met with sound grenades, teargas, rubber bullets, and live ammunition. They are run over by army jeeps and clubbed in the heads with the butts of automatic rifles and arrested and sent to prison for months and years, no matter their age. Journalists and first responders are maced in the face. And entire communities are teargassed while soldiers pronounce over loudspeaker, “We are the Israeli occupation forces. If you throw stones we will hit you with gas until you die. The children, the youth, the old people, all of you – we won’t spare any of you."

An eight month old baby died of excessive teargas inhalation that night. No one can tell me that is a just punishment for the act of stonesthrowing, an act that almost never harms a soldier. No one can tell me that it is the Palestinians who are aggressors and the Israelis who merely defend themselves. And no one can say that Israel is not engaging in collective punishment, not when you watch what happens at checkpoints, not when you see the gassed streets empty in minutes, not when your own eyes are still burning, eighteen hours later.

–

https://www.facebook.com/PNNEnglish/videos/908834729195154/ https://www.facebook.com/JewishVoiceforPeace/videos/10154294921964992/ http://www.maannews.com/Content.aspx?id=768571

#graffiti in #jerusalem. Figures.

#jerusalem #graffiti

Just let the trees grow. Just let the olives be harvested. Just build the wall where it belongs, on the other side of the grove. Just. Only. They really aren't asking for much. #bethlehempeacecenter #bethlehem #letthetreesgrow

#letthetreesgrow #bethlehempeacecenter #bethlehem

Picking olives is kinda like picking blueberries, only from a tree. #oliveharvest #bethlehem

#oliveharvest #bethlehem

We met this man in #Lakiya who built his home illegally on his family's land (because the government does not recognize his ownership) using stones gathered from the rubble of #Palestinian villages all across the #WestBank and #Israel. In his words, "Maybe if I had money, I don't build like this. I'm glad I don't have money." #Negev #Bedouins

#israel #lakiya #palestinian #negev #westbank #bedouins

Had my first taste of #teargas today. Mr. #Netanyahu, tear down this #wall. #roadtojericho #eastjerusalem

#wall #roadtojericho #teargas #eastjerusalem #netanyahu

Lifta and the Right of Return

It's quite the challenge finding Lifta. It's not that the empty village is in an out-of-the-way place or that it's fallen completely out of the public eye. You can see it from the road when you enter Western Jerusalem, and thirteen families still live there, and the government has been trying to destroy it to make way for upscale highrises since 2012. But when we ask, no one confesses any knowledge of the location. It's not until the seventh man we approach that we get a set of coherent directions, without confused giggling (girl painting her nails behind counter at Herzog Mountain) or embarrassed consternation (business man of twenty years in Jerusalem who has never heard of this place called Lifta). I normally wouldn't think that much of it. However, we began our search by taxis from Yad Vashem, official taxis called for us by one of the security men at the museum, and for the first five minutes they claimed not to know where Lifta was, before finally agreeing with each other via radio that it must be at the entrance to Jerusalem and beginning a circuitous route that direction, all the while speaking to each other in Hebrew. One of the girls in our group happens to speak some Hebrew, and while our group leader grew increasingly more upset at their behavior, eventually asking them to turn around and take us back to Yad Vashem Square, she was listening with some incredulity. Later she told us our driver kept repeating, "Lifta, Lifta, they want to go to Lifta? Don't these people know they are in Israel?" Well. Yes, technically, even by the 1967 armistice lines, we were at that point in Israel. But then, technically at this point so is Lifta. And technicalities aside, if the implication is that if visitors to Israel expect to be treated civilly, they should only visit Israeli institutions (which is my interpretation of the implication), well, I guess we already kind of knew that. Lifta is a Palestinian village in the middle of modern-day Jerusalem whose inhabitants fled in 1947-1948 after six residents were murdered by members of Lehi, a Zionist militia. Before they could return, Jewish settlers from Kurdistan and Iraq moved into their homes. These Israeli residents lived in Lifta through the 1950's during the Israeli government's program of destroying Palestinian villages to prevent the return of the rightful residents, meaning that Lifta was spared this destruction. After the majority of these residents moved into more modern housing in the 1960's, Palestinian home-owners (still prevented from returning to live) made the houses unlivable by tearing holes in the roofs, preventing any other settlers from moving into the village. Today, Lifta is a mostly deserted testament to the ongoing insistence of Palestinian residents that they have the right to return to their homes. Thirteen of the Kurdish and Iraqi Jewish families still live in the homes lining the upper edge of the valley, and together with the original residents of Lifta, they oppose any measures to bulldoze the village to make way for the fancy housing project that has been proposed. The spring of Lifta, down in the bottom of the valley, is revered by Othodox Jews because it is a natural spring issuing from Jerusalem. When we arrive at the pool, a pair of young Israeli lovers are sitting above the spout, drying in the late afternoon warmth; our guide calls it "a common sin in Lifta." He is a man named Eitan, a "second-class Israeli" due to his Argentine/Jewish heritage. He's done a lot of important work with Israelis, most recent of which is his project De-Colonize, and he gives us the tour of Lifta. At one point, we stop near a house that is still inhabited on the upper hillside, and members of my group comment of the ripe red fruit hanging from the giant cactus creeping across the rocky slope. "That's saber," he says. "I think, in English, something pear?" "Cactus pear!" someone suggests, and he agrees. "They didn't really used to eat the fruit of it though. They brought it from Mexico in the 1800's, just to mark the boundaries between people's homes. It's a very hardy plant. It thrives even without anyone taking care of it. So in Lifta, and all the old abandoned places, it grows everywhere." I am immediately thinking of bird vetch. White sweet clover. Dandelions. "So it's not something that grows here naturally?" I ask Eitan. "No," he says, then looks at me questioningly when I laugh. "In English we'd call it an invasive species," I explain. "It's funny, that it's the one thing that grows everywhere in the villages that were sort of invaded." "Yeah!" Eitan agrees, and I can tell he's thought of this connection before. "There's actually another thing that's funny. In Arabic they call it saber, in Hebrew sabal. In Israeli culture, what they consider a real true Israeli -- usually an Ashkenazi who was born here -- those they call sabal." "But it's not actually from here at all." "Yeah, but it came here, and now it's everywhere." He laughs and shrugs and continues down the path. Eitan doesn't really communicate if that's like the Israelis poking fun at themselves, or if it's a weird lapse in judgment, or if the word has other connotations that explain that usage. But the rest of our time, I keep seeing those massive cacti enveloping the gutted houses, and while it's nowhere near a perfect analogy, there is some truth in it. Some of our group spoke of Lifta's possibility as a World Heritage Site. Better than nothing, of course, and yes it would make an excellent one. But Lifta is a place residents could actually return to -- it's not in the center of Tel Aviv, it's not a modern-day kibbutz, it's an empty village in a valley on the edge of Jerusalem. The Right to Return may at times be a symbolic right focused mostly on reparations, but not here. Here it is a turning back of the years, fixing old homes, turning the earth for olive trees, scrubbing out the pools of the spring, chipping away the hate graffitied on the stones, pruning back the saber.

(Abandoned building in Lifta) (Lifta Spring) (Saber)

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