A year of Palestine

A year ago I was boarding a plane to go to Palestine. At the time I had no idea what I was getting into, no idea how it would change me. On a personal level, I was seeking to make things "real." I'd been doing social justice organizing work since my teens and that work had come almost exclusively from a place of anger. My anger was faceless, both towards those I was fighting in solidarity with, and those I was fighting against. An older activist who I greatly respect once wrote an email to me which she signed off with "warmth and revolution." The phrase struck a chord with me, both because of how much I appreciated the sentiment, and how far it was from my reality. I was beginning to feel how unsustainable organizing out of pure anger was, that movements too needed love to survive. For me this meant that I needed faces and voices and stories.

I chose to focus my work on Palestine because, as a Jew, I felt profoundly lied to and profoundly responsible. I grew up with the common Zionist mantra of "a land without people for a people without land." I was 18 and in college halfway across the country before I heard anything contradicting this. Though resistant at first, I finally began to explore just who these "so-called Palestinians" were and why they wanted "to push us into the sea." The answers I found were shocking. 531 villages were destroyed and 750,000 people fled or were expelled for the founding of Israel. Israel was currently building a wall twice the height of the Berlin Wall and 400 miles long to keep Palestinians out. Over a million Israeli bullets were fired in the first few days of the second Intifada.

Still, these were all just numbers. Quickly those numbers became real people.

Each time something bad happened, despite all I had read, I would be surprised, and each time my Palestinian friends would go out of their way to tell me it was normal. I think there were a lot of reasons why they did that. The most obvious is that they didn't want me to be able to see things as exceptions. The news always portrays atrocities as isolated occurrences, simultaneously glorifying and denouncing them so that nobody has to recognize patterns or examine root causes. I also think that saying "this is normal" to an outsider recognizes that it shouldn't be, and that's an important thing to constantly affirm. There was always a certain calmness about it that I didn't know what to do with. It wasn't quite jaded, or even angry. It was more of a blase toughness – something that just was and that people had to keep fighting through. People talk all the time about suicide bombings, about the violence of Palestinians, and all I could keep wondering while I was there was how there wasn't more violence.

In Arabic, there is a concept called sumoud. The idea was stressed to me throughout my stay. The word doesn't quite translate, but basically it means steadfastness. People remaining on their land in the face of intimidation, violence, economic strangulation, and forced displacement is an act of resistance.

We've all probably heard about what's going on in Gaza right now. Israel has the area under a full blockade. Nothing is being allowed in, including fuel, medicine, or water filters. There is a vast humanitarian crisis underway. Two days ago though, there was a bit of hope. Palestinian militants, in an act of refusal to resign their
fate to the hands of governments, destroyed the majority of the border fence that separates Gaza from Egypt. Over 200,000 Gazans entered Egypt, bought supplies to sustain themselves and their families and, for the most part, returned home. That's sumoud.

Today I have more faces and stories than I sometimes want. I certainly have more love, but I also have more rage. For the first few months after returning home the stories would constantly haunt me. My only two impulses were to either sleep constantly or burn everything I saw remotely relating to the occupation. Bulldozers,
which I now associated with the destruction of houses and trees, made me shake.

My friend Yousef got arrested soon after I came home, and it took all my self control, and lectures by a few good friends, to convince me that the best course of action was not to buy a plane ticket back there. A few days before I left to go to Palestine, I wrote, "One thing I would like to do upon return from my trip is to use my voice to begin to break down the mirage that there is a monolithic Jewish opinion on Israel and its actions." Ultimately, I know I am more useful here. I also would like to hope that when I get the call that the bulldozers have come to Beit Ommar, the village where I lived for three months, bringing with them the long dreaded wall, that I will
drop whatever I am doing and go fight beside my friends.

This May is the 60th anniversary of the founding of Israel, what Palestinians call Al Nakba - The Catastrophe. I am working with a group of people here in Philly to organize 60 days of action leading up to the anniversary. The conflict did not begin with the occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem. It began with the violent dispossession of people from their homes, and it will not end until this is recognized and rectified.