It's been a while since I last posted anything!
But to be honest, I kind of feel guilty every time I want to write something
about what's happening here; while in Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, and many
other places surrounding us it's really awful and the conditions are much worse than
here! Compared to all of them, Palestine is a much better place to be
at the moment; as one of my friends put it; "we know things are bad in the
Middle East when Palestine is one of the safest places to be." But
yesterday another one of my friends posted something on his facebook page that
was really powerful to me. He's come to Palestine just recently from the United
States, and he's going to be staying here for a while living and working in
Bethlehem.
I don't want to give any comments or anything on
the complexity of what he's written, I'd rather people read it and
just think about it by themselves. Here it goes:
"Perhaps one of the most terrifying things for me while traveling around Palestine is realizing how many American Jews come to this land and believe that Israel and what Israel is doing somehow makes them feel closer to their Jewish identity.
The violence that surrounds me sickens me so
much, particularly because I recognize as an American how complicit I am, and
how many of my fellow Americans spend their lives
supporting these horrors…
Down the street from my apartment in Bethlehem,
a Palestinian city cut apart by an Israeli wall, there is the holy site of
Rachel’s Tomb. The Tomb sits inside the city of Bethlehem but the Israelis
built a wall on three sides to make it inaccessible to the Palestinians living
beside it but accessible to machine gun-toting Orthodox Jews from Brooklyn.
Just beside the Tomb’s Israeli walls are Aida and Azza refugee camps, full of
Palestinians ethnically cleansed from their homes by Israel in 1948, prevented
from ever seeing their homeland by Israeli laws which allow Jews from anywhere
on Earth to move to Israel subsidized, but prevent Palestinians born there from
ever going home. On the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem road, some of the refugees’ old
homes and mosques are visible along the side of the highway, but most Israelis
call them “ancient, Arab-built ruins.”
In the Old City of Hebron, fences have been
placed above the streets to prevent 500 Orthodox Jewish settlers who have taken
over the second stories of Palestinian houses (with IDF support) from throwing
trash down on the residents who have stayed. They still throw trash, which
collects on the fence above as a visible reminder, and now they sometimes pee
on Palestinians as well, as they know their piss will fall through the fence
and hit Palestinians as they walk. At the tomb of Abraham, surrounded by
dancing Orthodox Jews with American accents and Israeli soldiers who demand to
know your religion before deciding whether you can pass, a visiting Latin
American Orthodox tourist beside me laments that part of the tomb is still
accessible to Muslims on the other side.
I travel from Bethlehem to Ramallah, taking a
road that carefully avoids Jerusalem and Israeli settlements (off-limits to
almost all Palestinians) by going South, East, North, and then finally West in
order to reach a destination immediately North of us. Along the road sit white
Jewish settlers, toting machine guns and waiting for their buses into
Jerusalem. Sometimes the Palestinian roads are closed by the IDF inexplicably
or for Jewish holidays or at odd hours, stranding Palestinians miles away from
home, while the Jewish-only roads that bypass the West Bank remain open for
use.
And on Rivlin street in Jerusalem, young
American Jews drink the night away, ecstatic at the chance to reconnect with a
land they start to call “home,” and to buy “Israeli Defense Forces” shirts for
friends back home, apparently happy about (or at least, not giving much of a
shit about) the violence that makes life a living hell for the millions of
Palestinians all around them…"
