Letters from Palestine
Six Bay Area residents who spent this summer in the Middle East share their observations on the people, the politics, and the hope for peace

The writers

Dara Silverman, a 30-year-old political organizer from Oakland, recently returned from a summer in Israel and the occupied territories. She is a member of A Jewish Voice for Peace.

Noura Khouri, 32, is a Palestinian American resident of San Francisco. She works as an event marketing specialist for E-Generation and has been in the Palestinian territories since early June.

Rob Eshelman, of San Francisco, was the legislative aide to San Francisco Board of Supervisors president Matt Gonzalez before leaving in early July to travel through the Middle East. He plans to attend graduate school in the fall.

Cathy Mahoney teaches fourth and fifth grade at Prescott Elementary School in Oakland, where she lives. She's a 48-year-old mother of three.

Arla Ertz, a 54-year-old San Francisco resident, is the program director for Drawbridge, an arts program for homeless children.

Michelle Hudson, 24, is an Oakland resident doing her second annual trip to the Middle East as a volunteer for the International Solidarity Movement. She's traveling with her partner, Tracie De Angelis, a 38-year-old social justice activist.

UNCHECKED POLITICAL VIOLENCE has defined the relationship between Israelis and Palestinians since the Jewish state's creation in 1948, and particularly since the intifada uprisings of recent years that Palestinians have called to resist Israel's illegal occupation since 1967 of Gaza and the West Bank.

Both sides have committed horrible atrocities. Yet while Israel has taken political and military steps to curtail Palestinian attacks that have employed suicide bombers and commando raids, it has been up to international human rights activists to try to stem Israel's attacks on Palestinians.

Thus was formed the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), an organization through which volunteer activists bear witness, protest, organize, and often act as human shields to stop injustices against the Palestinians. The dangerous nature of that work was highlighted March 16 when 23-year-old Rachel Corrie was crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer as she tried to prevent the destruction of a Palestinian home.

Since then hundreds of activists from around the world have given their time and money to take part in the movement, including these half-dozen activists from the Bay Area who have been corresponding with the Bay Guardian during an eventful summer marked by more death and division, some hope for eventual peace, and Israel's construction of a vast security wall that has sparked sharp international criticism, even by the hawkish President George W. Bush.

While the following letters have been edited for length and clarity and are just a sampling of what we've received, they represent the uncensored, first-draft observations from several places and perspectives of what's actually going on over there. We hope you find them as enlightening and informative as we did. (Steven T. Jones)

Dara Silverman

JERUSALEM, JUNE 14 – The first day was a bit hard, but it got easier as the day went on. Olympic Airlines from Greece flies into the Israeli airports. I was told that they worry about bombs, and so the majority of flights arrive and leave in the middle of the night/early morning. So I arrived at 4 a.m.

I had been worried about Israeli customs, having heard many stories about internationals being stopped, given shorter visas then usual, etc. But nothing came up on the computer when they entered my name, and because I was a white American Jew with a list of people to visit in Israel, the tired customs official corrected my pronunciation of the Negev desert, and let me pass through.

The sun began to rise as we approached Jerusalem. The landscape is very similar to Crete, rocky and scrubby, with clusters of trees. The buildings run the range from white to tan, mostly clean and orderly apartment buildings. The settlements, where Israeli people have built houses in the occupied territories, can be identified by their circular construction, often on top of hills.

I was the last of the 10 in my van to be dropped off, and the driver, Uri, began to talk as he drove me to the Damascus Gate. He had been in the Israeli military six years before, during the war with Lebanon. His job was to search for land mines in the homes of Lebanese people.

He dropped me off at the gate, which borders the Muslim and Armenian Quarters on the edge of East Jerusalem. East Jerusalem is the Palestinian part of the city. It is often left out of the calculations when people discuss the occupied territories, even though more then 250,000 Palestinians live there.

The gate itself is beautiful and massive. It dates back to the second century C.E. and is the most ornate gate in the city. There is a market around it on the weekends, and a few carts and vendors throughout the week. Later, someone pointed out the Israeli soldier stationed in the watchtower at all times. After walking around a bit, I started to call through my list of contacts, to figure out where I should go next....

As I waited for a bus, I struck up a conversation with a young bassoon player, Gilah.... She was the first person to tell me about the bombing of the bus in the center of West Jerusalem. Later, my friend told me that an acquaintance had walked out onto the street and seen chunks of flesh on the ground from some of the 16 people who were killed and many more injured. It was big news, and everyone was talking.

At the same time, the Israeli military had dropped a rocket on the house of an alleged Hamas leader, killing three civilians nearby. Fifteen Palestinians were killed altogether on June 10 and 11, 11 of them civilians. She said something to me about the costs of occupation that are immeasurable – how do you record the memories and experiences that people grow in a war zone?

Noura Khouri

RAMALLAH, JULY 2 – After being interrogated three times before even getting my luggage Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion Airport, I was then instructed to return to the head interrogator in order to get my passport back. After more than another half hour waiting for my luggage to be x-rayed for the third time, I was asked to step into some strange room and go through a metal detector, and only then was I set free.

One perhaps not-so-surprising fact is that each and every one who had to endure these treacherous lines was of Arab decent (I thought they would throw in a token tourist or two just to make it look a little less obvious).

After being set free, I was greeted by a very friendly and enthusiastic shuttle driver who invited me to sit up front with him. In my shuttle I asked a lady from Finland if she was interrogated, and she said yes. I asked her how many times, and she said only once.

When I told her about my eventful experience she said, "Well, it is good. It is for our security." I'm sure she could not have possibly known how awful that sounded to me, but being so relieved to be set free, I let it go.

However, it is great to be here. Amidst all the ruins and destruction, the land is more beautiful than I could have imagined, and it is great to be amongst my peeps. I feel so at home.

So far all the locals love to snicker quietly at my Arabic while assuring me kindly that I am doing just fine and will improve greatly very soon. So, I made it to Ramallah, where I am right now. The streets are hopping and we ISMers are taking them over and having a blast.

Dara Silverman

JERUSALEM, JUNE 20 – Everything is always more complex than I think at first. On Thursday, I was walking near Jaffa Road, the shopping district where the bomb had gone off last Wednesday, and I passed a store with a handwritten sign in the window: "Discount for having courage – loving and supporting Israel."

My cab driver later that day, Moshe, an older Israeli man, told me that after keeping Palestinians in the morgue for 55 years, what could Israelis expect? Then he asked me if I wanted to come stay at his house (no sex, he said, unless I got in his bed). He had just finished hosting a girl from Florida. Before I got out of the cab he gave me some basil from his garden to smell and his number.

EAST JERUSALEM, JULY 8 (two days before her departure) – For me, as a white, international Jewish woman, checkpoints can be a fairly cordial affair from the soldier side. When I get to the front of the line, they ask for my passport, or sometimes they just wave me through without even checking it. Often I get a "welcome to Israel" or "have a great trip" or "sorry we have to do this to you." ...

I feel the righteous anger building, slowly but surely in me over the past month. And as much as I can analyze it and examine it and try to dismantle it, it is a part of me. And it isn't going away. And so I am left to struggle with the dilemma of how to address all the ways in which, just like in the U.S., I am afforded privilege.

The turning point for me was two Sundays ago. I was returning with a group of friends from the Mount of Olives, a site that overlooks Jerusalem and is supposedly very nice at sunset. We got lost, couldn't really find it, but did see a nice sunset, and were walking back to the hostel through the Old City, in the Arab Quarter.

The streets are very narrow, and cobbled, and the buildings go up for two, three, or four stories. It is pretty much all stone, and quite old. The options for movement can be somewhat limited.

As we walked I began to hear a noise rising from up ahead, echoing throughout the streets. It was chanting and yelling. I had seen many notices earlier in the week for a rally that said, "Israel is an outpost and we are all settlers," referring to the Israeli neighborhoods that are built in the occupied territories, on Palestinian land the Israeli government confiscated.

The signs were yellow and had stars that said "special salute to the hill-top youth," the young people raised in these colonies who are the most aggressive about taking more land and building out into the territories. We could see the singing and yelling marchers coming toward us, and I realized this was the parade of settlers, the shock troopers of colonialism in Israel.

They stopped, about 25 meters away, and stood and sang before continuing forward. Suddenly, white Jewish boys and men streamed around me. They streamed around me singing and looking curiously at our small group, which was obviously not a part of their festivities.

I asked a cameraman what was going on, and he told me that it happened at the beginning of every month and every Tuesday night. He told me that they were settlers who came in to the city to march from gate to gate and chant and sing. It was Rosh Chodesh, the day before the beginning of the new month in the Jewish calendar.

In my experience in the U.S., this tends to be a pretty woman-bonding-with-woman event. Sometimes there are ritual circles or gatherings, pretty low-key celebrations of the new moon, as the calendar is based on the lunar cycle.

I am not sure I can describe what it was like as I moved to the side and watched them pass, but I felt like my heart was breaking. Here were people like me, at least some from a similar background, taking a tradition and belief that I share a part of, that I want to believe in, and using it as a colonial tool to hammer their supremacy home, every week, every month.

I felt myself torn; I want to know the songs they were singing, the prayers they were chanting, but not like that. Not like a hammering rod to shove down the throat of the neighborhood. Not the soldiers stopping Palestinians from crossing the street until the march had gone by, who grabbed a guy by the cheek and smashed him against the wall next to my friend's head to stop him from moving.

I backed up as the march continued because I had been talking to a woman who was visiting from the States and worked for the U.N. and hadn't realized that everyone else was about 10 meters back; we were surrounded by soldiers. I realized there were soldiers in some of the apartments as well, scanning the crowd.

Now I can see why other Jews come back from visiting Palestine and Israel and need to take space from the Jewish community. And I struggle against this within myself every day I am here. Just like I struggle against these same forces in the U.S., internally and externally, every day. Because I am these settlers and they are me. The struggle to maintain and protect my privilege and the desire and work to fight and resist in every way I know how.

Some of the things I see here every day I have gotten used to. And it is really uncomfortable to notice how quickly that can happen.

Noura Khouri

QALQUILYA, JULY 9 – Yesterday we arrived at the checkpoint at 9 a.m.... I had an alright time negotiating with the soldiers. There is one who is really nice to me. I'm not sure it is a good thing, though. They asked me if I was married. I ignored the questions but asked one of the soldiers, who was Palestinian, why he would do such a thing as be involved with the military, and he said it was because they pay him a lot of money and pay for his school. That was really sad to me. I had to of course get in my final comment to "remember the struggle of his people" as I walked away, relieved enough, with my passport. Overall, it seems to be a relatively calm time in the area, which just makes it that much more difficult for me to understand the sickening wall and need for all the damn checkpoints.

Rob Eshelman

TEL AVIV, JULY 11 – I am not going to Palestine with a fatalistic attitude. International solidarity movements have played invaluable roles in the struggles for self-determination in places such as South Africa, East Timor, and Chiapas. Mostly I am going to be among the Palestinian people and gain inspiration from their brave resistance to Israeli occupation and their undying struggle to live with dignity.

Cathy Mahoney

DEIR IBZIA, JULY 20 – Overall, things are better in the village this year than last year. Ramallah has been open most of the time, with only occasional curfews (it was closed one day last week). After the "road map" was announced, the Israeli army made eight new roadblocks on the road from Deir Ibzia to Ramallah.

Our friend Hella had to walk to the next village when she was in labor to get a car to go to the hospital. Because of all the roadblocks, no car could get through. Then she had to walk back again after the baby was born. Each time new roadblocks are built, the people open them up again, but then a few days later the Israeli bulldozers and army jeeps come and make new ones. It's so senseless, just pure oppression.

The economic situation is still very difficult.... More people are working in Ramallah, but most of the people who used to work in Israel before this intifada started still do not have jobs.

Rob Eshelman

EAST JERUSALEM, JULY 20 – East Jerusalem comes alive early. The 6 a.m. sun hits the high stone walls of the Old City and casts a long shadow before the Damascus Gate. Radios from taxi cabs and passing police vehicles squawk commands to the cab drivers, already chain-smoking, and the 18-year-old soldiers behind the wheels of their jeeps. A cab driver yells, "Tel Aviv, Tel Aviv," over and over, while the smell of falafel balls frying in hot oil and Turkish coffee wafts through the crisp morning air.

Despite being in Palestine, some things remain the same for me – the need for a morning caffeine fix and a look at the day's headlines. For the second consecutive day, the English-language edition of Haaretz is focused on a missing Israeli cab driver, Eliyahu Gorey, suspected of being apprehended by Palestinian militants. It smacks of the same stupid sensational journalism rampant in the U.S.: Lacy Peterson, or that child star from Colorado who we were commanded to care about.

The ride to Ramallah is bumpy, and I arrive at the Qalandia checkpoint outside the city within 30 minutes. Checkpoints – the object that so clearly illustrates the realities of Israeli occupation. From above, Qalandia would take the shape of a dumbbell. At each end of the checkpoint, massive amounts of activity. Cabs, trucks carrying goods, people trying to get to work or to see their families. In the middle, a long narrow stream of people passing nearly single file under the gaze of young Israeli soldiers with automatic weapons.

By 10 a.m. I'm at the offices of the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions (PGFTU) with Mohammed Aruri and nine other staff members of the organization. Mohammed has been jailed seven times since the 1970s. Rarely charged with any specific offense, his stays in jail are just administrative detention for being a threat to the established order. He's gentle in nature and says "You are welcome" nearly 20 times within the first five minutes of my arrival.

Mohammed is committed to the struggle of the Palestinian worker and to put an end to Israeli occupation. Coffee and cigarettes are laid on the table, and my lesson about the struggle of Palestinian workers and the current intifada begins.

For the 120,000 Palestinian laborers who worked in Israel prior to the al-Aqsa Intifada, living under occupation got precipitously worse when they all lost their jobs thanks to Israeli imposed border closures and intense restrictions on Palestinian travel to Israel. According to Mohammed, 60 percent of Palestinians are now unemployed and 70 percent are living below the poverty line. Two million Palestinians are living on less than two dollars per day.

In this light, one sees the 162 security checkpoints throughout the occupied territories and the restricted access to Israel as the economic equivalent of carpet bombing. The end result is a near collapse of the Palestinian economy. The West Bank, known for its olive oil and citrus fruits, and Gaza, where European markets bought flour, have virtually shut down because goods cannot pass out of the territories or are held up at checkpoints for so long that they perish. Furthermore, the closures have made it impossible for raw materials to be shipped into Palestine, and this hurts consumers and the territories' industrial sector. So in additional to the unemployed laborers now blocked from their old jobs in Israel, more and more workers within Palestine are losing their jobs.

"Everything is under Israeli control. Even the air we breathe," says Husein Faqahaa, director of educational programs at the PGFTU, as he grasps his neck as if choking. Husein was born in the small village of Sinjil, which lies between Nablus and Ramallah. It takes him three hours to get home because of the three checkpoints he needs to cross.

Cathy Mahoney

JENIN, JULY 25 – Jenin seems to me to be much poorer than Ramallah. There are no tourists, and people don't have much money to buy things. Of the villages I have visited so far, Araboni was very, very poor. In Taybey we visited a family that seemed quite prosperous and another family that has lost everything due to the construction of the wall. In the village of Romani, the mayor said that many people in the village are dependent on food aid because they have lost their land and they have lost their jobs in Israel. All of the villages around Jenin and Nablus are located on very rich farmland, but they are not able to export crops to Jordan and other Middle Eastern countries like they used to do.

What is really clear is that Israel's policies of stealing land for the construction of the wall and access roads, the demolition of homes and olive trees and other crops, the stealing of water resources, the closure of roads and entire areas by roadblocks and checkpoints, the complete restriction of exports, and not allowing Palestinians to work inside Israel are all designed to inflict the maximum economic suffering possible on the entire population.

Arla Ertz

BAHRTA, JULY 28 – We walked to the school to join up with the Palestinians and Israelis and get in formation to start our march up the winding road to the gate of the Apartheid Wall above. Several roadblocks lay between us and the gate, but we climbed over each and every one as a large group in solidarity. Palestinian organizations carried wide, beautiful banners proclaiming in Arabic and English their sentiments of liberation. Internationals carried the ISM banner and an array of signs decrying the wall. Israelis carried signs in Hebrew declaring that the wall is tantamount to genocide.

We marched in the hot sun, sweating and chanting, our energy and hopes rising with every step. We also were a bit nervous, hoping we would finish the protest safe and without arrests. The plan was that the group of "blockers" would head the march, then separate off at the top allowing the gate-cutters and gate-shakers to move forward to the gate with their wire-cutting equipment. The idea was for them to cut open the gate, damaging it so it could not be reclosed, and also to cut parts of the fence on either side of the gate so that the damage would be effective. The blockers would link arms to prevent soldiers from getting to the cutters and shakers. (The shakers would shake the gate back and forth forcefully to break it adequately.) Another corps of internationals would form a boundary around the group of Palestinian demonstrators to protect them from reprisal from the soldiers, should soldiers approach. Meanwhile, a few Israeli activists stood with signs on the other (Israeli) side of the wall.

The cutters/shakers went to work immediately and began to cut and break the gate. Soldiers shot off tear gas and percussion grenades without verbal warning. The noise of shots was extremely loud and horrifying. The cutters and shakers kept on with their task, as we had agreed in the event of tear gas. They were so intent on their work that they didn't notice at first that the soldiers had resorted to firing rubber bullets. Suddenly it was apparent that some of them were injured. We had agreed that in the eventuality that soldiers used such weapons, we would retreat at the first sign. Since it was unclear when the soldiers started firing the rubber bullets, we didn't even consider retreating until after five internationals were injured. One was immediately taken to the hospital in an ambulance that was standing by (this had been prearranged by ISM), and the others were treated on-site by Palestine Medical Relief Committee medics, who had accompanied us on the march.

Michelle Hudson

JAYYOUS, JULY 28 – Today we went to take food to a Bedouin family who was cut off from the village by the Apartheid Wall. There were about 20 Palestinians and 20 internationals. The family, which we saw at least four members of today (I am sure there are more children, but we only saw one), is cut off from the village, which means no access for food or visiting any of their loved ones. The people from the village bring them food every week....

Two of the local Palestinians climbed over the razor wire (where it was pushed down). One then climbed to the other side of the huge ditch. Then one man began to throw the bags of food to the other man, one by one, large bags of groceries, bottled water, etc. The man then threw them to a woman on the other side (over the electrified fence and under the barbed wire) where she then loaded all of the bags onto a donkey. All of the people there were then clapping. While this was going on, there was a bulldozer continuing to work, and you could hear the awful sound the whole time we were there.

On our way back to the road, the children that were with us started to yell in frustration to the Arab/Israeli workers that were working on the "fence." The workers explained that they had no choice, there was no other way they could feed their families. It is amazing to think about the fact that we were in that exact location less than a year ago and you could stand on a hill and see acres and acres of olive trees and cultivated land that belongs to these farmers. Now most of it has been confiscated by the [Israelis]. It was very surreal.

Arla Ertz

JENIN, JULY 29 – Today we visited the family of a little boy who was killed. This was a sad and intense visit, as you may imagine. The parents are grief-stricken, and their other children are traumatized. They witnessed their brother's head blown open and saw his brains come out. I wouldn't be so graphic in describing this, except I can't get the image out of my mind of his siblings going to each other and with their finger drawing a circle on each other's head to indicate where Mahmoud's head was blown open. I'll never forget this. Little Mahmoud had a twin sister who holds out a shekel to anyone who comes near, showing the shekel that's "for me and Mahmoud!" She misses him and every day asks where he is.

QALQILYA, JULY 31 – Yesterday we set out for Qalqilya, where the Apartheid Wall is 25 feet high and solid, unlike the heavy wire, metal, and concertina wire fencelike portions we've witnessed so far. At Qalqilya, the fence completely encloses the town. An extremely strict checkpoint policy keeps outsiders from entering Qalqilya, although if you somehow manage to get in, it's somewhat easier to get out. We went to Qalqilya because an action protesting the wall had been organized for this morning, and we were instructed to arrive the day before for final planning and role assignment. [Editor's note: Arla's group was denied entry all day and ended up sleeping with a Palestinian family in a nearby town.] ...

We arose at 5:30 the next morning, in hopes that the soldiers would not be at their post and we could sneak across. But a military jeep was there at the gate. We decided to wait a period of time and see if the jeep left. Our coordinator kept watch and notified us when the jeep drove off. We then ran quickly through the gate, across the main road, down through a field, keeping up a rapid pace, until we reached the gate in the wall. There we lifted up the razor wire, slid our backpacks under, and then crawled under ourselves. We scrambled to our feet and kept on running until we were safely within the area. After a few minutes' walk, a van met us and took us to the ISM apartment in downtown Qalqilya. We had made it after all!

By then it was about 7:30 a.m., and we were offered mattresses to sleep on until around 9, when we were briefed about the plan for the morning's action. We were going to march to the wall, internationals and Palestinians together, to spray paint graffiti on it and hurl paint balloons at it. A large, beautiful sign featuring a peace dove flying through the wall and parting it would be attached to helium balloons and floated above the wall. Israeli peace activists would demonstrate simultaneously on the other side of the wall at a point where the solid wall merged into the wire-and-metal fence-type portion of the wall. The event was so moving, to see the three groups united in their opposition to the Apartheid Wall and the occupation. It was a vision of beauty and coordination.

Michelle Hudson

JAYYOUS, JULY 31 – The demonstration was a nonviolent, peaceful demonstration against the Apartheid Wall that has been built inside of the Green Line, or the 1967 border. The Israeli government has claimed that the wall is for security when in fact it is a land grab, confiscating thousands of acres of Palestinian land. This land is the sole source of income for many families in the West Bank and has been in their families for hundreds of years. This is the most fertile land in the region, and over 37 Palestinian water wells have been taken in the Qalqilya region alone.

The march, which included about 70 internationals and 100 Palestinians, started at 10 a.m. from the municipality of Qalqilya. We were holding signs, banners, and balloons bearing the names of Palestinian political prisoners that are being held inside of Israel. It was a spirited march with chants, noisemakers, and a lot of energy. Once we reached the wall, the designated internationals accompanied Palestinians and took part in decorating it with messages and paint balloons, filled with the colors of the Palestinian flag. Messages such as "Free Palestine," "Berlin 1953," and "Tear down the Apartheid Wall" were spray painted on the wall. A few meters over, Israeli peace activists waited to meet us so we could all stand together in solidarity on opposite sides of the fence. The soldiers kept yelling, "Painting on the wall is not allowed," but nobody listened, and after a while they grew tired of being ignored and stopped yelling.

The soldiers stayed between the demonstrators and the fence, but the spirit of the two groups, the Palestinian and Israeli demonstrators, stayed alive for about an hour. The call was finally given by the organizers to fall back, and everyone returned, safely and with a good feeling. There were no injuries or arrests, and the goals of the demonstration had been reached. That part of the wall, instead of being only ugly gray cement, is now beautifully decorated....

The Israeli government is doing all it can to separate the people and make the lives of Palestinians unbearable. But people inside Palestine and Israel know that it is possible to live side by side as neighbors and teach their children love and understanding instead of hate and fear. What is desperately needed is justice, not barriers.