Dreams of Palestine

by Ortrud Gessler (Eve Human)
June 22, 2010

In the spring of 2007 I spent a short seven weeks in the Palestinian West Bank, working as a volunteer with the human rights group ISM.
It has been over 3 years now, but sometimes at night I still dream of Palestine.
Some dreams are nightmares full of fear, others full of sadness, and sometimes anger engulfs me.
And then there are those other dreams, memories so hard to describe.
They show me that good does indeed prevail over evil. That goodness defeats hatred, violence and despair.

The memories I took with me from my weeks in Palestine and from the Palestinian people, a people who in spite of so much suffering have never lost their courageous spirit and their basic humanity, these memories will stay with me for as long as I live
– while I’m awake and in my dreams.

The following is a very personal account of why I went to Palestine, and about my experiences there.
(The videos are all from the internet, but some of the pictures on this page are mine, while others are not):

Occupation 101 (Now on Google-Video)

Although I hadn’t yet seen this particular and very comprehensive documentary, in the years before I went to Palestine, I had read a lot about the situation there and the brutality of the occupation.

I had read about the oppression of the Palestinian people, the many crimes committed against them, like “targeted” assassinations with 1000 kg bombs dropped on residential neighborhoods or the house-demolitions which made so many Palestinian families homeless over and over again. But often, when I tried to talk about what I had discovered in the books and the articles I had read, I would be hushed down.
People kept telling me:
“You haven’t been there, so you know nothing.”

So then in spring of 2007, I went to see and look at the truth with my own eyes.

I took a long vacation from work and family, and I talked to a group here in Iceland which did solidarity work for Palestine. They gave me a list of what I needed to take with me, and they also told me that sometimes the Israeli immigration doesn’t allow foreigners to enter the country even as tourists, if they are suspected of being pro-Palestinian.
But I was lucky, I didn’t look political.

When I returned home, I took a few scars with me – some on my body, but most on my soul. Those scars have taken a while to heal, and sometimes they still hurt.
When I tried to get on with life at home, picking up from the same point I had left it, I couldn’t.
I went back to work.

However, after a short time I had myself transferred to night-shift so I would meet fewer people. In this way I wouldn´t have to talk, because I really couldn’t, not calmly at least. When I tried, my words started falling over themselves, rushing from my mouth, too fast, too loud – breathless. Nobody could understand me, since I couldn’t explain.
I would not even go to the meetings of the solidarity group any more, I was afraid to break down completely. Besides I felt rather embarrassed, since I had written some rather frantic letters home to them.

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What troubled my mind

To be honest, the occupation of Palestine wasn’t the only thing that weighed on my mind at the time.
I have never been cool, detached or very stress-resistant; I’ve always been a bit emotional.
And even before I went to Palestine, my mind was troubled by a recent realization which had shaken my view of the world to the very core:
Finally I had had to accept that there was actual evil in this word.

No matter what had happened in the world before 2001, I had always trusted in our western system and way of life, flawed as it might be.
“Sure, our system might need a few improvements here and there. But nothing is perfect and nobody is, including me,” I had thought.
And while I accepted the world‘s being imperfect, I didn’t believe that in our part of the world and in our time, evil–real true evil–existed.

This started to change about two years after the events of 9/11.
That the so-called democratic government of our closest ally could be involved in the killing of its own people, its own loyal citizens, for the purpose of justifying an upcoming series of wars, which would be killing even more innocent people, seemed to me beyond the realm of simple imperfection. For me this indeed appeared to be a manifestation of true evil.

What convinced me in time of the veracity of the claims made by the truth movement wasn´t any conspiracy theory, but the physical evidence presented by scientific researchers, educated people with degrees in physics, chemistry, architecture and engineering.

In my mind the laws of physics are something to trust in and hold on to. They are immutable, real.

However, what had disturbed me even more than the acts of those American government insiders, those political instigators of 9/11, was the reaction of those other institutions, the ones I had previously always trusted unconditionally to tell me the truth about events happening both now and in the past. I had trusted them–the media and the academic experts quoted by the media–to explain the world to me as it supposedly is; in fact, I had trusted them far more than I had trusted most politicians.

It was the refusal of the mainline media, even here in Europe, to look at the plain and very visible evidence, and the so-called “experts” who were ready to lie about this evidence or omit the most relevant facts for political purposes, which destroyed my fundamental trust in the western system. This loss of trust turned my world upside-down and brought sad disappointment into the deepest recesses of my soul.

Soon after my 9/11 discoveries, I realized that those lies were far from being the only big ones we had been told over the decades, with the lies propagated about Israel and Palestine being among the worst examples.

Until then, with my own partly Jewish, partly German background, I had firmly believed the story I had heard countless times that the Zionist Jews, when they had come to Palestine in the first half of the 20th century, had found a desert and had made the desert bloom. I had believed the tale that before that time, the Palestinians had been just a few nomadic tribes living all over the Arabian deserts, in tents or something, and that they were just spiteful and jealous fanatics who couldn’t be reasoned with.

Even when the TV news told us occasionally about Israeli settlements in areas claimed by Palestinians being an obstacle for peace, even then I had thought: “So what, it’s desert anyway. The settlers will just make the desert bloom a little more.”

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The Truth about Palestine

The terrible truth I now discovered was that all those tales were untrue, and the reality was the exact opposite of my earlier beliefs:
Palestine had continuously been settled in towns and villages for thousands of years by people with a rich culture. Crops had been planted and trees been cultivated for all these times.
For several hundred years before the arrival of the European Zionists, the Islamic, Christian and Jewish populations of Palestine had been living peacefully together side by side. It was the brutality and arrogance of these European immigrants which destroyed that peace. And it was these Zionist immigrants who were the unreasonable fanatics.

Having started to read seriously, I also found out that not only had Israel been involved in crimes against humanity among the Palestinian people, some of them unimaginably horrific, but Israel has also committed war-crimes in Lebanon, Syria and Egypt.
The picture to the left was taken after Israel had bombed a UN shelter full of civilians during Israel´s 2006 aggressive invasion of and air attacks on Lebanon.

And in the last few years, Israeli agents, like the leaders of AIPAC and the Neocons, pushed the US into the war in Iraq, which has cost over a million human lives. And still they aren’t satisfied, and they keep pushing for a war with Iran, which might be the beginning of WWIII.

And while Israel presents itself as an innocent victim of violence and racial hatred, in reality it is Israel who is victimizing others, both openly–with its military power used against the Palestinian people and neighboring countries–and covertly all over the world especially in Africa and South-America

Israeli special forces have been involved in the civil war in south-Sudan, as well as in other African countries. In the 1980‘s and 90‘s, they trained the right-wing death-squads in Colombia as well as in Guatemala and El Salvador, while the Americans trained the regular armies. Israel has been involved with and funneled weapons to the brutal contras in Nicaragua.

Israeli intelligence units tricked the American military via false information into bombing Libya, and they have trained and armed both sides in the Sri-Lankan civil war–the Tamil separatists, as well as the central government troops.

Israeli intelligence members or assets, often Jewish citizens of Arabic countries, have committed several proven false-flag operations in the Middle East against western targets, as well as several more suspected operations, all to make Arab people look bad.

One Israeli intelligence operation involving false flag bombings, was the so-called Lavon affair in the 1950s in Egypt.

In Iraq in the 1950s, the Mossad, using young manipulated Iraqi Jews like Naeim Giladi, even attacked Iraqi synagogues to scare Iraqi Jews into fleeing to Israel.

While Giladi, the whistle-blower who had been involved in this particular special operation, actually regretted his role, other special operatives have shown no remorse but actually bragged about their “successes” in destabilizing countries, starting off civil wars, and supporting right-wing coups.

An Israeli psychology professor and policy-critic writes about this Israeli involvement in backing and arming brutal regimes and rebel groups throughout the world in his book:
“The Israeli connection – Who Israel arms and why”

What I then read from published documents and even diaries from earlier Israeli politicians is a callousness and bloody-mindedness beyond anything I could ever imagine, a total disregard for human life.
See: “Israel´s Sacred Terrorism by Livia Rokach”

Even now it is hard for me to talk about either my experiences, or the propaganda and lies which so many people still accept as truth, without getting emotional. And once again, it is the lies which hurt the most.

Yes, there are other places in the world where even worse human rights violations are committed by other armies, governments, or militias, but Israel is the only country that commits Nazi-like war-crimes and crimes against humanity yet still presents itself as a democratic nation, justified in all its deeds, a small and powerless victim–not a powerful aggressor.

The whole country is based on a racist ideology, Zionism. And still Israel´s apologists get away with calling all critics of Israel’s brutal policies racists or anti-Semites.

But reading about all this was in many ways different from experiencing it with my own senses, my own eyes, ears and occasionally my own skin.

And still, what I experienced and what shook me up so much, even after I had come home, was that for Palestinians, this is their everyday life. They have to live with these kinds of physical attacks and acts of humiliation and psychological warfare all the time, while I could go home and feel safe again.

And I often marvel at how the Palestinians can stay so strong in all this. Maybe it is the knowledge of every man, woman and child that they are on the moral high-ground.
Yes, even a Palestinian child knows that truth and universal ethics is on his side, and this knowledge makes many Palestinians wise beyond their years while retaining a touching innocence of spirit.
(Read the last paragraph about “The Child and the Bullet” for a good example of this.)

As for the Israelis, I’ve somehow got the feeling that for all their self-righteous posturing, they indeed know deep down in their hearts that they are on the moral low ground, the very low ground. And most Israelis and supporters of Zionism cannot yet face this knowledge consciously and live with themselves.

Somehow the strength of the Palestinians I observed gave me strength while I was there in Palestine, and now those memories give me hope.

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Jerusalem

While I worked with ISM, an international human rights group under Palestinian leadership, I was stationed in Hebron and spent most of my seven weeks there. But I also went to other places in the West Bank in between.

When I went to Jerusalem, I met a family whose members had almost all been arrested at some point and jailed for years. But don’t think that my friends are in any way unique in their experiences.

The fact is, at least one third of Palestinian men have been in Israeli jail at one time or another; for women, the percentage isn’t quite as high, but many are still arrested for political reasons.

My friends had been members of a left-wing party. The party had been legal once, and then it was banned by Israel. One son of the family had been arrested at age 17 and jailed for nothing more than having been a member of the party.
His mother had organized a dinner-party for her friends, all of them political women. And when she was serving the food, Israeli soldiers burst into the house. She tried to run away and was caught. Running away was the offense that cost her four years of her life.

In Jerusalem I of course went on the traditional pilgrims’ way, the Via Dolorosa, praying the “Stations of the Cross”.
These prayers, a remembrance of Christ’s suffering, which are normally done during the season of Lent in churches all over the world, are prayed here in Jerusalem every week in a procession along the “Via Dolorosa”, “the street of pain”. According to Christian tradition, this is the way Jesus took to his crucifixion, out from the ancient city of Jerusalem and up to the hill of Calvary. Today this hill is also part of Old Jerusalem and the site of the Crucifixion Church.

Incidentally, this church, built on one of the holiest places in Christian tradition, is practically next door to the Al Aqsa mosque, the third holiest site in Islam.

Every Friday afternoon, a group of Franciscan monks leads worshipers on this way. The day I followed the procession, we were quite a large group.

I was bit surprised that the Via Dolorosa is in large parts a shopping street, something like a little bazaar where all kinds of goods are being sold.

But then this would not be so very different from the times of Jesus.
The way Jesus and other condemned prisoners were led to the hill of Calvary would also have been a very ordinary way, where people conducted their ordinary everyday businesses.

And at every “Station” where we stopped and prayed, the mostly Muslim passers-by and shoppers waited for us patiently while we positioned ourselves along the walls in the narrow street, and most often, they smiled at us.

In the same way, earlier in the day on Friday at noon-time, we Christians had had to wait for Islamic worshipers coming out from Al Aqsa mosque in great numbers, blocking the narrow streets.
At every Station, the Franciscan monks who led our prayerful procession gestured to us to make room for the passers-by and so we did.

But then, all of a sudden, the normality broke down.
We had stopped at the 8th Station. A group of people came from the opposite direction, the first one being a woman in western clothes who wanted to pass. But instead of waiting for just a few moments, she attacked the monk who gestured for her to wait. She hit him with her fists, hit him several times, just because he was not getting out of her way quickly enough. Seeing this was a shock for me. The woman was surely no Christian; certainly from the way she was dressed, she was no Muslim. There could be only one guess as to who she was, but still, why would she do this?
Who would hit a monk?

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Bethlehem

When I went to Bethlehem, I learned that Muslims and Christians in Palestine are friends. There is no difference in their sufferings or in their being oppressed.

I learned that the birth-town of Jesus is surrounded by walls and check-points, and that if Mary and Joseph had lived today, they couldn’t have brought Jesus to Jerusalem nor back to Nazareth, and even getting to Egypt for safety would have been next to impossible.

And when I think of the child-murders committed at the time of Jesus’ birth, which the Bible tells us were at the order of King Herod, then I also think about today´s children of Palestine and their danger of being murdered every day.

But I also learned that in the Holy Mass when the priest comes to the passage where he says “Almighty, eternal God”, then in Arabic he says “Allah”.
It reminds me, that we, Christians and Muslims, indeed pray to the same God.
Bethlehem, the cradle of Christianity, where the Prince of Peace was born, will see peace one day, true peace that comes from truth and justice, of that I’m sure.

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Bi’lin, tear-gas, bullets and a Palestinian David

A couple of weeks after my arrival, I went to the demonstration of Bi’lin. Most Internationals go to the Bi’lin demonstration at least once.
It’s a good thing to do that, for if no internationals or Israeli peace activists are at a demonstration, the rubber-coated bullets the soldiers shoot at the protesters will then become live ammunition, and Palestinians will die. It has happened many times before. The Israelis used to believe that nobody cared if Palestinians were killed, but if internationals or Israeli Jews are there, they would have to be more careful.

But even the presence of internationals does not hinder the Israeli soldiers who sometimes shoot to kill. The man second from the left in this picture of a Bi’lin demonstration in 2008,which looked pretty much like the one in which I participated in 2007, was killed by soldiers in another Bi’lin demonstration in 2009. He was killed by a tear-gas canister shot from a short distance directly at his chest. His name was Basem Ibrahim Abu Rahmeh. He was 30 years old and the sixteenth Palestinian to have been killed in those demonstrations in Bi’lin.

Rahmeh’s death came a month after American human rights activist Tristan Anderson was shot in the head and put in a coma by the same weapon.

Two months earlier, two Palestinian teenagers were killed, Mohammed Khawajeh and Araft Khawajeh, in a similar anti-wall-demonstration in the village of Ni’lin .

In Bi’lin Israel thought it had created “facts on the ground”. But even after the wall had been finished, which had taken 60 % of their land, the villagers did not give up.
When I came to Bi’lin, these villagers had already been protesting against this wall every single Friday for more than two years. They protested when the wall was started, and when it was under construction, and they are still protesting now that it has been finished (at least in Bil´in the wall is finished; it’s still under construction in many other places.)
Walls don’t have to stand forever, they can be broken down.

On the day I was there, the protest started with about a hundred people, most of them Palestinians, singing and chanting, holding hand-written signs. They were going from the village in the direction of the wall.
In the very front was a man in an electric wheel-chair. He and a small group of Palestinians reached the line of soldiers first, and right away the soldiers surrounded and arrested them.

I was in the second group, standing opposite the soldiers. The people around me tried to talk to the soldiers.

But the soldiers didn’t want to talk. They pulled out those orange tear-gas cans and pointed their guns at us.
I had the urge to run, but I knew I couldn’t run fast in this uneven terrain, and after a couple of steps, I just turned my back to the soldiers, pulled in my head and waited, hoping that my backpack would protect me from whatever they were shooting. I had been told before the demonstration had started that sometimes the soldiers shoot the cans with their cannons at close range directly into the crowd.

The soldiers had retreated a few steps, and the first tear-gas can landed right next to where I was standing. It was like the thickest fog on earth; it made me totally blind and I couldn’t breathe. I had been told that this was the effect of the chemical, which tells your brain for a while that you can´t breathe and that you are suffocating. It also burned in my eyes, my nose and my throat. I tried to get away from the cloud.
But even if I’d known in what direction the wind was blowing, I had no sense of direction any more. Instead, I stumbled blindly around, and then I fell.
Somebody else fell down right behind me. He was screaming.
When I could see again, I turned around and saw a Palestinian man lying directly behind me, withering in pain.

I got up on my feet still disoriented, stumbling around.
Within a few seconds, a group of Palestinians came running past me and ministered to the injured man. They pulled down his trousers. And I saw he had been shot and was bleeding from his thighs.
I later learned that he had been hit by 2 rubber-coated bullets at the same time, shot at very close range, and both bullets had penetrated his legs, close to the abdomen. He needed an operation, and for several days he was in the hospital in bad condition.

I walked away following a group of internationals. When a group of soldiers pressed by us in the direction of the village, a couple of my friends decided to follow the soldiers to see if the soldiers were going to attack the village directly.

The soldiers, however, after shooting more and more tear gas grenades all over the place, turned around.

Panic-stricken I asked my friends if the soldiers would now shoot us from both sides. A short time later we were hit by a second cloud of gas.
My friends followed the soldiers to see what they were up to next. I stayed behind for I could no longer keep up. For a while I stood alone, and then another group of soldiers came running in my direction. By then I had become so scared of them, I only wanted to hide behind a tree or a rock.

But I had been told: “Do not hide, for if they see you hiding, they believe you’re planning an ambush and they will shoot you.” I had already seen one soldier aiming a gun that seemed to have no rubber bullet attachment, as if he was shooting with live ammunition. So I stood there with raised hands, scared to death, as they passed by.

When I eventually reached my friends again, a group of soldiers, followed by armored vehicles, came from behind. They pushed us aside. One of them, when he saw me trembling, said: “Don’t be afraid, we’re not going to hurt you.”
But I’m not used to being shot at and pushed around with clubs and guns; I kept on trembling, I couldn’t help myself.
Does anybody ever get used to this? I don’t know….

And shortly thereafter, my friends and I were hit with tear-gas for the third time.
When we finally could leave the scene, over the fields, I had had far more than enough.

One of the images of Bi’lin that will probably stay in my mind as long as I live is the one of the boy on the hill with the slingshot.

The demonstration had been non-violent from our side the whole time, until shortly before it was over–that is, when this boy with the sling-shot appeared.
Yes, I know a sling-shot is a weapon too.

But the soldiers had helmets and shields, they were in no danger. They were aiming at the teenage boy, who stood there all alone on a hill with the ancient weapon of David, the teenager who fought the giant.
Was it five little stones, like in the song you learned in Sunday school?
I don’t know.
But I could see him clearly, the boy with the one stone. And I could see the soldiers far below. The boy was standing not so far away from me. I could see the soldiers aiming at him. But at that very moment I wasn’t scared at all.

Like David of old, the boy had put a stone in his sling, and round and round he swung it over his head until he released it. I don’t think he hit anyone, and the soldiers didn’t hit him either. Goliath never wins, not against David.

Ten people were arrested that day, 4 had been severely injured, and nobody had been killed…this time.

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Hebron

In Hebron I worked with ISM, a human rights and solidarity organization of Internationals and Palestinians. The Palestinians organize the work, and the internationals support it. ISM is fully committed to the philosophy of non-violence, and all volunteers are taught the concepts and are trained in the practice of non-violence.
Israel still doesn´t like the organization, portraying its members as radicals.

I have often heard the question, asked by Europeans and Americans: “Why is there no Palestinian “Ghandi”?”

The answer is that there are actually many, many Palestinian “Ghandis,” and there have been for many years–people committed to a non-violent struggle for justice and equal rights. Most of those Palestinian “Ghandis” have spent years in prison.
You just don’t hear about them in Western media outlets because until very recently, western media preferred to portray Palestinians as violent, and Israel’s state-terrorism as “self-defense”.

Hebron (Al Khalil in Arabic) is, according to Islamic, Christian and Jewish tradition, the place where the patriarchs Abraham and Isaac, and their wives Sarah and Rebecca, died and were buried.
The site of their tomb is now called the Al Ibrahimi Mosque.

On February 25, 1994, radical settler Baruch Goldstein went to the mosque with a hand grenade and a machine gun and opened fire on the people praying there.
He killed thirty Palestinians, and about 270 were injured.
Afterwards, the mosque was closed down for half a year by the Israelis, and when it was opened again for worship, half of it had been turned into a synagogue.
The Palestinians say that the Jews have bought their synagogue with Palestinian blood.

One friend of ours told us about his memories from the time of the massacre, when he was only ten years old and three of his friends from school were killed.

He himself had been praying with his father in another mosque that day. The next day when he went to school, he saw that the teacher had put flowers on the desks of the dead children, and our friend told us that he was so sad about losing his friends that he didn’t want to go to school anymore and look at the empty seats. So his parents had him transferred to another school.

While Jerusalem seems normal if you don’t look too closely, no normal life is possible for Palestinians in Al Khalil, the Arabic name for the West Bank town of Hebron.

166,000 Palestinians live here. But a big part of the inner city is closed to all Palestinian cars, supposedly for the security of just 700 Israeli settlers (officially they are 700; Palestinians say they have counted no more than 400 settlers in Hebron at any one time. There is, however, a larger totally fenced-in settler colony, Kyriat Arba, right next to Hebron).

Those settlers are protected by eighteen hundred Israeli soldiers.
In the closed-off section of Hebron, Palestinians above the age of 16 are not even allowed to ride a bike. When they are lucky, they may push a small two-wheeled cart to transport heavy items. But often, not even those carts are allowed to go through the checkpoints.

Usually people have to carry everything they buy from outside up the hills, including the supplies for the small shoe manufactories, as well as the finished shoes. The hills in Hebron are very steep. Once I saw three teenagers carrying a new, still packed-in washing machine up through the dirt paths of the olive groves. I saw their mother waiting for them outside the house.

On school days you can see three other teenagers pushing their handicapped brother or friend up the steep hill. They seem to be used to it. But still, half-way up the hill, they have to stop and catch their breath.
Well, I had to catch my breath walking up those hills even without carrying anything.

There is one donkey which is allowed to pass next to the check-point. It is owned by the milk-man. Every day it carries heavy milk bottles and other supplies up the hill.

One of the things people have to carry regularly uphill are the heavy iron gas-bottles, which they connect to their gas stoves to cook their meals, since there are no gas-lines in Hebron.
Occasionally the people have to carry the sick and injured down, since it often takes far too long a time to wait for the Palestinian ambulance to get permission to pass the check-point.

A friend told us that when his wife went into labor and he wanted to get her to the hospital, he waited for two hours for the ambulance to get permission, and it never came. In the end, he had to carry her in his arms through the olive groves in the middle of the night, although there is no light. (I went through the olive groves at night and it really is dark there). He couldn’t walk down the road, since his house is located right next to a settlers´ compound and an army station, so if he had passed there at night without permission, they would have shot him.

I know that place, and I know he was not exaggerating; they are very trigger-happy at that spot. I also watched his wife pass by on the road while carrying her baby, and they were throwing stones at mother and child.

Of course the olive-groves aren’t all that safe either, not even in broad daylight. The settler youngsters gather there in groups and ambush any Palestinians working their lands or tending their sheep with a hail of stones. The same happens to Internationals who dare to walk there alone.

At the checkpoints, which lead out of the Israeli-controlled area, Palestinians and Internationals have to walk through metal detectors and all bags get checked.
At the smaller checkpoints inside the area–and there are many of these extra check-points–bags are often checked again.

And they also do body-searches there, right in the middle of the street.
Palestinian men most often have to lift up their shirts, their undershirts, and their trouser-shafts, and then they have to turn around in a circle. Sometimes even young boys are treated like this.

Women are normally checked with metal detectors; children too, even the tiny first graders going to school.
Sometimes, if the Palestinians are lucky, their bags are checked with those metal detectors as well. But when they are not so lucky and they carry big bags filled with shopping, they often have to empty them right on the street.

Nearly everybody complies quietly.
When anybody protests, he is detained, which means his ID card is taken and checked and phoned in to military command.
And then the person has to wait thirty to sixty minutes, or even longer, until the soldiers get a clearance call from their superiors confirming that the detained person isn’t wanted for some violation. If a Palestinian protests too much, the police are called and he is taken to the station, where he will be detained for several hours, and will nearly always have to pay a fine before being released.
But more often than not, Palestinians, especially young men, are detained for no reason at all, other than for walking on the street.

Few dare to protest, for if a Palestinian is picked up by the military police, he will be brought to the base and tortured. Torture means he is beaten up and sometimes worse.
Most often the Palestinian is chained in an uncomfortable position for many hours or even days, until every muscle in his body aches. He will not be allowed to sleep, being kept awake with blaring loud music or screeching noises.
He will have a bag put over his head, normally one smeared with feces, so people nearly faint from the stench.

Several of my Palestinian friends went through this kind of torture before being permanently jailed for years. One of my friends told me that there was one blessing from all this–before he went to jail, he knew nothing, but in prison he became educated.

The Palestinians in the prison where he was sent were well-organized. They had hunger-striked themselves into being allowed to have books and chairs and tables. For everything they wanted, the prisoners needed to organize a hunger-strike, my friend told me. And then the leaders of the inmates would tell all the prisoners they had to read three books every week, one for politics, one for religion, and one novel.

Then the older Palestinian man looked at his younger friend and said: “But nowadays things have changed, the prison in your time isn’t as good anymore.”
The young Palestinian said: “But still even today all the good people are in prison.”
He turned to me: “You know, in all other countries in the world all the worst people are in prison. Not here–in Palestine, it’s always the best ones.”

Hebron’s Shuhada street used to be one of the richest shopping streets in all of Palestine; now all the shops have been closed down.
For three years, the area was put under total curfew–no one was allowed to walk the streets. People had to take to the roofs when they wanted to get out of the house to get food or go to work or even to go to school.
The three families who lived between the 2 Israeli settlements there had had their front-doors welded shut.

Palestinian families who live in the other part of the street are still not allowed to walk past the settlements or to visit those houses in between; the inhabitants of houses above Shuhada street and the children who attend the school there have to use staircases and roundabout pathways because they are forbidden to walk the streets which pass the settlements.

But even while following all the rules set by the occupation authorities, Palestinians are still not left in peace.
They are constantly harassed by settlers, even on the streets or paths on which Palestinians are allowed to walk.

Harassing Palestinian women and children seems to be some kind of settler sport, really. They laugh while doing it; they think it’s fun.
Often, however, these attacks are systematic. They are being done to empty the Palestinian houses of their occupants, to terrorize them into leaving so that the settlers can enlarge their territory. Some settlers have actually admitted to this tactic on camera, while they assumed the reporter conducting the interview was an American Jew sympathetic to their cause:

The Israeli soldiers stationed at those different checkpoints all over the old city practically never intervene on behalf of the Palestinians.
Once I asked a soldier why he wouldn’t intervene, and he told me that this wasn’t his job; he was there to protect the Jews.
But if a Palestinian ever pushes back, even a child, he or she will be arrested.

This situation is the reason why international human right workers watch the streets or patrol the pathways or the olive groves. Hopefully, by just being there, they might prevent harassment and attacks by the settlers against the Palestinians.

And if necessary, internationals will intervene by non-violent means. Internationals also try to monitor the soldiers’ behavior towards the Palestinians. At checkpoints, where there is no international presence, or in Gaza where internationals often can’t even get inside, human rights abuses are usually far worse.

Yes, it’s true, internationals act as human shields.
You think it’s crazy, a martyr’s complex or something like that?
Think what you will.
But I know it’s logic, it’s the only way possible.

Here are a people without rights, none at all: the Palestinians. And here are the internationals, people who still have rights protected by their embassies and their countries back home. So as an international spreading your arms to help a Palestinian woman and her baby escape to safety beneath a hail of stones, you assume that the settlers will stop, for otherwise, they will get in trouble. You trust in that and stand your ground.

But there are times when they don’t stop–not the settlers, not the soldiers, nor other representatives of the state of Israel.
Rachel Corrie, the young American girl who was killed, had faced a bulldozer driver. The people from ISM who knew about the event have told me that Rachel had looked straight into driver’s eyes.

She must have been sure that he would stop. She had trusted in his humanity. And when she realized he wouldn’t stop, it was too late, she could no longer escape.

Sometimes they just don’t stop….

Most internationals will be attacked at some point, if they stay long enough. A friend was once thrown down the garden stairs in the olive groves. Another time, he was beaten up by soldiers. He told us newcomers during our introduction to the area that if we needed to be stitched up or fixed otherwise, we should go to a Palestinian hospital, since they do the “stitching up” for free.
(I only needed one such hospital visit.)

I was physically attacked twice, although I was really not too badly hurt either time.
The second time, settler teenagers had led us into a trap in order to grab or destroy our camera. They had just attacked several Palestinians and when we interfered by calling out and running towards them, thus giving the Palestinians a chance to escape, the settlers saw the camera and thought we had it all on tape.

The camera was our only weapon. Unless we got the attacks on camera, Israeli authorities would deny everything. The settlers are not given any limits or boundaries regarding what they can do to the Palestinians.

The ISM companion I was with at the time was attacked from behind, hit over the head with a stone, and then relentlessly beaten and kicked. I screamed as loud as I could, and tried to grab one of the attackers to pull him off. And then my mind must have blacked out, for I don’t even remember how I got those bruises, nor do I remember the faces of our attackers very clearly.

This of course made me a lousy witness when we filed our usual and utterly useless charges at the Israeli police station.
The only thing the police did was blame us for the attacks, telling us we had provoked the settlers.

Shaken up as I was, I nearly fell for this mind-game the police were playing on us. So when I phoned in the attack to ISM´s headquarters in Ramallah, while my companion was still lying in hospital with a concussion, I thought I had to convince even our own people that we, my companion and I “had really, really, really not provoked the settlers“, nor started filming before the attacks, and so on.

Only a few days later, the same companion was singled out by Israeli military police when we attended a demonstration outside Hebron where once again, Israel was confiscating Palestinian farmland and uprooting fruit-trees to expand Jewish settlements.
My companion was sitting down with a group of protesters to block the path of the bulldozers when the MPs grabbed him by his feet and dragged him dozens of meters along the gravel road before finally allowing him to get up. Then they proceeded to cuff and arrest him.
He wasn’t deported but he was banned from the Hebron area.

Of course we hadn’t provoked the settler violence. There had been far more violence before internationals had come to Hebron. And in places where there are no Internationals or Israeli human rights activists, the soldiers have no limits on their actions either.

The ex-soldiers who had been stationed in Gaza admitted in an interview with Israeli psychologist Nofer Ishai-Karen (herself an ex-soldier in a Gaza occupation unit) to having trampled on tiny children and kicked pregnant women in the belly. They had also tortured prisoners they had had to transport, and so on.

Similar things as those described in Ms. Ishai-Karen´s research also occurred in Hebron at the beginning of the second Intifada.
People from the “Palestinian-Authority” side of Hebron have told me about a certain “hat-drawing” ritual:

A certain military police unit would go through the streets of Hebron during curfew hours, and they would capture everyone they found outside, and make them draw a piece of paper out of some helmet or cap.
Whatever was written on this piece of paper was then done to the unlucky Palestinian who had been captured.
Inscriptions on those papers were:
have an arm broken,
have a finger broken,
have a leg broken,
be thrown from a moving army vehicle,
or receive a bullet in the leg.
The man who told me this said he had known a young teenager who been killed by being thrown from a moving vehicle.
A man he knew got a bullet in the leg this way and was then told to crawl to the end of the street while the soldiers counted to fifty. If he didn’t make it, he would then get a bullet in the head.
The terrified man crawled and crawled while he heard the MPs counting, but he didn’t make it in time to the end of street.
But he wasn’t shot in the head.
They just drove away laughing.
This “hat-drawing” practice only stopped when the resistance started to especially target this sadistic MP unit.

Nowadays in “relatively calm” times, the worst incidences in Hebron normally happen on Saturdays, the settlers’ Sabbath, as well as on religious holidays.

On those days, the settlers choose not to drive their cars for religious reasons.
Instead they walk, like the Palestinians have to all week long.

The settlers usually walk around in large groups, harassing every Palestinian on their way.

On holidays, the settlers celebrate, and sometimes they close their celebrations with mass-attacks on Palestinian houses.

So on those nights, internationals stay with the Palestinian families who have been attacked before.

One holiday night, a young English woman and I stayed with a family whose house is regularly attacked after these celebrations. This time, the settlers had collected lots and lots of wood for a very large campfire in the middle of the olive-groves, right in front of one of the houses which the settlers had emptied by terrorizing the Palestinian owners and later demolishing everything inside and writing obscenities on the walls.
They turned up their loud-speakers so high that surely their speeches were heard over half of Hebron. In between, we could hear some hooray shouts from the whole group, which was composed primarily of young men and male teenagers. Because we couldn’t sleep, we watched the event from afar, together with some members of the Palestinian family with whom we were staying.

At the time, the whole experience gave me an eerie feeling of unreality, as if we were in a movie portraying Nazi-times. There we were, crouching behind the stone fence of the family’s garden, together with their teenage daughter, listening to loud fanatical speeches, and then we saw the settler youths dancing around the fire, singing and shouting.
And eventually we watched them raise a long pole with some cloth on it. They held it over the fire and when it lit up, the Palestinian girl next to me gasped, for she had recognized it. The settlers were ceremonially burning a Palestinian flag. It was just creepy.

We stayed awake the rest of the night. The year before, a flag hadn’t been the only thing the settlers had tried to burn on this particular holiday. A woman in the next house had been terrorized so badly by “celebrating” settlers that she had had a miscarriage.

When the settlers found out I was German, things got a bit nasty for me as well. I was threatened and accused of being responsible for all those 6 million who had died in the Holocaust. I thought this wasn’t fair, since my mom had had a lousy childhood under Nazi rule. So I told those accusers about my mother’s Jewish background.
Things got even crazier from there.

The soldiers started to make fun of me.

One day the soldiers closed one of the checkpoints for Palestinians–for technical reasons, they said. Of course, they could have used their hand-held metal detectors, and let the people pass by around it, if they had wanted to.
And we Internationals asked the soldiers to do so. But soldiers weren’t going to make it easy for Palestinians. That wasn’t their job.

They let the people wait in line endlessly just to make things a bit more miserable for them. Then I got in line to wait for the next time they would let people through, to go to a shop on the other side.

The commanding officer, however, told me in front of the whole line of waiting people, that I wouldn’t have to wait–after all, I was Jewish.
I told the soldiers that I was a human being like everyone else and I would wait.
The officer, by the way, was a British man of Jewish descent, who seemed to have joined the Israeli army just to get in on the fun of harassing Palestinians.

While some settlers still kept threatening to hasten my demise, the leader of the settler community in Hebron told me that while I might be Jewish according to his law, my German side seemed to be stronger than my Jewish side.
This man, by the way, had been a good friend of the late Baruch Goldstein, I mentioned earlier, who had massacred 3o Palestinians at the Al Ibrahimi mosque.

One Saturday when this settler boss was leading a large group of Jewish American visitors through the area as was his custom, he pointed me out to them as they passed by, saying in a loud voice:

“Look at her. Her mother is Jewish and her father a Nazi, and she is here to continue her father’s evil works.”

Another settler, the compound’s bus-driver, tried to save my Jewish soul. But he first absolutely insisted on my telling him exactly how many Jewish grandparents I really had. I guess he needed to make sure my soul was truly worth saving. He told my international friend, standing next to me during one of those soul-saving attempts, to shut up. He wasn’t going to talk to her, he declared, since in his book, I was worth a thousand times more than the likes of her.
Guess how that “compliment” made me feel.

But the bus-driver’s soul-saving attempt didn’t interfere with his other “settler-duties”, which primarily consisted of making Palestinians´ lives miserable.

When one of the bus-driver’s daughters claimed that she and a few other little girls had been attacked by two Palestinian teenage boys, he insisted on having those boys arrested.

We had walked up the hill all the way with those boys and we knew the little girls had been far ahead of us. The boys hadn’t even been close to them. They had proudly practiced their English with us, showing us how well they had learned in school.
And then the soldiers detained them.

“Please,” I tried to reason with my would-be-soul-saver, “those boys are innocent. We were there, we’ve seen it. You know me, I would never allow anyone to hurt a child, not your children either.”

But he just smiled, said his daughter wouldn’t lie, and then told me that one day I would have to meet my maker, taking responsibility for what I was doing there, helping “the enemy”.
And then he had the boys arrested.
It was so frustrating for me to see those innocent boys being taken away. It was a feeling of utter helplessness, knowing whatever you say as a witness, it does not count with either the soldiers or the police.

The boys were released the next day, but naturally, not until their families had paid their bail.
But one shouldn’t call it bail, really. It’s more like a ransom.

Palestinians, often teenage kids, get arrested all the time, mostly for no reason at all. The parents are then asked to pay bail, if they want their children returned to them. When the charges are dropped, the “bail” is then called a “fine” and never returned. I guess Israel needs a bit of extra-financing. The occupation is expensive after all. For most Palestinians, the “bail” is a lot of money for families who are very poor.

I once saw a rural Palestinian woman ransoming her teenage son. She wore the old traditional Palestinian dress. She had some teeth missing from her mouth. While waiting outside the gate of the police-station, she held some bills in her hand, waving them at the camera over our head whenever she heard a crackle in the broken-down loud-speaker. She wanted to show whoever was watching that she had got the money to get her son out of jail. This rural woman clearly was no person with money to spare. Three little girls were holding on to her, looking scared, while we waited for hours in the hot sun in front of the gate of the Israeli police station.

We internationals were there to file another useless complaint about an attack on us. It seemed to be such a waste of time. But our Palestinian organizers thought it would be good to make the reports, just for the record.
Many other Palestinians were waiting as well; waiting in line for endless hours in front of check-points or gates is the normal routine for Palestinians.

The other Palestinians waiting in front of the police station gate had to get a permit for something or other–Palestinians need permits from the Israeli police for lots of things.
After some three hours, we heard a crackle in the speakers and most Palestinians went away. I guess it meant there would be no permits given out that day.
But we eventually got in to make our complaint, and the woman finally was allowed to “bail out” her son.
When we left, we saw the peasant woman and her teenage son leaving as well, the three little children in tow.

Despite all these every-day humiliations, the Palestinians shrug and take it. That’s just life in Palestine for Palestinians. Everyone knows it, so you adjust.

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A Family’s nightmare

But then there are those things you won’t recover from.

Outside the closed off zone is the area which is supposedly under the control of the “Palestinian Authority”. To call it that is no more than a big joke. The “Palestinian Authority” has authority over the traffic and the streetlights and that’s about it.

The Israeli army can enter the area whenever they want, enter any house, arrest anyone and hold him for as long as they see fit, without warrant, without trial, without rights.
And arresting people is what they do on a nightly basis. And while they are at it, they sometimes shoot.

One of those “incidents” occurred during my time in Hebron.
The soldiers wanted to arrest somebody late at night. They banged on the door of a house. When a boy opened, they started to beat him up, and when his sister tried to help him, they hit her too. This was too much for the father of the family, an elderly man of 63. He interfered with his bare hands and so was shot in the throat. When his wife in desperation tried to pull off the soldiers from her husband, she too was shot, in the head. Then the soldiers started to beat up everyone else in the family, for now the family was frantic with despair.

Two sons tried to get their mother into a car to drive her to the hospital for she was still alive. But the soldiers confiscated the car keys and wouldn’t permit the Palestinian ambulance to pass. Why? The woman wasn’t thought to live, I guess. And sometimes, when Israeli soldiers shoot Palestinians, their military doctors remove the bullets, so the army can claim the victim had been hit by a stone, thrown by Palestinians themselves.
But this woman survived. Eventually she got to the hospital, but by that time, she was diagnosed as nearly brain-dead.

In the end it wasn’t even quite clear if the soldiers had actually barged into the right house. Was it actually a neighbor they had intended to arrest?
The next day, the name of one of the sons was released as the soldiers´ supposed target. He went to the Israeli police-station. He told the officers there that he would have come quietly. Why did they have to do this to his family, his parents, why? The police just sent him home.

Its possible the soldiers didn’t plan to shoot those people when they rammed into the house–it is the occupation which leads to these escalations of violence in nervous or trigger-happy young soldiers. When Palestinians have no sanctity of their homes, when Israeli soldiers can barge in any time and can use whatever force they want on the people inside, then these killings happen over and over again.

I wasn’t there, but one of our Palestinian organizers knew the family. He went to the house and talked to the family. He came back and told us what had happened.

He told us the house looked like a slaughterhouse. Blood everywhere, from ceiling to floor and on all the walls. He also told us what the family had been doing right before their world collapsed. They had been planning the wedding of one of the sons and they had just been looking at the invitation cards, which had come fresh from the printers.

This detail of the story hit our friend hard. He is a young man who was himself in the process of planning his own wedding which was to be the very next month.

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The Other Side of Palestine

But while watching all this misery and nearly unbearable injustice, I also got to know the other side of Palestine.

There were the days and nights we spent with Palestinian families, when trouble was expected. We would try to communicate, try to learn Arabic.
They taught us and laughed at us, at how funny we sounded.

Most communication though was still by hand and foot, which was a lot of fun as well.
The people opened up their family albums for us, and we showed them pictures from back home. And they always offered us delicious food to eat, much better than the food we made in our humble kitchen at the place in which we lived.

Occasionally I even would do a bit of real honest-to-goodness labor. Like here, when some other internationals and I helped a Palestinian farmer’s family to harvest their fields. In this case, we helped the family to cut feed for their goats from their field. Previously, every time the family tried to bring their goats into the field or to cut it themselves, they had been attacked by settlers. The settlers were intent on taking over the family’s land in order to cut a pathway connecting two settlements while cutting off the Palestinians.
Here are two of the family’s children:

Then there was the day when a companion and I were attacked and pressed against a railing by a whole group of Israeli settler kids.
They kept on kicking us and there was no way out–we couldn’t even turn around and try to climb over the railing.
An Israeli soldier came running down the stairs from his post over the street. He told those settler kids to stop, but they didn’t. He pressed himself through the group and placed himself between them and us.
They still kicked around him, might even have hit him too. But now it was relatively safe for us until finally the police arrived, and the kids ran away.

When I saw the soldier again, I thanked him. He just nodded and waved me off–he didn’t want to talk about it.

Every Saturday we met an ex-Israeli soldier, from the “Breaking the Silence” movement, on the street. He had once been stationed in Hebron. He was leading a group of Israelis or Americans around, explaining to them what the occupation did to the people of Hebron. And those who went on his tours may have had their eyes opened to the facts, possibly for the very first time.

(The settlers have their own tours, actually at about the same time and through the very same neighborhood, and yet their visitors see different things. Eyes aren’t the only thing you need, if you really want to see….)

There was the time when the Israeli human rights workers came and joined our Palestinian friends and us. And we felt there was no difference between us all.
Deep friendship had developed between the Palestinians and those Israelis.

One evening we went together to a coffeehouse. The Israeli was a bit nervous to join us, since the coffeehouse was outside the closed zone of Hebron in the area of the “Palestinian Authority”.
But one of the Palestinians put his arm around his shoulders and told him: “Don’t be afraid! Nobody would ever harm you out there, you belong to us.”

There was the demonstration we went to, which Israeli peace activists attended. When the soldiers started to arrest people, they also tried to grab a couple of Israelis, and the Palestinians did what they always do when somebody is being grabbed by the soldiers–they tried to pull them out, and they succeeded.
If a Palestinian is arrested, he might be thrown in jail for years; an international will only be deported back home, and an Israeli stays in jail for only one or two days. And yet, when the Israelis demonstrate on the Palestinian side, they become some of them and the Palestinians would fight for them, just like they would for their own demonstrators, no matter the cost to themselves if the soldiers decided to grab them instead.

A people who are on moral high ground can be generous in spite of whatever has been done to them before.
The “never forget – never forgive” is not a Palestinian attitude.

Then there was the time when our whole group was invited to a birthday party at a Palestinian home. One of our friends led the way, and as usual, everybody had to wait for me to make it uphill.
Our Palestinian friend smiled and joked a bit.
“One day,” I told him, “you will be old, too.”
“You aren’t old,” he said.
And after a while, he added: “I feel like a hundred years old sometimes.”
Now finally I found the courage to ask the question which had been on my mind for quite a while: “But why then, are you still so…”
I grabbled for the word, ” so happy?”
It was the wrong word. But he understood, and he knew I didn’t only mean him.
“We have to,” he said, “we have to go on living.”
Here he was, a wise man of only 22, in that year when I was in Palestine.

The birthday party actually was a surprise fare-well party for me, complete with a nice cake. We stayed inside and had a good time with the family.

But the very same day, only a few hours earlier, the family had been sitting in their garden having tea with their visiting relatives when an avalanche of stones came down on them. They showed those stones to us, and some of them had been really big. The family had actually been quite lucky that nobody had gotten seriously hurt.

The stones had come from the army base next door.
The family’s father went and complained to the army commander. The commander just said “It wasn’t us.” “But it came from the base,” our friend insisted. “No,” the commander said, “soldiers don’t do this. It must have been settlers. But since you didn’t see which one of the settlers did it, we can’t help you.”
So our friend went back home, shrugged it off, and he and his family prepared the party for me and the other internationals.

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The Child and the Bullet

But most vividly I remember the children, who played around us and with us while we were watching the checkpoints. Like all children everywhere, they lived for the moment. They made us laugh and occasionally even made us forget the grim reality around us.

The boy in the picture above is Mohammed. He is Moussa’s friend and an up-and-coming Palestinian artist. In 2007 he was 9 years old.

And then there was Moussa

Moussa himself was 11 years old the year I was in his town Al Khalil (Hebron). In the picture to the left he is practicing some acrobatics for the street circus some internationals occasionally organize for the children of the area. In the background is the street-check-point with the soldiers in the shadow. The name Moussa b.t.w. is Arabic for Moses.

Moussa nearly always had this broad mischievous smile on his face. Most days after school, he helped his parents in their shop. But whenever he was free, he would ride his little old bike, which was held together mainly by duct-tape, and which lost its chain about once a day. The bike was actually getting a bit small for him and its brakes were Moussa’s feet on the street.
But these were only minor obstacles, for Moussa rode it like a racing bike, hairpin turns and all. And sometimes he did acrobatics for us, the fawning international audience.

If you look at Moussa’s broad smile, you would never guess all the things he had seen and heard so far in his short life.
Moussa lived through the second Intifada and later, the siege on Hebron, when the soldiers had positioned themselves on the rooftops of all the buildings on the highest hills, including the rooftop of his parents house, and from there, they had shot at everything that moved.

He had seen the time when there were endless curfews, often lasting for weeks at a time. During those curfews, people couldn’t even go out shopping or visit their relatives and neighbors.
Some of Moussa’s relatives had been arrested and sent to jail during that time.
The year before, Moussa had been attacked by settlers. His friend Mohammed had drawn a picture about it. He showed it to me:

You could clearly see the house of Mohammed’s family, with the two security cameras the soldiers had attached to the roof.
And you could see a scared little face looking out of a barred window; (probably little Mohammed himself)
And in front were soldiers and Israeli military police with their armored car and the “mustoudinin”, the settlers. And the stones were in the air, flying – and Mohammed told me that the two little figures on the bottom of the drawing, first the one on the bike with a big stone heading in his direction, and then, the one lying bleeding on the ground and unconscious, were both Moussa.

Sometimes the soldiers are nice to Moussa and to the other kids, and sometimes they aren’t.
Once they told Moussa that if he wouldn’t do what they wanted, they would take him up to the top of the hill to their base. Moussa knows that people get tortured in that army base; everyone knows.

One day when we arrived at the street checkpoint, we saw a man who had been detained. We hadn’t seen what had happened before he had been detained and we could’t communicate with him. He spoke no English.

Moussa came along and we asked him to translate for us. Moussa talked to the man and then, with hands and feet, Moussa explained that soldiers had told the man to drop his trousers in the middle of the street and the man had refused.

The soldiers then called the military police. And the man was arrested for disobedience and hauled off to the army base. But we internationals took pictures of the arrest, to prove that he was without any wounds or anything before they transported him up there. The man was then released the next day. His sister called and thanked us for having been there. She said that her brother was fine.

And then there was the day when Moussa found a machine-gun bullet on the street.

He was riding his bike as usual. Suddenly I saw him stop, stoop, and pick up something from the ground. He got back on his bike, riding towards me to show me what he had found.

He stopped in front of me, where I was watching the checkpoint.
It was a bullet as long as the child’s hand and it had a vicious looking odd. The bullet must have dropped from an ammunition belt.

Nervously I looked over Moussa’s shoulder, not knowing what to say to him without the soldiers noticing.
The soldiers hadn’t seen anything, they had turned their backs to us and were talking together.

“Bad” said Moussa looking at the bullet in his outstretched hand, “bad.”
Moussa closed his hand tightly over the bullet, drove another round on his bike, then turned and rode over to the soldiers, stopping with his feet in front of them.
And then he handed the bullet over to one of the soldiers.
He got back on his bike and rode back to me, and with his broad typical Moussa smile he said:
“Moussa not bad!”

No, my little Moses, you are not bad, not bad at all!