< Reflection One: “... And The People Bloom Again”
July 2016 Delegation | Militarization and Paths to Justice
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-“... and the people bloom again”
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Overview: This first collection of reflections from the delegation is highlighted by Sararosa Davies' moving poem from which it takes its title. The delegation got off to a rough start when the group flight was canceled. Delegates were split into six smaller groups on different flight paths. Several members of the delegation were interrogated by Israeli border control agents; three were denied entry to Israel. Submissions by Mark McDowell and Sherry Altman discuss this situation.
But first, Karl Anderson explains what's behind a beating he witnessed Israeli soldiers give a Palestinian man in Jerusalem; Jacob Ertel shares observations from Al Quds (Jerusalem) in first and second installments; Mark McDowell comments on the seeming dystopian scenes caused by Israel's occupation; Hideko Otake asks "Can We Stop the Vicious Cycle of Violence?"; and Tracey Rogers and Hideko Otake comment on the delegation's visit to Israel's Holocaust museum.
Bethlehem, Palestine | Sararosa Davies - Saint Paul, Minnesota
It lives in the mothers
and the lines around their eyes,
wrinkles encircling pupils like the wall.
_____ It lives in their tears as they fall asleep, and the love
they always return to when they wake up. It lives in this land,
_____ in these valleys and hills and their way of speaking through wind.
_____ It lives where the mothers can't anymore.
I can't drink water without thinking about my sons
_____ in their cells, one tells us in Bethlehem
holding a poster slick with heat,
_____ pictures of her sons on paper crowd the square,
She tells us their names and I wonder
_____ how many times she has seen guns pointed at her husband,
how many times she has picked up a glass
_____ to put it back down again, how many times
she has felt so suffocated by those red houses
_____ that trickle down the hills that surround her village
how many times it was all too much,
but it still lives.
It lives in the mothers
_____ and their hope, their sumoud
that their sons can find their feet touching
_____ this ground, find their way home again.
It lives in the olive trees and orchards,
_____ in a future where the hills and valleys
are splayed open like prayer hands,
_____ and the people bloom again.
* sumoud is an Arabic term meaning “steadfastness”
Behind a Beating | Karl Anderson – Washington, DC
Earlier today, our delegation (the 58th organized by Interfaith Peace-Builders) witnessed a young Palestinian man being beaten, kicked and prodded outside of the Damascus gate into the Old City of Jerusalem. He committed no crime - other than being Palestinian in an apartheid state.
He exists in a parallel spatial reality to his Israeli counterparts: a reality which does not allow for the existence of Palestinian minds, bodies or spaces.
His abuse is the specific result of an administrative solution to a political situation, and shares the same sanctioned authority as both past and present US Jim Crow laws, South African apartheid, the deportation of south Asian immigrants from Australia, and other global colonial legal systems.
Administration, in this context, exists as the functional mechanism in which a state justifies its political aspirations. As an added bonus, it is couched in language which distances itself from overt racism, instead relying on dogwhistle rhetoric to mask its genuine intention.
Administrative bodies distance the aspirations of the colonial heart, in this case Zionism, and the fleshy reality of the militarized police's actions.
Al-Quds (Jerusalem), A First Reflection | Jacob Ertel - New York, New York
We travel on a road from Occupied East Jerusalem to Bethlehem in Area A. Unlike last night, this one isn't a bypass road and it takes us over 45 minutes to make what should be a 10 or 15 minute trip. We are to meet with Badil, a human rights-based organization dedicated to the Palestinian refugee crisis.
I look to my right and and see a hill of red roofs, a hallmark of Zionist settlements. "This is supposed to be Area A," I think to myself.
In fact, it is. The lack of any infrastructural demarcation between Areas A, B, and C means that one can be in a given area while looking directly into another one. The notion of territorial control takes on new meanings here, and in this instance perhaps especially since Oslo. The settlements are so visually enmeshed within the Palestinian Authority (PA) controlled areas of the West Bank that it is difficult to understand these nominal demarcations as anything resembling close to autonomy (and this is not even to mention the functionality of the PA with relation to Israeli authority).
A settlement on almost every hill, their sewage running off into the Palestinian villages below them. Israel has not turned the water on for 40 days and counting. The landscape speaks of violent entanglement, the red roofs splattered throughout.
I walk up to the graffiti-covered wall covered with messages from Palestinians and sympathetic foreigners. In 10 minutes I walk along 3 twists and turns, a watch tower patrolled by an IDF soldier stationed at each one. This is one of the wall's several functions - entrapment. The town of Qalqilya, for example, is completely surrounded, and its once-agricultural population cut in half since 2004. The Mexico-US border is on a completely different scale.
From the other side, settlers see a stone wall with limestone, an intentional reference to biblical-cultural heritage. I think back to a woman in Bethlehem from earlier in the day who spoke to us about her husband who was murdered in his car by the IDF and her son currently hunger-striking in Israeli Administrative Detention. She says that when she thinks of her son she cannot even bring herself to drink a glass of water. There has been no water for 40 days. She thanks us for listening to her story.
It is relatively late and my friends and I decide to go out to walk into the Old City. I have to keep reminding myself that these young men are Israeli military, not police. They often walk with their US-made automatic assault rifles pointed up with their finger on the trigger. After walking around for a bit, we go outside of Damascus Gate to sit and chat. Over the course of about 10 minutes we watch as two groups of two Palestinian men are stopped-and-frisked. The soldiers are obviously bored. One of the soldiers grabs the man's soft drink, swigs it, and tosses it before beginning the pat-down. Giving how the soldiers are moving, it's clear that the area is being surveilled by an un-observable third party.
We decide to call it a night and get up to walk back past the Israeli police station towards the hotel.
Like Something out of a Dystopia | Mark McDowell - Bedford, Massachusetts
As we drove to Bethlehem I glimpsed the Separation Wall for the first time. I wasn't quite prepared for the emotional impact. It winds through the landscape like something out of a dystopia. For all the petty and severe restrictions with which the Israeli's burden the Palestinians, it seems like the wall bears witness to it all. How can such a wall bode well for the Israeli's?
Our presentation from Badil was something I can understand; facts, figures and the rule of law. Understanding well the enumerations of the Palestinian refugee's plight only adds a building sense of anxiety that builds through the day.
At the Kairos meeting we learned about the Palestinian Christian churches' joint statement. This seems like a good strategy to alert other Christian churches, especially in the US to what is happening in Palestine. Maybe if American churches hear the message from fellow Christians, American public opinion will begin to move on this issue.
Can We Stop the Vicious Cycle? | Hideko Otake - New York, New York
In the presentation at BADIL Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights 2 photos of boys at the similar age, probably 8 or 10 years old, were shown side by side: A Palestinian boy detained by cops or soldiers and an Israeli settler boy with a gun.
The image reminded me of young soldiers at an Israeli checkpoint that we passed through when we drove from the airport to the hotel the day before. They looked like happy teenage kids chuckling to each other although they were heavily armed with assault type of weapons.
I wondered what they are designed to learn through their education system about the social and political "reality": how the narrative is constructed, especially in the history class, how much the individual kids can have opportunities to access alternative information to unpack the authorized narrative and to criticize it by sensitively considering their own daily experiences.
How can we stop the vicious cycle of hatred and conscious and unconscious discrimination to be transferred from one generation to the next?
Al-Quds (Jerusalem), A Second Reflection | Jacob Ertel - New York, New York
If you walk out of Yad Vashem and turn about 45 degrees to the left, you are looking over the ruins of Deir Yassin. Deir Yassin was the site of the bloodiest massacre during the Nakba, the village liquidated entirely. You likely wouldn't know what you're looking at because of the forest planted on top of it.
If you walk out and look straight, you are looking at a bypass road. It curves over the valleys below, held up by stilts made of concrete. Israeli settler vehicles whiz across patches of red roofs.
If you look out at the horizon, you are looking at the Green Line. You likely would not know this, because the Line is not clearly demarcated; instead, the Apartheid Wall snakes its way throughout the territory, effectively annexing Palestinian land all along the way. You cannot see the wall here. Like most instruments of occupation, its invisibility in one area is the converse of its hyper-visibility and physicality in another. It is cordoning off territory beyond the horizon.
On the way to Yad Vashem, we pass a Muslim cemetery. The Simon-Weisenthal Center is building one of its several Tolerance Museums on top of it. A parking lot occupies another part of it. Though this West Jerusalem Muslim cemetery has challenged this construction for years, ultimately the Center is able to develop the land easily because of Israel's jurisdiction over the area. Though Israel's power is often thought of as centralized and totalizing, here I am learning that its effect on the landscape is anything but: a diffuse network of varied architectural dimensions, of static points, and of contested, shifting terrain both seen and unseen.
I want to believe that Yad Vashem was built in good faith, but I don't. As I make my way towards the end of the exhibit, the Israeli National Anthem plays and a panel discusses post-war migration to "Israel." Israel in quotes because this is pre-1948. Palestine does not exist in this narrative.
All genocides have their horrors, and all deserve proper commemoration and preservation in historical memory. The Holocaust is of course no exception.
There is one Nakba museum in the world, and it exists on the Internet. It is illegal to teach the Nakba in Israel.
As we prepare to enter the Old City again through Damascus Gate, we witness again the harassment of a young Palestinian man. He is held and kicked for roughly 5 minutes. Eventually we make it to the Western Wall in the Jewish Quarter, and it is explained how Arab homes were razed in order to build the sprawling plaza in front of the wall. IDF and Israeli flags line the square.
#neveragain | Tracey Rogers - Arlington, Virginia
Today, I visited Yad Vashem, The World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem. It was a gut-wrenching experience for obvious reasons. What the Nazis did to the Jews was deplorable – #neveragain.
In viewing the different sections and exhibits, I became even more deeply disturbed as I began to notice the many ways in which Nazi tactics could be compared to tactics used by the Israeli government in its occupation of Palestine, and by those who pursue policies of White Supremacy in the U.S.
Throughout the center were quotes and curations that could be reworded to speak to the plight of Palestinians and African Americans. For example, Hermann Gorring, a Senior Nazi responsible for anti-Jewish policy was quoted, “I would not want to be a Jew in Germany.” This could also be said of others oppressed: I would not want to be a Palestinian in Israel. I would not want to be an African American in the U.S.
One curated photo said that “Jews were painted as having negative and immutable rights,” which reminded me of how Palestinians are painted as terrorists, and how Africans were painted as savages. Jews during World War II were forcibly “transferred” out of their homes, as are Palestinians today. Meanwhile, the photos of tanks pictured in Occupied Europe haunted me as I recalled images of tanks in Palestine, and tanks in Ferguson, Missouri. Historic photos of guns pointed at Jews in internment camps, reminded me of guns pointed at Palestinians at checkpoints, and guns pointed at Alton Sterling and Philando Castile. U.S. Army Chaplain Abraham Klaussner was quoted as saying, “Liberated, but not free – that is the paradox of the Jew.” “African American” and “Palestinian” could be easily substituted for Jew.
If it were not’t for the International Court of Justice, I’m not sure we would be able to avoid another Aktion inflicted on Palestinians (Aktion was a Nazi German term used to refer to the assembly and deportation of Jews to death camps).
Who Can Represent the Voiceless Victims? | Hideko Otake - New York, New York
Walking through Yad Vashem (the Holocaust Museum in Israel) I was thinking, “who can represent the voiceless victims?”
After 911 some family members spoke up to stop any retaliation war under their deceased children but their voices were totally ignored. Political exploitation of victims is so offensive but so commonly happens because it's an excellent tactic to take advantage of gentle feelings of sympathy and not easy to criticize it.
But victims should not be used to justify for the similar type of offensive discrimination, human degradation and even violence.
A Daily Travelogue of Travel Woes | Mark McDowell - Bedford, Massachusetts
Monday, 7/18 – Our flight has been canceled. I've experienced my share of flight cancellations but having a luggage truck run into the plane is a first. Oh well, the unexpected can add interest to a trip. It is nice to get to into hotel room by midnight.
Tuesday, 7/19 – Mark McDowell
The staff is doing everything to arrange alternate flights and keeps us well informed.. Emily is amazing. We get a knock on the hotel room door at 7:10. (We realize later that the room phone had been knocked off the hook during the night.) Anthony says for me to get to the lobby in 20 minutes to catch a shuttle to Dulles and a flight to Ethiopia. This sounds interesting. Eleven (I think) of us settle in for a 12 and a half hour flight.
Getting There – Not What I Expected | Sherry Altman - Ithaca, New York
Due to our Brussels Airlines flight out of DC being canceled, the 40-something individuals in our combined delegations #ifpb58 and #ifpb59 (if you’re following on social media) had to be rescheduled on new flights. This required immense patience and perseverance of our trip leaders. In the end, the group had to be split up.
Before we left, our leaders had prepared us by explaining that questioning is a normal part of the process of getting into Israel, and that, depending on your name or your skin color, you may face extensive questioning. While I could imagine there may be some of us who might face these kinds of questions, I certainly couldn’t see any reason not to allow any of our people in. All the folks in our groups, though outspoken activists, seemed to be people of integrity who believed in working systematically for human rights. I never expected the outcome – some of our people didn’t make it in. All three were young 25-35 year olds, all three were American-born citizens.
We knew before we went that the Israelis deny entry to anyone they choose, without explanation. We had been through an orientation together, and I had a good feeling about each one of my fellow travelers – serious, smart, caring people with an interest in wanting to see for themselves what is happening in Palestine/Israel. One was a high school teacher, another worked as an attorney with a progressive lawyers’ organization, and the third worked with an information center providing facts for journalists about the Middle East. All had been taken aside for hours of interrogation.
The rest of us were in the Tel Aviv airport, for hours, waiting for the questioning to wrap up, and praying that our friends would make it through. In the end, we were shocked and saddened when they were denied entry. Once the rest of the delegation had all arrived and we were reunited, we hugged like old friends.
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