FAQ Palestine

Unlike the other posts on this blog which were written in situ in Samos or Malawi, I’m writing this two years after having lived in occupied Palestine.

My recollections may not be as vivid or comprehensive as I might have liked, but it felt about time I put down some words about my experiences, and what better time to do so than being between jobs during a global pandemic?

I thought a good format would be addressing some of the questions I was asked the most when I got back, and if answering these triggers more detailed memories for me, I may go back to describe some things deeper in subsequent posts. Let me know if you have any follow up questions not answered.

It’s also worth adding that upon returning to London after these experiences, I spent the past year and a half immersed in Palestinian advocacy working full time at a Palestine-focused NGO. Therefore my understanding of the issues is a lot deeper and more comprehensive now than they were when I moved to Palestine with a lot to learn still in January 2018.

What were your first impressions of Palestine?

Sat on a coach from Jerusalem to Ramallah, the first alert to the fact I was approaching an occupied land was the wall. It really is bigger in the flesh than you ever imagine it to be. A huge thick unearthly slab of concrete just there, stuck onto the landscape.

Once the coach had crossed into the occupied West Bank, the next thing that stuck out was all the buildings on this side suddenly had black plastic barrels on their roofs. I later learn that this is water storage for Palestinians, who receive less water than their Israeli settler neighbours, who don’t have these black canisters on their roofs.

These were the first two visual things I remember seeing and thinking, “things work differently here…”

That same first day I arrived in Palestine went on to be an incredibly formative afternoon.

Arriving to my flat, my new flatmate and fellow intern who’d arrived maybe half a week before me invited me to come with him to a cover a story he’d set up for that afternoon. I said I didn’t want to step on his toes but he was very open to it, so before I knew it we were traversing the streets of Ramallah to take a Service (taxi) to a refugee camp just outside the city, called Jalazone. Bear in mind I hadn’t remotely gotten to know Ramallah yet, or adjust my senses to my new home, and suddenly I’m weaving through the narrow streets of a concrete refugee camp on my way to meet the Galeth family.

We were here to talk to fifteen year old Malak. Malak had just been released from an Israeli jail, which she was sent to aged 14. She spent eight months behind bars, five of those waiting for her sentence. She shared a cell with five other girls. Towards her final weeks there, one of these girls was Ahed Tamimi. Her conditions had been inhumane and a breach of her human rights, cuffed for up to 18 hours twice a week for visits to court, without food, water or toilet breaks, and communicated to only in Hebrew which she did not speak.

After the interview Malak showed us some of the things she made in jail. Woven pieces of jewellery from fabric or beads and a painstakingly beautiful handwritten magazine she had put together with the other girls.

After talking about a traumatising year of her life (one she should never have been put through) she then, in typical teenage girl fashion, just wanted to take selfies with me and experiment with different filters.

What’s life actually like for people there?

I often found this tricky to answer as I really wanted to emphasise two things equally to people: that Palestinians live a normal life like anybody else, and that Palestinians don’t live a normal life remotely like anybody else.

Living in Ramallah, a city with bars, clubs and alcohol (very much not the case in every West Bank city  – a good rule of thumb is if the city was founded by Christians, like Bethlehem, Taybeh or Ramallah, you can find alcohol there) I was going out every weekend, soaking up the obsession with techno among young Palestinians, playing darts in bars, winding up at house parties watching music videos cuddled on a sofa. I was able to go to swimming pools and art galleries.

However, the violence of the occupation is like the proverbial rat —  it’s never more than a few feet away.

One time, meeting a friend for a drink, he was late as he had been pulled over driving from Taybeh from Ramallah and had his laptop chucked on the ground and broken by a soldier. He arrived tearful and shaken even though he’d grown up under this occupation.

Also, as I said, I was in Ramallah, part of Area A with (theoretically) full control by the Palestinian Authorities (even though soldiers do still enter the city to carry out raids and arrests). If I had been in a camp, facing frequent soldier raids in the middle of the night to take away the teenagers, or in Area C with constant demolitions and settler attacks, I would have experienced the constant violence of the occupation even more. Lots of people see Ramallah as a bit of a bubble for this reason. And of course, had I been Palestinian, I would have been the direct recipient of this violence rather than a mere observer.

An example among many whose lives are this way are the Tamimis in Nabi Saleh. One day I received wind that Mohammed Tamimi, 15, had been arrested in a morning raid and taken in, so I headed to the village Nabi Saleh to talk to his parents. Mohammed at the time had part of his skull missing after being shot by the IDF (the famous incident Ahed Tamimi was in jail for responding to) and was waiting for a series of surgeries to fix it. His mum said she had pleaded with the soldiers to arrest him with his hands in front of him instead of behind in order to protect his head. They hadn’t obliged and when Mohammed was released later that day he told us he’d been mishandled and kicked in the van. This photo was taken later that day when he was released to show you what his head was like.

Did you feel safe?

This was primarily a question asked by Israeli family and their friends and was incredibly irking. Israelis are fed an incredible amount of propaganda about how violent Palestinians are in order to justify their state’s unjust military occupation. These are the signs to Israelis warning them not to enter Palestinian controlled areas at risk to their lives, which is nonsense.

Therefore to have their cousin living in Ramallah and reporting feeling safe seemed as if it was too much cognitive dissonance for them to wrap their heads around.

I felt as safe as I would do anywhere. You pick up how to be street wise in a certain place after a few evenings of being out, the cultural dos and do nots.

Did you tell people you were Jewish?

“Maybe don’t tell anyone you’re Jewish,” my grandma warned me before I went to Palestine. [“Are we Jewish then grandma?” I wanted to ask, considering she had converted to Christianity after her children had grown up.]

It wasn’t something I wanted to hide per se, but at the same time my Judasim, whatever that amounted to, wasn’t exactly something at the forefront of my identity, and crucially, had certainly never been tied up with Zionism, meaning I had never had to go through the complicated disentanglement process that many other Jewish people supportive of Palestinian rights had to. (That being said, I didn’t get away scot free without some level of friction from family members about Palestinian advocacy work).

But while I didn’t want to hide it, I was also somewhat cautious about how it might play out. Would a population of people who had been oppressed for 70 years by an occupier who happened to have a Jewish face not surely have internalised negative feelings about Jewish people generally? Would some people have turned to stereotypes and theorised more villainous, anti-Semitic tropes to explain their occupation to their kids?

One night my friend leaned in to me in a bar, “Can I ask you something. You said you were Jewish?” I think I’d casually referenced it in a conversation previously. He was positively bowled over with admiration that ‘somebody Jewish’ would come to Palestine, to the point it was almost uncomfortable and felt like total misplaced praise. I explained I wasn’t making a great sacrifice or defying my entire life’s identity by being here, I had long had the injustices facing Palestinians on my radar, had attended protests against the bombing of Gaza through student years, and so on.

The vast majority of Palestinians I met were the quickest people to differentiate between Zionists and Jewish people and I’ve continued to find this to be true.

I want to give you both sides of the spectrum on how I perceived Judaism being perceived in Palestine. No more than three times did I see something anti-Semitic in Palestine. I thought about leaving this out of this blog so it isn’t weaponised against Palestinians —  but I wanted to be representative. Consider this though: how many incidents of anti-Semitism similar to these happen in the West? I think you’ll find they’re relatively frequent.

The first was an interviewee’s father espousing conspiracy theories about Jewish people ruling the world. It being early on in my trip I didn’t say anything about myself. I do wonder what would have happened if I had. The second was seeing Mein Kampf for sale by a book vendor on the street. I went back a number of times to see if I could approach the seller but it was gone. The third was a swastika graffitied on a garage in a small and rural village in the Jordan Valley.

What was the hardest bit?

Definitely the most dramatic and frightening day was getting tear gassed and shot at in Hebron by Israeli soldiers, whilst I was there to report on what was a peaceful Palestinian protest. I was totally unprepared, unequipped and there alone. But really if I’m honest, I found the biggest toll for me came any time I had to return to Israel, which Palestinians call ’48.

I was living in a certain dystopian reality and when I found myself back in Israel everybody pretended that reality did not exist. As if there was no Palestine being occupied mere kilometres away. It was something I couldn’t stomach and found incredibly isolating and distressing when there.