[Reader-list] Fwd: Third Palestine Report

[Jyotirmoy Chaudhuri]

In the heart of this darkness, people are incredibly warm and hospitable.  I feel at home here.  I am surprised and moved by the welcome and kindness.  I did not expect graciousness and gentleness in occupation and trauma.  

The culture is highly communal and social. Families are huge and connected.  The people, even the refugees, have a sense of place that runs deep.  They are of the land in a way I’ve not encountered before.  Refugees, now in the third generation, still say they are from the village their grandparents fled in 1948.  When I ask, a 15-year-old girl tells me, “I am from Zakaria.”  Zakaria is a village in Israel proper about 20 miles away in distance but galaxies away in access.  It is in ruins.  It no longer exists as the village of Zakaria.  Much of what was Zakaria is today a moshav, an Israeli farm cooperative named “Kfar Zaharia.”  This girl has never been to Zakaria.  

The families that are from the West Bank have been here as far back as memory goes----centuries and more.  Until the coming of European Zionists en masse in the 1920’s and after, people lived together on this land in a pluralistic society of Jews, Muslims, and ancient Christian communities (Druze, Coptic Egyptian, Greek Orthodox, and others).  Mostly, they lived without hatred.  I meet an old man who remembers the twilight of that time.  Each week on the Sabbath he used to turn off the light switches for his Jewish neighbors.  These stories are dying now.

There is a powerful sense of history here.  Jericho, a town in the West Bank, is the oldest known human settlement on earth.  People have lived in Jericho for 10,000 years.  This settledness creates deep connections.  There is high trust between people.  People share what they have.  The Palestinians are wealthy in the social capital we no longer have.  On the street strangers greet me and ask where I am from.  They say, “You are welcome in Palestine.”  Every morning the man at the cabstand offers me tea and a handshake.  We have all had invitations for meals in the homes of people met in shops and cafes.  

One evening, I’m the only woman in a servis van, nervous about traveling at night alone to a new city.  A man asks if I’ve been to Ramallah before.  I say no.  In halting English he says, “If you need help, I am ready.”  It is an elegant and kind offer.  And indeed he does not leave me until we arrive at my hotel.  Another member of our group tells us about a fellow who walked with him for 2 hours as they searched for somewhere he was supposed to be.  Stories like this are common.  

Before we got here, I was told that people are polite and greetings and manners important.  I was also told that if I am ever in a dangerous spot, I can knock on any door and those inside will shelter me, that the ethic of hospitality overrides everything.  When I heard this stateside, I thought, “Oh yeah, right.”  But now I too am a believer because I have experienced that kind of welcome.  Sad to say, we are all startled by the warmth and trust that Palestinians extend to each of us, whether we are American, Indian, white, Jewish, black, whatever.  

An irony of being here is that though I am anxious around the soldiers and their guns and their drunken excesses of power, I feel safer in Palestinian society walking around at night than I feel in the U.S.

So far I have encountered two rude Palestinians.  It has been amusing to tell other Palestinians about them because they are so baffled and kind of head scratching about it.  It tells me how unusual such behavior is.  

I have been impressed by how educated and sophisticated this population is.  Education is highly valued.  Literacy rates are 95+%.  In the last 30 years, several universities have been founded in the West Bank.  A monthly magazine called “This Week in Palestine” lists artistic and cultural events all over the West Bank and East Jerusalem.  This ancient, refined society is trying hard to keep up the semblance of a shared cultural life despite the imposed confinement, the wide-scale poverty now, and the literal destruction of institutions, infrastructure, and public gathering places.  Even teenagers are knowledgeable about history and politics.  I have heard several teens offer sophisticated analyses of global geopolitics.  One night a student quotes Emerson at length to us and tells us about Romanticism.  I can’t help but think what a sharp contrast this is to what U.S. teens and adults know about the world and art and history.  

Among the people I have met in these weeks, I have not encountered hate.  There is outrage.  There is talk of justice.  There is talk of human rights.  There is frequent talk of how Israel and Israelis are poisoning their own souls with the brutality they inflict on Palestinians.  There is concern that Palestinians must not let themselves become the next generation of oppressors after their decades as victims.  But so far, there is no talk of hate.  It is a soulful and pacifist philosophy I find amazing and surprising.  Sometimes I find myself impatient with the perseverance and the lack of rage.  I myself feel a lot of rage about what I see.  More than anything, people want peace and the normal life they have not had for nearly three generations now.  They are tired.  They speak of living with Israelis in peace as citizens of one country with the same human rights for all citizens.  This is the only solution I hear discussed.  No one speaks of a 2-state solution.  The facts on the ground of Israeli settlements all over the West Bank and the ways the Wall has annexed to Israel so much of the fertile land and the water and carved up and made the West Bank discontiguous----these things make a sovereign Palestinian state no longer a possibility.  People here recognize this.  The evidence is in their faces.  Everyone is clear that Israel is never leaving the land it calls Judea and Samaria and that we call the West Bank.

The culture I see here makes me sad beyond words.  I am here as a witness to the destruction of Palestine and Palestinians.  I wonder how long these people can continue to persevere and hold onto dignity.  Resilience cannot continue endlessly through anything.  These people have endured 38 years of occupation, collective punishment, and spirit breaking humiliation.  And now in the last five years the violence of the occupation has accelerated to a level of brutality for which there are no words.  The events of September 11, 2001 gave the Israeli army license to do whatever it wishes in the Occupied Territories in the name of eradicating “terrorism.”  And the army and government of Israel have taken full advantage of this historical moment to crush, oppress, shame, and break.  I have felt despair at how the IDF come up with twisted sadistic ways to snap souls, to take away the humanity of these people, and reduce them to something less than they are.  Palestinians are suffocating in suffering.  One man tells me that the IDF have taken away everything he has, all that is left now is the air he breathes.

Ruppat Rani
ruppatrani at rcn.com



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