Thomas Suarez

In February of 2008, New-York based violinist Thomas Suarez joined two members of the
London Philharmonic Orchestra, New York native Nancy Elan, and Thomas Eisner, in a series of
performances for children in Palestinian refugee camps. The trip was arranged by the London-based
charity, Camden Abu Dis Friendship Association. [All photos by Tom Suarez]

The man keeps his eyes fixed on the screen through three slow puffs on his cigarette. Metal rods and pieces, bundled tightly together in a faded laundry bag, look suspicious under the x-ray, so my suitcase is placed on an old wooden table. A guard stares at the suitcase through the smoke rising from his lips and asks me to open it.
In the flesh, the strange bundle looks even more suspicious; the guard nervously calls for a superior, who in turn summons another. I realize the gravity of the situation when all three cigarettes take second place to the metal contraption. I stand back so as to be sure I do not look as though I am interfering. When I see that they are afraid even to touch it, I realize that I’d better intervene.

“Music stands.” They turn to me. I point to the viola strapped to my back and one of my colleagues pretends to play. “Three of them.” Exchanging glances of relief, they look back to what is not a rocket launcher, then walk over to us, waving their cigarettes like batons. Music stands, they laugh. Welcome to Jordan. Music stands! Very welcome to Jordan!

Panorama showing Jerusalem on the right, an Israeli watchtower in the center, and neighboring villages of Abu Dis on the left.

Welcome to the Occupation

The next morning we wait in a damp cement building for the old bus that shuttles people from the Jordanian to the Palestinian side of the Allenby Bridge. The Jordanian border guard jokes with us and passes around a little plastic cup of cardamum-spiced coffee, being careful that no cigarette ashes fall as he refills it from his thermos. There is my partner, violinist Nancy Elan, violinist Tom Eisner, and me, Tom Suarez, violist, making an uncommon cello-less trio, but one which suits our purposes well.

As the bus takes us westward across the Jordan Valley, we see our first evidence of Israel’s occupation of Palestine before reaching the border. That is the riverbed. Although in mid-February we are nearing the end of the rainy season, the valley is dry, and the Allenby Bridge crosses over parched earth. The reason lay upriver: In a region where water has never been taken for granted, Israel had decades back diverted Palestine’s aquifers to feed Israeli businesses and the lawns of its illegal settlements. To our south, we can just make out a sheen that is the northern edge of the Dead Sea, itself now dying at the rate of about one meter a year from Israel’s diversion of the Jordan.

The Allenby Bridge, our crossing into Palestine, is named for the Brit who led the Egyptian Expeditionary Force in the conquest of Palestine and Syria in 1917 and 1918. He was nicknamed Bloody Bull and his war techniques are considered to have been precursors to the Blitzkrieg. Reaching the Palestinian side of the 14 meters of steel trusses and wooden floor, we first encounter the two-tiered society, Master and Vassal, that is Occupied Palestine. The difference with which the obviously-Arab and the apparently-white are treated by the Occupation authorities is striking from the moment we reach the Israeli border facility.

We take our place at the back of a long line of Jordanians and Palestinians in a large cement room where young women in uniforms, some seemingly teenagers, wield massive weapons and boss around Others old enough to remember 1948.

We are there only briefly when an official spots us and walks up to us. He explains that we don’t need to wait on line with these people. Indeed, we do not even need to carry our own luggage; without asking, it is carried for us. Confused, we look around to see what is distinguishing us from the rest, but see only our lighter skin and more Western dress. Feeling like we have taken four front seats vacated for us at the bus driver’s orders in 1955 Alabama, we are whisked out of the cement holding room to a short line at the immigration desk.

The immigration desk has two officers, both women in their early twenties, one on the left and one on the right. Tom and Nancy go ahead of me, Tom getting the left officer and Nancy the right. Tags embossed with London Philharmonic Orchestra in white letters on a distinct, orange-pink background stand out on the violin cases strapped to their backs. After a few minutes of brusque counterpoint of questions from their examiners pressing them for reasons for their entry, Nancy is admitted. But Tom’s examiner is getting more and more suspicious, her questions more confrontational and his replies more exasperated. Finally, in reply to a question I couldn’t make out, Tom says something about his grandparents murdered in Auschwitz. You are Jewish? follows immediately in an abruptly sweeter, though astonished, voice. There is a brief, almost giddy exchange, and Tom also passes through. The person in front of me goes to Tom’s examiner, and a moment later the right desk is also free. My turn.

“You are with the man who was just here, yes?” The question comes not from my interviewer, but from the one on my left who had just interviewed Tom. She motions to the viola case strapped to my back with the same orangey-pink tag dangling from the handle. I confirm that we are travelling together. “Please tell your friend,” she implores me, twisting her neck toward me and forgetting the person she is supposed to be examining, “please apologize for me. I thought he was Muslim. I didn't realize that he is a Jew." She had treated a Chosen Person as the Other. I will tell him, I assure her, about the unfortunate error. Then my own examiner says, "so you are Jewish," in the tone of a confirmation. She does a double-take when I reply that I am not, but no matter, she knows I am with the one her colleague had slighted, and after a few easy questions reaches for the admittance stamp. As I ask her to stamp a separate slip of paper rather than my passport, the counterpoint resumes in my left ear: “Please don’t forget to apologize for me,” Tom’s examiner repeats several times even as I am leaving the desk. “I feel so bad about it.”

Bedouin man leading his flock through the streets of Abu Dis.

Leaving behind Palestinians uncertain of their entry or exit at the hands of the armed progeny of an occupying army, and leaving behind a large silver Star of David emblazened on a naked hill aside the terminal, we squeeze into a taxi and set off for East Jerusalem. As we drive the gradual incline from the low ground of the valley, to the hills that comprise Jerusalem and its neighboring towns, occasional Bedouin settlements catch our eyes. For decades the nomadic Bedouin have been shoved about to make room for Israel’s illegal settlements, and now there is nowhere left for them but the roadsides. Even this will now end, as Israel has designated these final slivers of Bedouin earth as "security zones" and will be forcing them onto land seized from Palestinian villages, among them Abu Dis, our adopted home in Palestine. In the meantime, Israel has prohibited the Bedouin from building any substantive dwelling, so they must pass the cold, wet winter months under cardboard propped against barren trees or in tin lean-tos.

East Jerusalem

When we reach the Strand Hotel in East Jerusalem, a six-storey, 88 room hotel, we increase the hotel’s occupancy from zero to four. Although the hotel lies close to the old city, the Jerusalem branch of Al-Quds University, and other points of interest, the Occupation has all but destroyed the Palestinian economy. Most tourists stay in the western, Israeli part of Jerusalem.

Soon we are among the many visitors from around the world who have come to walk the old city’s cobbled streets and alleyways, rich in Biblical history. The most conspicuous icon in the old city is not Biblical, however, but the flag of Israel. Several of the old city’s buildings fly multiple Israeli flags, principal among them a beautiful, central building bought by the former prime minister, Ariel Sharon. Towering over an ancient, narrow street, the residence is crowned with a huge Israeli flag and an almost comically oversized menorah that reminds me of the colossal North Korean flag I saw years ago just beyond the DMZ, placed there by Pyonyang to up its psychological ante. On nearby buildings, new balconies flaunting large Israeli flags are supported by beams built over old Arab balconies.

Near Ariel Sharon's residence, an old Arab balcony has been used to put support beams for a larger Israeli balcony above it.

What is perhaps worse than humiliation inflicted by Israel is the humiliation that Palestinian shop owners in the old city inflict upon themselves in order to survive: I love Israel, in various renditions, their t-shirts, caps, buttons, and coffee mugs say. Towels boasting a map of all the land from the Jordan Valley through the Mediterranean, the entire swath bearing the single place-name Israel, symbolically claim the Biblical Holy Land for the modern nation-state.

The glare of memorabilia is especially prominent as we walk along the Via Dolorosa, the route along which Jesus is said to have carried his own cross to his crucifixion, and I am struck by the correlation between the cross and the I Love Israel souvenirs: as the devout reenact Christ carrying his cross, the instrument of his destruction, they march past Palestinians similarly forced to carry theirs.

Continuing along Jesus’ route, the flow of people is interrupted by rifle-toting IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) guards shepherding a group of men wearing yarmulkas. Why the armed escort is necessary is a mystery, as we see no evidence that anyone is hassled.

East Jerusalem, with the Dome of the Rock in the background.

Back at our hotel. both Nancy and I wish to practice our instruments, so I ask the manager if there is any other room I could use for a couple of hours. He smiles and tells me to play anywhere in the entire building, anytime, as I please. "You are the only guests," he reminds me.

In the evening an expert from the organization Stop the Wall visits us at the hotel. We’d thought we pretty much knew about the Wall, Israel’s cement behemoth that snakes about Palestine. But if what Stop the Wall claims should come to pass — and World Bank documents he cites seem to support their case — we knew next to nothing. We knew, of course, that Israel’s stated reason for erecting the "fence" (as its politicians like to call it) is to keep terrorists from getting inside Israel. This is of course demonstrably false; the reason is for Israel to seize more land and strangle the rest. A barrier to keep out "terrorists" would partition Israel from Palestine, but the Wall mostly partitions Palestine from Palestine. And although the Wall has destroyed everyday Palestinian life by imprisoning regular people, anyone determined to cause violence would find a way in.

Jerusalem as seen from behind the Wall near Abu Dis. Note the piece of sports equipment visible in the lower left, very near
the Wall - this spot had been a neighborhood sports facility before the Wall. The Dome of the Rock (see previous image) is
visible in the distance, and an Israeli watchtower surmounts the hill on the right. A Spanish-speaking activist has written on
the Wall "... the fight for liberty" and "peace with dignity".

We sit around a coffee table in the unheated hotel lobby. There’s no laptop for our guest to show us the maps on the CD-ROM he brought, which illustrate the current and predicted paths of the Wall, but this leads to a more interesting discussion. He finds a scrap of paper and draws rough maps freehand. Precision of the lines is not critical for the new topic, which goes beyond the immediate issues of the routing of the Wall and political boundaries. He presents a coherent case that the land grabs and the fragmentation of Palestinian society are merely antecedents to the Wall’s ultimate purpose. Once the destruction of Palestine is complete, once Palestine is reduced to physical, economic and sociological rubble, a series of disconnected, emasculated ghettos made completely dependent on the world beyond the Wall, then low-tech factories will be built along the perimeters of the bantustans, and the Palestinians will become their slave work force. Compliance from each cell of Workers will be guaranteed by their isolation and dependence, with wages and employment manipulated by the ruling Master class on the other side of the Wall.

Nancy wonders if such an atrocity would be too much even for the compliant international community. But I suggest that not only would the outside world tolerate the slavery, it would applaud it: Israel, after decades of intransigence from its unruly neighbors, offers them the means to a better life, depriving its own citizens of employment in order to help the wretched masses on the Other Side. The world would see the death stake as a selfless olive branch; the inverted reality of news today is no less far-fetched. Flashes of the 1927 movie, "Metropolis", come to mind as he talks; Nancy and I realize that the Wall, as bad as it is, might only be the Trojan Horse.

Abu Dis

In the morning we leave for Abu Dis. Close enough that it affords a perfect panorama of Jerusalem, Abu Dis had long been like a quieter corner separated by a valley. The walk between the Mount of Olives and Abu Dis is said to have been beautiful.

Then the Wall came.

Nancy at the Wall on the Jerusalem side of Abu Dis

There It is in front of us, extending left and right as far as we can see. No matter how ghastly you thought It would be, no matter how high the figures made It sound, it is more ghastly and it is higher. Nancy wants to leave her mark on It and finds a piece of charcoal in a nearby shop. She asks me what to write — on the spot, suitable words are not easy to conjure. I think of the large sign I had made to demonstrate against the Israel Philharmonic’s Carnegie Hall concert exactly a year ago, in February of 2007: Musicians Against the Occupation. Three of us from the New York area had braved the Fifty-Seventh Street February wind and the livid crowds to call attention to the fact that while Israeli teams and musicians freely travel, compete, and perform, Israel prevents Palestinian teams and musicians from doing so. The words are no less relevant here, so Nancy clutches the charcoal and blackens them onto the Wall. She adds USA Shame On You, the Wall being financed with US money at a cost of $1.5 million per mile.

Where we are standing, we are in Abu Dis, our new home, and although we don’t yet know it, our flat is a minute’s walk away, or was once a minute’s walk away. Until the Wall. Now we must get back into our little van and drive a half hour to get to exactly where we are, but two feet away on the other side. Palestinians cannot do even this, since they carry the additional "wall" of I.D. cards that keep them in designated bantustans.

The Wall weaving through Abu Dis.
Since Israel often declares a security buffer along the Wall, these home will likely be destroyed.

"We’ll make a pastrami sandwich of them," Ariel Sharon famously told Winston Churchill III in 1973. "We’ll insert a strip of Jewish settlements in between the Palestinians, and then another strip of Jewish settlements right across the West Bank, so that in 25 years, neither the United Nations, nor the USA, nobody, will be able to tear it apart." Even when, ten years later, Israeli IDF Chief of Staff Raphael Eitan bragged that "when we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do about it will be to scurry around like drugged roaches in a bottle", the Wall was still two decades away.

But now the Wall and the Settlements work in concert, strangling Palestinian villages more like a cancer than a pastrami sandwich. The Wall isolates the healthy cell, the village, and severs its blood supply, its transportation and commerce. Cancer cells, the illegal settlements, replicate themselves around the village until completely surrounding it. Finally, apartheid roads supply only the settlements, like new blood vessels connecting only to the tumor cells, not the legal village, the dying host cell. The cancer then metastasizes to another part and repeats the process. This will continue until Palestine, the host organism, dies.

Abu Dis dissected by the Wall.

The Settlers are heavily subsidized by the Israeli government, thus by US tax dollars. More importantly, Israel secures the permanence of the settlements by encouraging the most militant of Zionists to be their colonists. Whether from Israel, Brooklyn, or Russia, radical militants are the efficient choice to people the "facts on the ground" that are the ballast of the Israeli theft of Palestine. Heavily armed and radical in their conviction of divine right to Palestine, their stolen lands have evolved into tiny nation-states with whom the government of Israel must reckon.

I don’t believe this was an accidental Frankenstein — it is how Zionist leaders of the post-1967 era placed the success of their imperialist dream beyond the control of unknown future leaders.

We reach Abu Dis on the other side of the Wall, exactly opposite Nancy’s charcoal message. A nearby minaret marks our spot. Shops that were once the busy neighbors of the little store where Nancy found charcoal, are boarded up and abandoned.

The Wall has both sliced Abu Dis into pieces and amputated it from East Jerusalem. Normal intercourse has ceased, the economy has failed, daily life has grayed, and families have been torn apart. Townspeople suspected of organizing or resisting are rounded up. Hurriedly erected Jews-only cities, built on the aesthetics of suburban sprawl, now surmount the surrounding hills that for millennia had formed the gorgeous landscape of the Holy Land.

Fig trees that had been a livelihood for generations of Palestinians and a hallmark of the landscape have been uprooted. Incongruous, fast-growing pines are planted in their place using water diverted from Palestinian aquifers. But rather than giving the settlements the facade of age as intended, the trees give them the look of the final frame of a comedy film in which the villain has slipped past undetected by moving behind a branch held in one hand.

One of the illegal Settlements ringing Bethlehem. The modern highway, here
seen traversing a deep valley and entering a tunnel built for it, provides access.
Only Jews are allowed on it.

New Jews-only roads are built to reach the settlements, and similar roads will network them with the many others engulfing Palestine. The settlements are so discordant with the gentle, ancient hills that they look like alien cities lowered into place by Martians. Wake up the next morning, and what you thought was a bad dream, won’t go away no matter how many times you blink. Like Orwell’s telescreen, the Wall and settlements seem to be looking at you everywhere, no matter where you go. Ignorance is Strength; we have always been at war with Palestine.

The activist who would be our guide, chaperon, our second set of eyes and ears, our fountain of experience and information, and when necessary our translator, I will call ‘Marwan’. Brilliant and self-educated, Marwan is the secret weapon that will ultimately defeat Zionism. He entered University at age 16 — or so he jokes, meaning that he was 16 when the IDF first threw him into prison.

Inside his cell he found two worlds, the one that his Israeli masters saw, the other a closely-knit society of fellow inmates who pooled their knowledge and experience. The days were passed not in languishing but in learning, and the sum of what every inmate could contribute was the curriculum. Older inmates, better educated inmates, more travelled inmates, younger inmates, those with artistic talents or any number of skills; each brought some piece to a larger puzzle, and everyone learned from each other. Passionate yet calm, peaceful but determined, getting to know Marwan was to understand why Israel targets anyone who displays qualities of leadership.

Guard on the way to Abu Dis

Tragically, prison can also do the opposite. Our driver, a neat man who kept his minivan spotless and slowed to a turtle’s-pace for speed bumps, had a brother who like Marwan spent much of his youth in prison. After one incarceration, his family found him strangely quiet and inward, as if he were no longer the same person. Nonetheless, he seemed to be trying to get on with his life. He had a job and had met a girl. They were engaged. But his plans for a normal life were again interrupted when the Israeli military again rounded him up and threw him back into prison. When next he emerged from his cell, he disappeared from his job, from his family, from his fiancé. No one knew where he was or what had become of him until the news came that he had blown himself up. I didn’t ask how many innocent Israelis he took with him.

Our driver’s family knew that the military destroys the houses of family members of terrorists. For a year, every day they removed their few pieces of furniture so that at least their belongings could be saved. But at a moment when everything was inside, without warning the bulldozers came. The rubble still remains, as they are prohibited from rebuilding. The land will of course be confiscated.

We reach Al-Quds University in Abu Dis, where the Wall is now the dominant feature of what had been the surrounding panorama. From the front of the campus, the land slopes down to the valley, but everything is encased by the Wall. Israel is trying to coerce the University to change its name, because "Al-Quds" means Jerusalem, and thus implicit in the name is the idea that Arabs have something to do with Jerusalem. The opposition throughout the faculty and student body is so fierce that, for the moment, Al-Quds remains.

Cyberspace allows some international university projects to proceed despite the Wall. We are shown about a science lab in which a young woman in a head scarf studies images of DNA on a computer screen, using the internet to share her results with colleagues on other continents.

Abu Dis is a "dry" town. Alcohol-free beer is the closest suggestion to booze that one sees in the grocery stores. Palestine brews it own beer and wine, but these, along with imported offerings, are found in the largely Christian cities like Bethlehem. Nancy posits that the lack of available alcohol, along with the society’s extremely close family bonds and sense of filial piety, hold together this society robbed of its daily life and dignity. I reply that the same extreme, external stress on Palestinian society might account for recent rise in the wearing of head scarves among women. Such traditions can provide order and cohesion for a society being ripped apart at its seams.

Posters with photos of martyrs are plastered everywhere. Most are young and look like they could have been your neighbor. Contrary to Western perception, Palestinians use "martyr" to refer to anyone who died at the hands of, or in the fight against, Israeli aggression, not just the tiny minority who commit suicide attacks.

Bread-making in Abu Dis

Globalization is nowhere to be seen, at least not in its on-the-ground retail manifestations. It will come, of course, once the expropriation of Palestine is complete. But for now, there are no chain stores, no global icons planted to nurture new generations of cultural drones. In Ramallah, the most cosmopolitan city in Palestine, I did see one coffee shop whose owner had a sense of humor about the issue: Stars & Bucks was the name of his shop.

Electricity is not wasted, so the night is unexpectedly dark when we reach our little rented flat at a bend in an alleyway, a stone’s throw from the Wall. The room has no insulation and the tile floor rests on the cold foundation. Every flaw in the ill-fitted window has been discovered by the wind. Marwan left us an electric space heater but it has no discernable effect and after a half hour we unplug it.

Local hamburger joint in Abu Dis

There is no hot water. Turning the shower valve on, my mind flashes back 20,000 years to a mastodon getting frozen so quickly and so completely that his flesh is said still to be edible today. Just before I follow in his footsteps my hand vibrates to the towel. Commodities are dear: the towel is made of some synthetic material that repels water. I go to bed with the taste of toothpaste in my mouth, because after only one swoosh of the icy water my teeth feel like they will crack. As I shiver under a synthetic blanket, I think of what life is like in an Israeli tent prison in the desert in February.

The night is also unexpectedly still. When we are woken by an odd sounding vehicle, we don’t know whether it is an unusual sounding truck or an Israeli tank.

Anata

In the morning we go to the Anata refugee camp. When we arrive at the camp’s boys’ school, we see that the Wall has sliced right through what was once the children’s playground. From the roof, we see why: a large Israeli settlement now sprawls over the neighboring hill. What had been the playground was taken because it lay along the desired route of the settlement’s Jews-only access road.

Anata, like many of the camps, is a microcosm of the Palestinian-Israeli debacle. The residents are the descendants of Palestinians who were forcibly expunged from their homes by militant Zionists, contrary not just to all international law and the morality of civilized nations, but indeed contrary even to the Balfour Declaration and the conditions under which Israel was admitted to the UN. The displaced Palestinians went to Anata to wait out the war, and were then forgotten by the world. Their descendants are still waiting.

To the right is one of the illegal Settlements surrounding Anata, as seen from the roof of the boys' school at the Anata Refugee Camp.
Immediately past the Wall is a Jews-only highway leading to the Israeli settlement. Pine trees stand where fig trees once provided
Palestinian livelihood, before being razed. Refugees in the Anata Camp use art to defy the Wall. The lower section of the wall
is out of view because of the sloping land.

Instead of justice, the camp residents have seen themselves squeezed in yet more. They are now surrounded by four illegal Israeli settlements, a Jews-only road, and an Israeli military installation. Their historic links with Jerusalem have been severed both by these "facts on the ground" and by their West Bank I.D. cards.

Israel situated all four of the Anata settlements over the Eastern Aquifer Basin in order to divert the aquifer’s water to Israeli interests. As a result, Anata must now purchase its own water back from an Israeli company — such outrages being evidence that Stop The Wall’s predictions are correct.

Turning around 180 degrees, we see a little road winding gently uphill, and on the far side of the road we see the camp’s girls’ school. We are facing about where, a year ago, 10-year-old Abir Aramin was shot and killed by Israeli soldiers as she walked up the road to school. Abir would have been yet another unpublished statistic had the father not been a member of the group Combatants for Peace, whose Israeli members have the voice denied Palestinians; but otherwise it was typical. After the shooting, the Israeli authorities refused to examine the scene for two and a half days, until after a heavy rainfall. When they did, they said that rains had made it impossible to precisely locate Abir’s blood or the IDF jeep’s tire tracks, and thus the case could not be pursued. That an IDF bullet had penetrated the back of her skull was not contested, as it was there to see, but no matter, because the Israeli coroner said that there was no proof that the bullet was actually the cause of death(!). Instead, the rumor was spread that she was actually killed by a rock thrown at the soldiers by a classmate. The many witnesses were ignored. Why Israel’s military was in Palestine guarding illegal Settlers taking yet more Anata land was not asked.

Very few of the thousands of children killed by the Israeli Occupation have received a fraction of this much scrutiny. Yet had the identities of assassin and victim been reversed, the murder would have been front page news for the Western media; it would have been labelled terrorism, and it would have been used to justify Israel’s siege of Palestine.
Was Abir a deliberate target? Even in instances where such deaths are “unintended”, they are still murder, because an illegal occupying army is responsible for the havoc it wreaks; by definition, its violence is never defensive, its victims never collateral.

Ex-soldiers have come forward to state how their being given their weapons and sent to the Occupied Territories is like being made a god, Ruler of everything and accountable to no one, implicit but unwritten freedom to terrorize the untermenschen. They have consistently confirmed what Palestinians have long insisted to the world’s deaf ears. And the targeting of civilians, and specifically children, by the Occupation army is well-documented by independent observers and human rights organizations.

Chris Hedges, a widely-respected journalist who was part of the New York Times’ team that won a Pulitzer Prize for that paper’s coverage of global terrorism, put it starkly when wrote from Gaza of the Israeli military murdering children "for sport" :

Children have been shot in other conflicts I have covered ... but I have never before
watched soldiers entice children like mice into a trap and murder them for sport.

We move to a chilly, damp classroom where, among our waiting audience, is Abir’s brother. Our fingers are stiff from the night spent in the Ice Age, so we ask if perhaps a space heater could be brought in. But quickly we regret our request: although the principal tends to it immediately and graciously, the look of horror on his face reminds us of how expensive electricity is for the impoverished camps, where students and teachers stay in their outdoor garments throughout the day. We take quick turns in front of the barely red wires, hardly warming our fingers, then quickly unplug the heater.

Nancy & Tom E performing Bartok Duos at the Anata Camp

We begin our informal concert with one of several Palestinian pieces I had arranged for two violins and viola: Mawtini, the de facto Palestinian national anthem (though the Palestine National Council, affiliated with Fatah, designated Biladi as the anthem). I think of a youth we met in Abu Dis who had been imprisoned for singing such a Palestinian song as the tanks rolled in; human rights organizations document the military’s detention and abuse of children caught committing this "security risk". But Marwan encourages the children to sing the words.

Children in the Anata Refugee Camp seeing us off.

Next we play the popular Aziza, which I had arranged with far more liberty than the anthem. Whereas the Beethoven that follows is received politely, the Bartok two-violin duos that end our concert are a big hit, their intriguing rhythms and exotic sonorities bringing unexpected color to the dreary refugee day. The eastern European folk elements upon which they are based likely elicit some common denominator with the Middle East.

The prisoner issue

We meet with professionals devoted to prisoners’ issues and international law. Though they work at respected international organizations, I do not cite them because Israel assigned them I.D. cards for a different bantustan than where their organizations are located. They are "illegals" in their own country.

Prisoner art at the Prisoners' Museum, Al-Quds University, Abu Dis.

Prisoners’ issues are especially important because arbitrary, illegal imprisonment and torture are a hallmark of Israel’s Occupation. They serve not just to demoralize and cripple Palestinian society, but just as important they create for the rest of the world the facade of a “guilty” populace.

And that is the coup of being arrested and put in jail: it makes you guilty. One can read the Jerusalem Post, for example, and find the term "terror operatives" used synonymously for Palestinians in prison. You’re guilty, else you wouldn’t have been arrested and imprisoned. And if you’re tortured, as most Palestinian kids are, you must be really guilty.

This psychological warfare is especially important for Israel’s image in the United States. Even among the so-called "left" in the United States, debate about torture typically revolves around whether it is moral, and whether it is effective, but rarely about whether the subjects are guilty. In Guantanamo, for example, the suspension of due process and habeas corpus is debated on principle, but the inmates’ actual guilt is rarely questioned. Yet we know that most of the Guantanamo inmates are innocent. Many were rounded up arbitrarily to demonstrate the US government’s proactive response to terrorism, and as its stage props for the presence of external threat. Many were presented by bounty hunters who were paid thousands of US dollars to catch "operatives". And some, such as a photographer for al-Jazeera, were seized for blatantly political reasons.

Thus when we hear that Israel has had to incarcerate and torture thousands and thousands of Palestinians, we realize that Palestinians are a very violent, lawless bunch, and so who can blame Israel for taking offensive actions against such a neighbor? Nor do we consider that even the "guilty" Palestinians are guilty only of resisting illegal aggression and occupation, and that this resistance, short of targeting civilians, is not only legal, but indeed "necessary".

At any one moment, Israel has 10,000 to 11,000 Palestinians in its prisons. The inventory of prisoners is fluid; some are routinely released as a PR gesture for the Western media, while others are rounded up. Many are arbitrary victims, others are kids who threw rocks at invading tanks, youths with a dangerous talent for leadership, or anyone who Israel believes can "name names".

Physical torture is supplemented by the most insidious psychological torture: the youths are told that unless they cooperate and give names or whatever else is demanded, the rumor will be spread that he or she has become a collaborator. This is a threat quite literally worse than death, since not only is collaboration the ultimate disgrace to one’s name and family, it also leaves the supposed collaborator vulnerable to vigilante justice.

Shepherds cut off from grazing land by the Wall. Both side of the Wall are Palestine.
The location is between Jerusalem and Bethlehem.

When we hear that Israel has released a hundred Palestinian prisoners, we are impressed by the risks Israel is willing to take for the sake of peace: they have released a hundred guilty Palestinians, a hundred "terror operatives". If only Palestine would reciprocate and release a hundred Israeli POWs, but alas they’ve but one, and unlike Israel’s prisoners, he is, by international law, a legitimate one, a soldier captured during an aggressive action by an occupying army. Yet that one Israeli prisoner provided his government the pretext for a brutal escalation of assaults on Palestinian civilians and a barbaric invasion of Lebanon that would have brought every Western military to its uncompromising defense had the identities been reversed.

Rather, we supplied and financed the weapons. A resolution by the US House of Representatives cited the Israeli soldier’s capture by "terrorists" and reaffirmed, following a terrifyingly twisted summary of events, Israel’s right to "defend" itself.

Follow the (US) money

It is with the prisoner issue that one first starts to see the extent to which the PA (Palestinian Authority) has been corrupted. Citizens of the United States may have been surprised to read of late that their government is allocating hundreds of million of dollars in aid to Palestine. Well, sure, that means Fatah, not the elected government, but still, that’s good, right?

In truth, much of the money the US sends to Palestine actually goes to Israel, adding to its $3b annual US taxpayer subsidy. How? The PA, or more accurately the P.A. officials whom Israel and the US allow to serve, agreed to reimburse Israel for various expenses regarding the territories it occupies, including the expenses it incurs in arresting, holding, and torturing Palestinians. When an Israeli bullet fells your child, the PA reimburses Israel for the expense of the bullet. Stranger than fiction, this is but a glimpse into the bizarre relationship between Israel, the PA, and the United States.

How could the Palestinian Authority have agreed to such strange arrangements? Here it is important to note that "representatives" of Palestine serve only at the pleasure of Palestine's principle adversaries, Israel and the United States. Representatives of Palestine who do not serve Israeli/US interests are silenced through imprisonment, assassination, or political marginalization — the "deposing" of the actual elected Prime Minister, Haniyeh, being the most brazen example of the last. Ths reality, in which Israel and United States "negotiate" with "adversaries" of their choosing, appears to be unique in modern liberation movements.

What of the rest of the US taxpayer money that goes to Palestine? Much goes to the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), an organization that has historically been linked with the CIA, though no such connection in Palestine is officially acknowledged. Its Palestine projects boast signs reading "from the American People" and "for the benefit of the Palestinian People." In Abu Dis we see three USAID projects: shiny new bus stops, a playground, and a water pumping station.

Non-operative water pumping station in Abu Dis built by USAID

However, the bus stops serve only as eye sores because there are no buses to use them; the playground has never seen children because it sits in an inaccessible edge of town adjoining a waste dump; and the pumping station, which had never been needed until Israel commandeered the aquifers, does not work and has never worked. Simple incompetence? Or perhaps the spending of the money on contracts was itself the object? Other explanation? There seemed to be no favored theory.

Where US taxpayer money has been used quite efficiently is in the subversion of Palestinian democracy. Fatah, the party which for many Palestinians symbolizes corruption, was given considerable US cash to turn the 2006 election in its favor — indeed PA President Mahmoud Abbas was already a de facto Israeli-US appointee, because Israel imprisoned more popular Fatah candidates not to its liking. But despite all this collusion, Palestinians made the only intelligent option open to them: they elected Hamas, warts and all.
Hamas won because while Fatah’s officials drove around in Mercedes, Hamas’ built school and provided needed services. Hamas won because when your children are being gunned down daily, when your houses are being bulldozed and your land stolen, you vote for who’s going to protect you. Hamas won because Fatah had sold them to the glue factory at Oslo. Yet that vote took the West by surprise.

The Wall, with Al-Quds University on the left (10 o'clock position). Palestinians are forbidden to use the road on the right side
of the Wall. In the distance is an Israeli military facility.

There followed the massive US-Israeli attempt to overthrow the newly-elected government by freezing its funds, supplying rival Fatah with more weapons and cash, attacking its offices, and assassinating its officials. The recent revelations that the Bush Administration was also conducting a covert operation to terrorize Palestine into total civil war, was hardly news to anyone not relying on the US corporate media.

Yet against all odds, tenacious Hamas managed to hang on to Gaza. Israel then “tightened the screws” yet more, turning it into a concentration camp, while the US lavished its cash on internal sabotage. The US began approaching Gaza’s public employees, who had been working with little or no pay because Hamas’ money has been frozen, and offering them their full current and back salaries in US cash, on the condition that they not work. Thus the very people who are the nuts and bolts of society — health care providers, teachers, police, etc — were given the choice of performing their jobs and starving their families, or letting society crumble in exchange for foreign bribe money.

Thus, along with Israel’s blockade, air strikes, sewage dumping, daily attacks on civilians, and assassinations, the United States is bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East even better than it did in Latin America.

Ramallah & the Amari Refugee Camp

The more cosmopolitan nature of Ramallah, where we have our next performance, is already evident from the graffiti on the Wall as we approach the city. My favorite is "CTRL + ALT + DEL" in particularly bold, neat spray paint. Its author is likely a computer enthusiast: this is the keyboard combination to force a complete reboot, to "crash" an operating system and abort some debacle. The Wall and everything it signifies has to be aborted. Palestine has to be rebooted without the virus.

The Quaker meeting house in Ramallah was built exactly a century ago, in 1908, on a quiet little pastoral plot in the middle of the bustling city. The lovely stone church structure, restored four years ago, serves the additional function of a concert hall. Adjoining it is a simple wooden house, where we are welcomed from the cold rain by Kathy Bergen, a Canadian Mennonite who has long devoted herself to peace and the Middle East. In the main room, a series of little posters affixed to the wall, actually pages from a calendar, summarize the sixty years since the nabka.

After our visit we continue to Al Kamandjâti, a music school begun by the violist Ramzi Aburedwan, an acquaintance of Nancy’s. Before Ramzi went abroad and studied music, he became iconic of the first intifada because of an oft-reproduced photo of him throwing rocks at an invading Israeli tank.

The Amari refugee camp, where Ramzi grew up, was our next stop. Welcome to Child Club, the letters affixed to the concrete wall greet us. Next to the windows’ real iron bars, someone has painted the life-like iron bars of a prison cell window, a macabre comment on what the camps really are. Inside, eager children wrapped in warm scarves and knitted caps sit and listen to us play. Some hold violin cases, beneficiaries of Ramzi, who gives his good fortune back to the camp’s younger generation.

That night in Abu Dis, we visit a friend and his two daughters at their flat. The girls’ mother, a Christian, is not there: the Wall and identity cards now keep her in East Jerusalem, their father in Abu Dis. Ever since the Occupation broke their family in two, the girls have not seen their parents together. The older daughter, a conspicuously intelligent and hard-working teenager, sums up her aspirations under the shadow of the Occupation: I just want to be able to lead a normal life, she tells us.

Bethlehem & the Aida Refugee Camp

In the morning we take a circuitous route, around the Wall and checkpoints, to Bethlehem. The village of Christ’s birth is now completely surrounded by the alien pods dropped onto hilltops by Martians in the middle of the night.

Marwan's cigarette gesticulates towards the encroaching matrix of settlements, forbidden roads, and Wall. What two states? he says in exasperation. Olmert, Bush, they still talk to the cameras about two states. Can you explain to me how they can keep a straight face when they tell the world they're going to make two states out of this mess?

One of the Israeli Settlements surrounding Bethlehem. Construction is continuing in the lower right.

When I reply that in the US, most people assume everything is in Israel if there are Israelis there, he asks for an example. I use Gilo. CNN covered Gilo when Palestinian kids were throwing rocks at the illegal settlements there. But CNN issued a directive ordering its reporters never to use the word "settlement". They had to refer to Gilo only as a "Jewish neighborhood" and not reveal that it is in Palestine. So, I explain, Americans assume that Gilo is in Israel and the pesky Palestinians are not letting Israelis live in peace. Marwan's wrist flinched nervously against side of the car. And all the news is like that, I finish. Marwan is a proponent of a single state with complete equality for everyone. In the US, I tell him, the most common argument against a one-state solution is that Israel would never accept it.

Our first stop in Bethlehem is the University. There we meet the remarkable Sister Patricia, who has lived in Bethlehem most of her life. She brings us to the music room, and in full habit talks about the Bethlehem she has lived through, the Bethlehem of the 1967 war and its aftermath. Her first-hand accounts of the brutality of the Occupation, particularly of children being taken, are consistent with what we hear from Palestinians. Sister Patricia also describes how students and teachers attempt to continue classes "underground" when Israel closes the University for "security" reasons, the most recent instance being for fully three years.

Student at the Edward Said National Conservatory of Music in Bethlehem, studying theory.

From the University we attempt to go to the Edward Said National Conservatory of Music, but are turned back at a checkpoint, and so must backtrack quite a distance to circumvent the growing length of Jews-only asphalt. Our new route takes us past the Israeli prison where Marwan had first been sent as a teenager; opposite the prison, between buildings, I see yet another Settlement on a nearby hill.

The Said Conservatory, with branches in Bethlehem, Ramallah, and Jerusalem, was established by Birzeit University as The National Conservatory of Music, the name later changed in honor of Palestine’s great intellectual. We are warmly received, and are invited back for a student recital in the evening before leaving for the Aida refugee camp.

The sweet, friendly children of the Aida refugee camp are chillingly contrasted by the hell they live in. Like all the older camps, Aida was originally composed of tents and non-permanent structures because it was assumed to be temporary shelter. Everyone would go home after the soldiers left. But as Israel’s true intentions became clearer, durable structures replaced the tents and now, fifty-eight years after its founding in 1950 to alleviate overcrowding in nearby Beit Jibrin camp, even the surrounding land is being gobbled up by Israel.

We set up our music stands on the cold floor of a room in the camp’s Lajee Center, which organizes cultural, social, and sporting activities for the camp’s children. One concrete wall and a narrow metal staircase are painted loud green, and the adjoining wall is bright yellow, an attempt to bring some cheer to the dreary surrounding. On the wall is a mural a child has made by drawing over crumbling pieces of plaster, showing a group of children being led to freedom by a fist-waving man. Behind them is a girl, different from the rest, in a blue robe, with her right hand raised high. Next to it the child has written

Father: Prisoner
Mother: Murdered
Resolution 194

UN Resolution 194, passed in 1948 after the assassination of Count Folke Bernadotte by the Stern Gang, sought to get the refugees home and/or get them reparation, and agreed to recognize Israel’s self-proclaimed independence only if it abided by its provisions. How many generations later is our little enthusiastic audience?

After Mawtimi, we play the scherzo from a Beethoven trio. As this scherzo begins with the viola alone, I am the one to set the tempo. Nancy had been nudging me for a much faster tempo than I’d been taking, and her analysis made sense, so before putting bow to string I put the third movement of the “Erioca” Symphony in my mind. The new tempo not only brings the movement to life, but also allows us to play the soft parts really really softly without losing the musical tension. Now we sense that the barely audible passages are piquing the children’s attention, so we instinctively get softer, softer still. They are delighted and strain to hear us, amazed that we seem to be working so hard yet are making so little sound. Some stifle a laugh — a victory for us. When we finish we ask a translator to explain that the composer marked the music with the Italian word for "joke", and that he would be very pleased if he could know that it had made them laugh.

We are playing instruments and bows which sound good but are not "precious", and so we ask the children if they would like to try them. Several children take a turn and there is one boy, perhaps twelve years old, who is captivated. Nancy takes extra time with him while his peers gather around. He is patient and carefully follows what she demonstrates. I’ve no doubt that he would be a serious student if only he were given the opportunity.

Nancy demonstrating how to grip the bow, Aida Refugee Camp.

Nancy teaching violin. Aida Refugee Camp.

Walking about the camp, one has the feeling of being in a place that civilized nations should be liberating. Metal, concrete, metal, concrete, metal, concrete, one anemic shrub sticking through the asphalt, cracked limbs bandaged by some unseen caretaker, bleakness in every direction. Defiant slogans punctuate the monotony.

Aida Refugee Camp

The camp is a frequent destination for the Israeli military. Much of the tragic evidence of military raids has been covered over to hide painful memories, but some bullet holes dot doors and walls. One set on a second floor is pointed out to us. Soldiers had entered the camp in the morning. We look up and realize that we must be standing about where the soldiers were. Their bullets pierced the head of a father at breakfast with his children. Those children now live with the memory of their father’s brains splattered in their cereal.

The Wall is the ever-present barrier at the end of their physical world. On the circular, black and gray cement of its watchtower, an unacknowledged artist has painted a woman in a blue dress. She reminds me of the rear figure in the child’s mural in the room where we played. Here she is more elaborate and seems to carry further symbolic elements. Further along the wall is a painting of an idyllic seaside being observed by a little boy, that boy being Hanzala, the signature icon of Naji al-Ali, the brilliant Palestinian cartoonist who was assassinated in 1987.

We go to the roof of the building nearest to the Wall to see what lies beyond it. A Jews-only settlement crowds the neighboring hill, and the modern Apartheid road that serves it hugs the other side of the snaking Wall. Dusk is falling and in the poor light the angular white of the settlement looks like a mountain strip-mined to the bone. I turn back to the camp and see a single, elegant minaret rising high above the gray squalor. Our Bethlehem hotel is a five-minute walk from the traditional site of Christ’s birth. We see no other guests.

The Wall and watchtower in the Aida Refugee Camp. The modern road visible on the far side of the Wall is for Jews only,
and leads to an Israeli settlement on the nearby hill.

Bad about PR; the Six Day War; Oslo

"We have been very bad about the PR, you know," Marwan begins at dinner in the hotel. "The Israelis know how to talk to the world. We have been very bad at it." Marwan describes the catastrophic betrayal by King Abdullah I of Jordan, who struck a secret deal with the Zionist leaders before the 1948 war. Abdullah sold out the Palestinians in exchange for the expansion of his kingdom to the newly-named West Bank and newly-displaced Palestinians. Palestinian dissent, in particular the All-Palestine Government (APG), was violently suppressed by Abdullah, and to this day his image on Jordanian currency is an object of derision. But the West is barely aware of the collusion at Palestinian expense — indeed, the event is held up as proof of anti-Israel bias: no one complained when Jordan occupied Palestine, one often hears. Like today, Palestinian voices were not acknowledged; Israel and the West appoint who it wishes to "speak" for Palestine.

Marwan touches on the years after the nabka and before 1967, which the West sees as a peaceful Israel trying to survive amidst the barbarian hordes. Why, he asks rhetorically, haven’t the Palestinians been able to get word to the average Westerner that three-quarters of a million people had been violently expelled from their homes, and that for two long decades they had waited for Israel to address its obligations under Resolution 194? Israel was not even supposed to be recognized as a country until it did. Or that Israel was illegally rerouting the region’s sparse aquifers since the early 1950s, leaving Palestine dry?

Aida Refugee Camp

Then 1967 came, a year whose infamy is for Palestinians second only to 1948. For adults 50-ish and over, it is the year the world turned upside down. Though called the Six Day War, some of the first-hand accounts we hear describe it as the "six hour" war. I tell Marwan that most Americans believe that Israel was attacked — I turned sixteen during the war and remember how it was portrayed. It’s true, he adds, that although Israel attacked first, Arab nations were amassing troops. But do Americans wonder why?

He’d often discussed Palestinian accounts of the 1967 war, but Marwan now mentions the mass executions by Israeli soldiers rumored to have taken place in Egypt in the course of the war. We both mention the recent corroboration of this event by individual Israelis, as well as by Bedouin eyewitnesses, upon the discovery of mass graves in the alleged locations. Marwan is intrigued when I mention an incident that may be related, and of which he is unaware. That is the strange case of the USS Liberty, which on the fourth day of the war was destroyed off the Gaza coast in a prolonged air and sea attack by the Israeli military, according to one CIA report at the orders of Moshe Dayan. Several theories have been suggested to explain the motivation for the attack; most likely are that Israel intended to sink the vessel and have Egypt blamed, and/or that the Liberty crew would soon learn about the mass executions taking place nearby in Egypt.

Marwan now turned to the aftermath of the ‘67 war, lamenting Palestinians’ failure to correct the fiction that Israel offered peace to the Palestinians if they would recognize Israel.
Sipping a local wine, he explains that the Israeli cabinet’s post-‘67 "peace" resolution was addressed only to Syria and Egypt and concerned only Sinai and the Golan. Not only did Israel made no offer whatsoever to Jordan or the Palestinians, but indeed their resolution referred to Gaza as "fully within the territory of the state of Israel" and did not even mention the West Bank.

Yet Palestinians were unable to expose to the world the lie that their "refusal" left Israel with no choice but to occupy Palestine, and that if only Palestinians had not resorted to violence, they would have had a nation of their own a long time ago.

Street scene in the old part of Bethlehem.

Israel never had any intention of surrendering Gaza or the West Bank, and its Occupation had nothing to do with Palestinian "terrorism", or even a rejection of Israel’s legitimacy. Yet the pivotal ruse to the opposite has been maintained to this day. Even the Israeli "left", defying all evidence and reason, typically explains the colonization of Palestine as "accidental", a later vice to which their government became addicted.

By the time we had finished dinner and sat with our glasses of Palestinian wine, Marwan had moved ahead chronologically until reaching his favorite topic, the Oslo accords.

The Oslo Accords were a phenomenal coup for Israel. Whereas the series of agreements in truth served only to legitimize Israeli aggression, they were presented as a "generous offer" that Arafat, by then the poster-boy of Palestinian intransigence, initially rebuffed.

Marwan asks the obvious: What is so complicated? Why can’t Israel simply obey the law and get out of Palestine? All this convoluted posturing, the decades of arbitrary "complications", the summits, the initiatives, all the brokering, all the agreements, and most exasperating of all, the “road maps” — the whole sorry history has been manufactured to evade the actual issue, an elaborately choreographed scam to enable Israel’s theft of Palestine to continue amidst the lie of the Palestinian "threat".

I tell Marwan about Shlomo Ben-Ami, one of Israel’s key negotiators in Oslo, who has publicly said much of what Marwan describes: that Arafat was Israel’s stooge, seduced by the prospect of coming back to the Occupied Territories as "king". The Arafat of the Oslo accords was an Arafat groomed by Israel for Israel; he hardly represented Palestinians and certainly not their interests. Ben-Ami admits that he would never have accepted the agreement if he were Arafat.

During the seven years between the initial agreement of 1993, through Oslo 2 ("Taba") in 1995, and the "successful" Oslo Accord that was signed with great pomp on the White House lawn in 2000, Israel had put into overdrive its theft of Palestine — "grab the hilltops," in Sharon’s words, directly violating Oslo, and of course international law.

Hebron. The building to the right of the steps is what had been the bus station for the old city.
But the street beyond was seized by Settlers and closed off to be a Jews-only access road.

But the larger scam is the agreement itself, whose fragmentation of all of Palestine into one of three non-contiguous zones (A, B, C) rewards decades of Israeli aggression and is the death knell of any hope of justice for Palestine.

Most egregious is Area C, which Oslo placed under Israeli control. Area C comprises fully 60% of Palestine and includes most of the Israeli settlements. The result is that Israel now "legitimately" control its stolen land. Yet in Area C Palestinians themselves can do nothing on their own legal land without permits from their occupiers. Palestinians cannot build or even modify a house on their own land without an Israeli permit. But while Jews-only Israeli settlements, illegal even under Oslo, continue to multiply and expand, Palestinians are virtually never given a permit to build on their very own land. Israel knows that Palestinians must eventually build or repair their homes, permit or not, so it waits for any construction or modification to begin, then "legally" confiscates the land for the violation.

Israel counters that all Palestinians have equal access to Israeli courts, as though redress to one’s aggressor is a consolation to the victim, but even that is a ruse, merely serving to give the outside world the facade of fairness and due process. Palestinians simply will not be given the permit required by their illegal Occupiers to do anything on their own land. When it is then confiscated by Israel, the West knows only that the Palestinian didn't have a permit.

Area C has afforded Israel such impunity that it is no longer wary of crossing even the international community. Last month [January, 2008], Israel uprooted 3,200 trees and levelled myriad water cisterns in the vicinity of Hebron, completely destroying a project financed not just by the precious savings of local Palestinians, but also by a hundred thousand dollars from the European Commission. Israel’s explanation? It was an "enforcement activity." That procedural term was enough. No further justification had to be given.

Area B is under joint Israeli /PA control, the PA responsible for internal policing and Israel for "security". But since Israel can override the PA’s authority whenever it invokes "security", it is in reality little different from Area C. For the same reason, Area A, which is supposed to be under full PA control, is not much better off. For example, Israel resumed control of Area A as part of its so-called Operation Defensive Shield (2002).

Oslo, in short, merely gave Israel’s actions the facade of legitimacy, and did so while preserving the lie that it is Palestinian intransigence that prevents a peace-loving Israel from putting this debacle behind us. In the meantime, Israel continues to flaunt whatever limitations Oslo pretends to impose. Of the eighteen thousand Palestinian families whose homes have been bulldozed since 1967, less than ten percent had even the pretext of “security”. How, Marwan asks with cigarette turned upside-down, has such a colossal deceit been maintained for so long?

I describe to him my favorite example of the American public being groomed to accept the world upside-down, a ploy so simple and brilliant that even he was impressed. One afternoon several years ago, my daughter came home from high school and told me that her best friend was selling candy to raise money for "Israeli children who were victims of terrorism". For the record, though it should be irrelevant, the girl was neither Jewish nor had any previous interest in Israel or Zionism. Students had been solicited to help with this appeal, and my daughter’s friend, being a kind-hearted, peace-loving sort, wanted to help.

Machine gun readied at a checkpoint between Jerusalem and Jericho.

The technique is genius. There are indeed Israeli children who are victims of terrorism, so how could one possibly object to such a noble cause? But money, of course, was not the point. It mattered only that the appeal was made, door to door through the neighborhood, by concerned youths who had given up their afternoon to unwittingly carry the subliminal message implicit in the appeal. This message — Palestinians are terrorists and Israeli children are their victims — was carried far more powerfully than any overt propaganda.

Close to midnight, Nancy and I walk through the old town, which is nearly deserted. A nun passes by, as do a couple of young men who barely notice us. Cats disappear into the trash bins. A little black plastic bag is caught in a quirky draft, and from a distance we think it is a rat. The alleys that intersect the main path to the Church of the Nativity go downhill both left and right, and I wonder what we would find at this hour if we follow them. Past the alleys we dimly make out pastoral valleys.

In the eerie stillness we walk about the Church where Israel had laid siege for nearly a month and a half in 2002. Israel had initiated a series of brutal raids on West Bank cities, Bethlehem among them; local civilians and resistance fighters alike sought refuge in churches throughout the city, but this one, on the spot traditionally associated with Christ’s birth, became the object of the bloody stand-off. Now the blackness, the emptiness, surreal Christmas lights lining a building top at the main square, and the uneasiness of the breeze, mark our first impressions of old Bethlehem.

Hebron

In the morning we continue south to Hebron. Our first stop is a dusty, curio-filled back room. The room, which looks like a scene in an Orientalist painting, serves as the headquarters for Rihana, the name I’ll use for the local activist who would be our guide in the city.

Rihana accompanies us on a tour of Hebron University, where we are shown a new teleconferencing facility designed to enable meetings with people elsewhere in Palestine when identity cards and checkpoints make travel impossible. On the way from the University to our performance, we pass the busy intersection where Occupation soldiers have forced Palestinian policemen to undress and stand, naked statues of humiliation.

The 450-seat theatre at Hebron’s Children’s Happiness Center has been a boon for cultural events and community involvement. Its design is versatile and intimate. Each row rises sharply above that in front, allowing everyone to see unimpeded, and the front row comes right up to the stage, with no forbidding abyss between audience and performer. The children feel comfortable talking with us during our performance. Rihana translates.

One teacher in the front speaks a bit of English. When she learns that we are from the UK and US, she tells us that her family is in Gaza, looking at us intently as she does, as though to ask if we might have influence to save them from the atrocities our governments are helping to inflict there.

After our concert the children show us their artwork on display in the lobby, and then we set off for the old city, wherein lies one of the most bizarre manifestations of the Occupation.

An IDF soldier in Hebron stops a Palestinian man to check his ID.

To say that a settler is radical is redundant; anyone who steals someone else’s land and occupies it is by definition "radical". Even by settler standards, however, the settlement of Kiryat Arba, just outside of Hebron, is home to radical settlers. Kiryat Arba is the site of Meir Kahane Memorial Park, in honor of the founder of the terrorist organization Kach, and was the adopted home of Baruch Goldstein. In 1994 Goldstein, Brooklyn-born physician who had received two citations from the Israeli Army, entered Hebron’s Ibrahimi Mosque and opened fire, killing 25 and wounding 150 before being subdued and beaten to death.

Why is this relevant today? One, because his grave in Kiryat Arba is a revered Zionist place of pilgrimage; two, because although the Israeli government publicly condemned the Goldstein massacre, its response was to station its military in the old city not to prevent further Settler violence, but rather to safeguard it. The result is a generation of Settlers hijacking homes in Hebron's old city at rifle-point, so fanatical in their belief that they are the Chosen Race occupying land to which they’ve divine right, that even some Israeli soldiers have described them as "pure evil" for which there is no solution but to remove them. But Tel Aviv knows that any attempt by the Israeli government to reign in the monster they've created would spark vicious rebellion on a terrifying scale.

Hebron, old city

The old city is typified by two or three storey buildings lining either side of narrow streets near the Mosque of Ibrahim. It is here that we come to the bizarre situation that is Hebron. Heavily armed settlers have been moving into the old city and evicting, at gunpoint, its legal residents. Palestinian families have been attacked in the middle of the night, sent into the street, their homes hijacked. The military is eternally stationed on rooftops, soldiers taking shifts to insure that the settlers are not impeded. Thus whereas Israel’s colonists normally live in settlements built new on stolen land, in the old part of Hebron they simply commandeer the existing homes. Palestinians live knowing that above their bedroom ceiling is a Settler who evicted your neighbor at gunpoint, and that at any moment you and your family will be next.

Hebron, street leading to Ibrihimi Mosque. The Palestinians who live and work in the street-level
apartments have spanned the street with metal fence screening to protect themselves from the
garbage thrown from the Israeli Settlers who have commandeered the upper floors.

Settlers who have commandeered upper-story flats use the Palestinian-occupied street-level as their trash dump, throwing their garbage out the window to the alley below. The situation is so surreal that the Palestinians have now spanned the narrow streets with metal screening, secured above their heads to the walls on either side, to catch the garbage from the Settlers above. For the Palestinians of the old city, the firmament is now a metal mesh suspending trash and waste of every sort, organic and inorganic, including human faeces.

You're looking up into the sky. Garbage from Israeli Settlers caught by the
Palestinians' protective screen, as seem looking straight up.
Note the piece of solid concrete toward the lower left -
such debris has injured and killed Palestinians.

Where the screens can’t catch, settlers throw stones or heavy debris from above, injuring — and sometimes killing — Palestinians. The rooftop soldiers share in the sport; according to the human rights organization B’Tselem, they are fond of throwing of urine-filled bottles at the Paletinians below.

Children are indoctrinated early. Settlers commonly encourage their children to throw stones at the Palestinians and any "internationals" they see about, and the soldiers make certain that the stone-throwers are not challenged. The outside world never believes Palestinians or international observers; but now Israeli soldiers have come forward to describe how Settlers educate their four-year-old children to throw stones at Palestinians, and to attack their homes and steal their possessions.

We visit the Hebron office of Christian Peacemaker Teams, which is in a dilapidated, otherwise abandoned building at the edge of the old city. Their power being that of witness to abuse and intervention during attack ("getting in the way", as their motto puts it), in Hebron they are kept busy indeed. Rihana warns us not to take any pictures or be conspicuous in any way — the CPT people have enough problems as it is.

The phone rings, and our discussion with the woman who runs CPT Hebron is cut short. There is a "problem" elsewhere in the city, and she scoots out the door. [Back in New York, I read of CPT "getting in the way" of subsequent armed evictions of Palestinian families from their Hebron home of generations. What the soldiers do now is make the father of the evicted family tell the CPT to leave. The father has no choice but to do so. CPT understands the situation and honors the man’s request, and then, as both he and CPT know will happen, he is arrested so that he will not interfere with the Settlers’ takeover of his home.]

Nancy and I continue to the roof of the building to get a better look at the area. There is a soldier on the roof of the next building, level with us, standing by rolls of barbed wire more than half his height. Aside from his rifle he is holding a large khaki-green bag whose several compartments look full. On the ground next to him is a tall black box with an antenna rising well above his head, bending from its own weight. In this day of cell phones and micro-electronics, I wonder what is special about the transmitter that makes it so cumbersome.
The soldier sees us, see the little camera dangling from my hand, and yells no photos. Nancy imprudently yells back no guns. The surprised soldier, keeping his eyes fixed on us and rifle poised, grabs a phone attached to the transmitter by a coiled wire. He begins speaking into the handset just as Rihana and Tom arrive. Rihana is unnerved and gets us away, dumb tourists who didn’t know what they’re getting themselves into.

The Israel military closed Shuhada Street soon after the Goldstein massacre of 1994. Since the old Arab market was adjacent,
the military closed the shops as well. Since then it has been a Jews-only road for illegal Israeli settlers. The settlers are most
often armed, and even their teenage children can be seen with rifles. On our way downstairs, I look out from a landing toward
the street. Five settlers, two middle-age men and three youngsters, walk down a Jews-only road adjacent to what had been
the old Arab market. One of the men has a rifle strapped over his far shoulder. They are probably on their way home to the
Hadassah settlement. Two soldiers, each with machine guns, keep vigil on the street.

The rooftop soldiers are everywhere. Walking back toward the center of the old city, Tom stops and looks up at one. The sun has fallen behind the building and the soldier’s face is in the shadow. I am off to the side, trying to be out of the soldier’s view while keeping eyes on both him and my friends; occasionally I release the shutter on the camera dangling from my fingers, partly hidden in my sweater, on the odd chance I might catch the scene.

"Excuse me," Tom begins, "do you speak English?" The soldier moves his rifle to a horizontal position, the silhouette of he and the weapon taking the shape of a cross. Although the soldier does not directly answer the question, it is clear that he understands what Tom said. Rihana implores us to move on. But Tom believes that as long as he is gentle with his tone and courteous with his words, only good can come of the attempt, and with excruciating politeness he introduces himself as a Jew who lost grandparents to the Nazis. The soldier is strikingly unimpressed.

A Palestinian boy emerging after undergoing heavy scrutiny at the checkpoint to Ibrahimi Mosque

A Palestinian boy passing nearby stops and peruses the scene warily.

Tom asks the soldier to consider what Israel is doing to the Palestinian people. "Don’t believe everything you hear," the soldier tells him.

"No, not what I hear," Tom replies. "It’s what I see with my own eyes." Rihana becomes frightened and tries again to get us to move away. The Palestinian boy goes up to Nancy and offers her his hand, his way of telling her that she must not stay there. He sees that even though we are “internationals”, we are naive to the habits of the Occupation soldiers. I’d read the testimonies of Israel’s brave “refuseniks”, but not until we leave Palestine do I read descriptions by regular Israeli soldiers in Hebron and have come forward to reveal just what the IDF’s “habits” [their word] are.

Here’s a glimpse of soldiers’ on-the-record testimony about the old city of Hebron. A fifteen-year-old boy throws stones at the Occupation soldiers. He runs away before the soldiers can grab him. So the soldiers grab a ten-year-old child who just happens to be nearby and, in the soldiers words, beat him up "to put it mildly." Then they hand the boy over to a commander who "really beat the shit out of him." The commander then forces the boy, crying and terrified, to stand up, but his gut is too injured for him to straighten, so the commander "kicks him some more." At this point the boy’s parents appear. The commander cocks his [loaded] weapon and stuffs it "literally inside the kid’s mouth," and yells at the parents "Anyone gets close, I kill him. Don't bug me. I kill. I have no mercy." The parents can do nothing but leave, as that is the best hope that their son will live. Such, these conscious-ridden soldiers insist, is not extraordinary — it is the norm. "Habit".

As we leave the old city, two little boys hawking trinkets chase after us. I buy one from each and their eyes open wide when I pretend only to have much bigger coins than the few cents they ask for. They run after me again and are shocked and amused when I speak in Arabic — no!

Hebron, just outside the old city.

We reach beyond the narrow alleys into a wider plaza with abandoned, crumbling buildings, their former grandeur still visible through the decay. There is something incongruous about the scene that takes me a moment to identify: despite the desolation and neglect, the streets are clean. One stone building facing directly onto the plaza is like three irregularly joined parts of the same edifice, each part separated by time. The entire right half must have collapsed a long time ago, then been rebuilt, and then the upper part of those later stones must have collapsed and again been replaced with newer, well-squared stones. Two enclosed soldiers’ booths sit atop the strange building, one facing the narrow street leading to the old city, one with a birds’-eye view of the plaza. A soldier in the latter booth eyes us with rifle in hand.

The two boys hawking trinkets catch up to Marwan in front of a particularly striking building with once-grand arches encasing a second-floor balcony. He teases them and buys a bead bracelet, hands it to me, and says that it is for my daughter.

On the way back to Abu Dis, Marwan suggests that we visit Herodium, a flat-topped conical hill that King Herod the Great transformed into a fortress palace in 23 B.C. It has the look of an old volcano with ancient ruins in its recessed summit. We follow its half-natural, half-artificial form standing out curiously against the surrounding country, and turn onto a smaller road near its base. Marwan stops and asks a local man if there is any problem with checkpoints; he is unsure. We drive up the road carved into the side of Herodium until reaching a gate with a soldier, who tells us to turn around. The Israeli military has taken over access.

Further along the road back home, a checkpoint has caused a massive backup of cars and trucks, but we are going the other direction and reach Abu Dis in time to hear word-of-mouth reports of what has happened in the two days we were away. We learn that one of the boys who had been with us at the community center has been arrested. The IDF wanted him and his brother, but not finding them, took their parents hostage, releasing them only after the sons surrendered themselves. No one knows what they are charged with.

Our Concert at Al-Quds

Abu Dis schools

Sunday morning we meet up with Jenny Tonge and her husband, Dr. Keith Tonge. Baroness Tonge, now a member of the British House of Lords, had been a Member of Parliament until being sacked for remarks she made following a trip to Palestine. "Having seen the violence and the humiliation and the provocation that the Palestinian people live under every day and have done since their land was occupied," then-MP Tonge said that she could understand why suicide bombing occurs, while making clear that she did not condone it. She also criticized Israel’s "grip" on the West, words that the leader of the Liberal Democrats characterized as having "clear antisemitic connotations."

Accompanied by the Tonges, we go to Abu Dis Boys’ School, which was recently attacked by a jeep of six IDF soldiers. The soldiers went classroom to classroom and beat the students with batons, pushing away the teachers as they tried to protect them. Boys who tried to shield their heads with their hands had fingers and hands broken. Four were hospitalized. In the official Israeli records, each soldier gave a different account of what happened, whereas every Palestinian who had witnessed the attacks, both teacher and student, gave a consistent account. Yet Israel refused to investigate, citing a soldier’s claim that other students, not the soldiers, had beaten the youths.

These families are luckier than many. Even among the families we met in little Abu Dis, the accounts of arrest, incarceration, beatings, night raids, and torture, all part of Palestinian adolescence, are chilling. Every day people ask for word of who has been taken.

Abu Dis countryside

The students at this boys’ school are a bit older and more lively than most of the children we’ve played for. There are many, and only time for one performance, so we decide to play outside on the asphalt to have room for everyone. We set up against an outdoor hallway lined with metal grillwork. Most of the boys pour into the yard and surround us, the rest opting to stay in the outdoor hallway and peer at us through the metal bars to get a closer look. One of the older boys keeps wanting to have his photo taken with Nancy.

Next we go to a boys’ school run by the Arab Institute. Memorials to local people killed by Israeli soldiers, and lists of high-achieving students, greet us near the doorway. The side of the building is painted with a scene showing the Temple Mount with a large eye, watching as a two limbs destroy prison bars. Inside, the building is spartan and clean. We all gather on a couch in the office.

Baroness Tonge discussing Hamas and Western perceptions of the Palestine-Israel debacle.

The headmaster discusses the challenges he and his students face in day-to-day Occupation existence, and when the issue of the West’s influence arises, Jenny Tonge comments that the Qassam rockets fired from Gaza into southern Israel do harm to Palestine’s image abroad. This leads to a discussion about the Hamas election victory, and why so many Palestinians, including many who are not religious and who surely found much to dislike about Hamas, still saw Hamas as preferable to Fatah.

Playing for students at the UNRWA school in Abu Dis.

We are taken to the Arab Institute’s home for orphaned boys. Like the school, it is clean, organized, and simple. When we visit the kitchen, we realize that they are making us lunch, and by the time we dine and chat, we barely make it to our next concert.

We drive to a school on the hilly outskirts of Abu Dis run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency. An oud player has rehearsed some songs with a few of the students, and we share the concert. After we play, we are shown around the school’s scientific equipment and art projects. One of teachers sees me looking at a little pillow on which a student had embroidered, in English, there’s no place like home. The teacher picks it up and hands it to me, pointing to the words. An image flashes through my mind of Palestinian refugees clicking their heels three times, as Dorothy does in The Wizard of Oz while repeating those words to get back home.

We climb into the old jalopy that was waiting to take us to Al-Quds University for our final concert. The driver turns the ignition key but the battery is dead; to complicate matters, we are facing uphill with a sharp turn immediately behind us. He releases the brake and we are in backwards free-fall toward the hilly bend for just an instant before the driver pops the clutch and starts the engine.

Tom [left], Nancy, and two Abu Dis students before the concert at Al-Quds University

Our University concert is attended by students and faculty, Baroness and Dr. Tonge, our various Abu Dis friends, and even Kathy from the Quaker house in Ramallah. Palestinian musicians and dubka dancers share the stage with us.

The next morning, Nancy & I wake to find that Tom had gone out early and gotten us not just a bag-full of the wonderful morning bread fresh from the brick, open-fire oven, but also three cans of spray paint: green, black, and red. We each decide on our commentary as we go outside and reach It. The World Sees Through This Wall comes to my mind. I use the green paint.

Jericho

Our concerts are over, and we become tourists, off to Jericho and the Dead Sea. After three checkpoints and road signs that spell ‘Jericho’ haphazardly, we reach what is said to be the oldest continually inhabited town (at least 11,000 years), and the lowest elevation (260 meters below sea level). Because of its location on the west bank of Jordan, Jericho figures prominently into the stories we hear of people moving between Abu Dis and Jordan during the 1967 war.

Entering Jericho, the ugly Casino Austria squats on the roadside. Not only does the eyesore do nothing for the people of Jericho, but adding to the insult is the fact that the many young Europeans who were imported to man the casino’s gambling tables are given housing in Maale Adumim, one of the largest of Israel’s illegal settlements. Maale Adumim’s population is at least 40% more than all of Jericho.

We also pass by the site of the siege — not the siege described by the Biblical Joshua in which the Children of Israel circled the city seven times, causing its walls to collapse, but the one at a Jericho prison two years ago, when British and American monitors responsible for guarding the prison withdrew to allow the IDF to encircle its walls and lay siege. At least two people were killed, many wounded, and six inmates taken into Israeli custody, including the alleged assassin of an Israeli tourist minister who openly advocated cleansing Palestine of all Palestinians.

As we walk about the complex of ruins known as Hisham's Palace, a mid-eighth century winter palace modelled on a Roman bath house, a question arises about the media as regards Palestine and the events of September 11, 2001. I mention the US media’s delight with a brief video clip of a few kids, said to be Palestinian, acting for the camera. The news anchors said they are dancing for joy over the attacks. On the days immediately following the attacks, the clip was broadcast over and over until the intended subliminal connection was made in the collective US subconscious. Indeed upon my return to New York from Palestine, now six and a half years after the attacks, I read a letter published in the journal of the local musicians’ union in which a member, supposedly an educated, informed citizen, still links "Palestinians" with the 9-11 terrorists.

Hisham's Palace, Jericho

Nancy briefly critiques the government's account of what happened on that terrible day, which was faithfully parroted with all its impossibilities by the corporate media. When Nancy asks Marwan his “take” on the US government’s account of the events of September 11, he is surprisingly unimpassioned. Yes, maybe this, maybe that. At first this seems a strange reaction, but then I think of the Reichstag building that Hitler destroyed in order to place blame on the Communists — from Occupied Palestine, wondering who was behind the attacks of 9-11 has as little relevance to what the US is doing in the world as the Reichstag building would have had to Hitler’s deeds even if the Communists had destroyed it.

We ascend the neighboring cliffs where Jesus is said to have spent forty days and forty nights fasting, meditating, and resisting temptation. The mountains afford such a spectacular panorama of the Jordan Valley that one can imagine, as the Bible relates, the Devil "showing him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them." and telling Jesus that "all these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me". A Greek Orthodox monastery originally built in the 6th century occupies caves and protrudes slightly from the cliffs. The many smaller caves punctuating the mountainside have over the centuries been home to hermits and ascetics.

Looking eastward toward Jordan, gray mountains and gray clouds sometimes blend together, but elsewhere seem to be separated by more than one layer, as if mountains floated in mid-air. The eye cannot follow what is silhouette of the mountains and what is gray clouds. Not knowing that I am wondering exactly the same, Nancy asks me if I can discern whether one particular stretch of gray undulations are the rim of Jordanian mountains, or clouds. The scene reminds me of early evenings in Umbria nearly four decades ago, when she and I were working at the Spoleto Festival, and the same phenomenon used to intrigue me in those hills at dawn and at dusk. Then, as now, I am never sure.
Back down in Jericho, as we set off for the Dead Sea, we pass the sycamore tree which locals claim is that which the wealthy Zaccheus climbed to see Jesus.

Dead Sea

The Dead Sea, whose shore is the lowest dry land on earth (420 meters below sea level), straddles three countries: Jordan on the east and southeast, Palestine on the West and northwest, and Israel for about twenty-five km on the southwest. Israel, however, has expropriated the Palestinian region of Dead Sea, and now prohibits one particular nationality among all humankind from going to it: Palestinians.

There are three Palestinians among us: Marwan, the driver, and a youth from Abu Dis who I’ll call Tariq. Tariq had long hoped that someday he would see the Dead Sea, so he came along on the chance that this time he might slip past the checkpoint. Marwan tells me that unless we are lucky and we all get through, I must take over the driving and he, the driver, and Tariq will wait at the checkpoint until we return. To better our chances, Keith takes Marwan’s place in the front passenger seat of the little van, and Marwan joins us in the back seat, jokingly ruffling his hair and rearranging his jacket so as to blend in with we Western passport-bearing folk. Nancy and I have a mixture of feelings: we are excited to see the much-fabled Sea, but we feel complicit, patronizing a whites-only establishment, indeed a white’s-only establishment that happens to be owned by the very “coloreds” being kept out.
We are lucky at the checkpoint, and all of us make it to the Dead Sea. Most happy is Tariq, who treats the visit like a long-denied pilgrimage. I find out that his cousin was murdered by the IDF. His cousin was eleven.

The northern part of the Dead Sea.

While walking along the shore, Tom hears someone with an American accent remarking about how he’s met people from all over the world here. Tom, with his usual calmness, asks the man if he’s ever met anyone from Palestine here. The man doesn’t seem to understand Tom’s point.

Not having a bathing suit, I strip to the waist and swim into the unique sea. Its 30% salinity, and the knowledge that there are no fish to bite or sting me, let me swim too far, and I am shocked when I turn around and see how far away the shore is.

Once the sun dims behind the distant clouds, the air temperature begins to change markedly, and I join Marwan, Nancy, and the rest on the shore. Marwan bought excellent Palestinian beer and has saved a bottle for me.

When we are ready to start back for the van, I go ahead to look for Tom. Just as I reach a small area of three or four concessions selling drinks and souvenirs, I am attacked by hundreds of airborne tourist postcards that a sudden wind snatched from an unwary merchant’s display. I see his son racing toward me after them. In any other situation I would have instinctively grabbed what I could for the boy, but I did nothing for the salvation of the countless Dead Sea Visit Israel postcards hitting me in the face. The wind should have blown them all into Tom’s face — he would have carefully retrieved them, then sat down with the boy and in a friendly manner ask him if he knew what country he was in.

Tom was not far away. He had approached a little bar that sold drinks and snacks at which there were three people working: a middle-aged woman who seemed to be the proprietor, a young woman who was the main clerk, and an African man who worked in the back. Tom introduces me while the younger woman eyes me suspiciously, then tries to engage her. She laughs in ridicule — oh, yes, the poor Palestinians, I’ve heard it all before. Tom stays calm and points out, with unbearable politeness, that we are standing on the Palestinians’ land, to which she replies with nastier ridicule that it is only his opinion that this is Palestinian land, and that she has her own opinion.

And that was when I budded in. I counter that it is a matter of simple international law, not of her opinion or our opinion or anyone else’s opinion. But it is her next jeering ha! at which, for the first time during our entire time in Palestine, I snap. For a moment, I am completely silent.

Get out of my store! I scream. The two women don’t know how to respond. I keep screaming at them to get out of my shop, my shop, nudging my way behind the counter as I do, MY shop. Quickly their expression change from anger to bewilderment. They makes signs that it is their shop, really, their shop. Ha! I scoff, pushing in even further behind the counter. That’s only your opinion. Out! Go! Get the hell out of my shop! Out! The black worker in the background watches the strange scene progress with a cautious curiosity; one can only imagine what is going on in his mind.

I leave the concession area, turn toward the parking area, and am confronted with a white sign saying Go in Peace in three languages. Through the rest of the evening, I can’t tell how much of my shivering is from wearing wet clothes in the cold, or from being shaken up by sixty years of collective misery having been dismissed with a jeer.

Snow falls during the night. I had hoped to sneak over to the wall to neaten up my The World Sees Through This Wall but in the morning the concrete is too wet. Marwan comes by earlier than expected — there is a problem with our ride to the border, so he takes us to his flat while he tries to arrange another vehicle.

Along the way he pulls to the side of the road across from a grocery store, scavenges the lid from a cardboard carton, and uses it to scoop off the night’s icy slush from the roof of the car, turning it upside down as he does so that none falls out. The lid is now a tray-full of crushed ice. He gives it to the shop owner across the street, who puts it in a basket of food displayed outside. Nothing is wasted; what had been the frigid night’s precipitation is now refrigeration for the warmer day. Marwan will get a consideration when the food is sold.
A car comes to take us to the border. An arrangement has been made for us to use the name of a certain East Jerusalem hotel as the car’s supposed point of departure. In order to get from Abu Dis to the main road toward Jordan, we must brush up against massive Maale Adummim, an illegal settlement that bulges right out to the Palestinian roadside. At present, we can still circumvent Adummim, but Israeli plans to connect the settlement with Jerusalem via "access" (=Jews-only) highways and yet more settlements will literally slice Palestine in two. We make our way north and east, passing several more settlements marked by road signs before reaching the sign that announces our transition from [+] sea level to [-] sea level.

Weaving further east through the vaguely lunar, sub sea-level landscape toward the Jordan Valley, and knowing that I would soon be on my way home, I begin to have the feeling that I am reentering a familiar blur, a hazy dreamland. Behind us is reality. You can see it, touch it, measure it, get hurt by it. Behind us is the truth — no artificial “balancing” of unbalanced issues, no need to make unequal “suffering” equal, no bogus “complexities” created for their own sake. The truth is that the world’s fourth most powerful military is attempting to erase a people who had done them no harm, and that the West, in particular the US, is a partner to it for its own imperialist and profit-driven ambitions. Thus our leaders and media coddle us in a make-believe reality that lets us go about our normal lives while they continue the horrors committed in our name and with our money.

Although Palestinians are the immediate victims of these sixty years of injustice, we will follow. In our complicity we will become our own victims, turning ourselves into just another of the shunned rogues that history looks back upon with horror and disbelief.

More and more people are questioning the official myths, and with the truth will come demands for justice. What form “justice” might take at this point, after six decades of dispossession and “facts on the ground”, is of course a difficult question; but only after the lie of Israel’s “desire for peace” is laid bare and its true motivation acknowledged, can the issue be honestly discussed.

This brief commentary is dedicated to my father, who passed away a couple of days after I returned from Palestine.
As a youth, his love for freedom and fairness made him volunteer for the Allied forces against Hitler even though he
was an "illegal" immigrant not in the public records. He was proud that I had gone to Palestine.