Notes On An Occupation
In light of recent events, I wanted to share my own recollections on visiting Palestine, specifically the West Bank. As Israel ramps up its plans to commit genocide via starvation against over two million Palestinians in Gaza, half of which are children, I thought it might be worth reminding people what an occupation looks like, and how violence against an occupier is the inevitable result of such policies.
This was all written in 2016. My opinions and politics have evolved since then, but I wanted to present the stories of Palestinians I spoke to back then to give a clear image of what the (comparatively “peaceful”, though it could never truly be called that) occupation of the West Bank looks like. What Israel inflicts on Gaza is worse than this.
I'm in a bus, desperately trying to keep cool. It's Friday afternoon, and the two-eighteen is packed to capacity with people returning to Ramallah from prayers at the Al Aqsa. It's not a cool Friday; the breezes that were blowing through the old city yesterday as I meandered around the streets have disappeared entirely. I point the AC vents at my face and soak in their meager whisper of cool air.
It's 30 minutes into the bus ride and I see it. The Israeli side of the wall is blank gray concrete, stretching up and down the rolling hills of East Jerusalem. It’s a presence, imposing, dark, military. Crossing the Qalandia checkpoint, that image changes. Painted on drab rock are multicolored portraits, phrases in English and Arabic, works of art. This side of the wall is beautiful, though no less terrible. All of this beauty has a singular goal of imagining a world where the canvas no longer exists.
I am in a taxi van towards Bethlehem from Ramallah. Three friends from the hostel are in the back seat, and I'm in the middle, next to two Palestinian teenagers. The road is far too bumpy to read the book I have with me, and sensing my boredom, one of the Palestinians strikes up a conversation. He tells me he’s Muslim, but likes going to Bethlehem on weekends. He calls it a Christian island between the Muslim West Bank and Jewish Israel. We talk about religion, and he points out that Christianity, Judaism and Islam are all very similar in their laws and doctrine. I agree, and we talk about Abraham and his sons, I mention that if people thought the way he does, maybe they'd be less angry at each other. He gently corrects me. I am angry, he says. But I express that anger peacefully. He tells me about going to protests and I feel stupid for imagining anger goes away with clearer theology.
After sitting in the van for almost an hour, we’re restless. I ask him how much further away Bethlehem is. He tells me we’re almost there, but says the road we’re on isn't the most direct route. A faster road runs close to Israeli settlements, so the authorities don’t let Palestinians use it. We pass through a place called the valley of fire. From the window, I can see the settlements; new apartment blocks, surrounded by concrete walls, dotting the hillsides.
I am in Hebron, on a deserted market street. The locals called it a ghost town, but I know ghost towns from back home in Oklahoma. This is far from those dots on a map in my home state, left to rot after economies pass them by. A different disaster happened here.
They do share the same quiet, the same eerie stillness. But here, it’s punctuated by young IDF soldiers out jogging. Older ones patrolling the streets with assault rifles. Orthodox families playing in the settlement nearby. Americans are waved through the two checkpoints onto the street, but Palestinians are not. After an American-Israeli extremist shot a group of Muslims in prayer in the mid-90s, the Israeli Defense Force made the decision to separate the settlers from the Palestinians. Unfortunately for the latter, a central market street in the city ran up against one of the settlements. Shops were closed, businesses forfeited. Doors bolted shut.
A few Palestinian families were left in their homes. I watched one of them descend a set of stairs, at the bottom was an Israeli soldier. They spoke in Arabic. One of the other Americans in my group spoke the language, so I asked what they were saying.
It sounds like they're buying groceries, he told me. The soldier’s asking: “How many are going? How long?” It was a negotiation. A 21 year old conscript had absolute control over the family’s movements, a milder form of house arrest. Eventually, he let them through.
I am with a friend at a small art gallery and museum near the old city of Ramallah. We are having coffee with the owner, an incredibly friendly man who runs the gallery out of his family’s two hundred year old house. He tells us Ramallah is forgetting itself. The city is inundated with aid money, and caters to high end European clientele; young people who move here don't have any recollection of the city’s history, they just want fancy bars where they can drink and smoke. He wants to make sure people remember that Ramallah isn't all upscale buildings and NGOs.
The conversation turns to the checkpoints. The border between Israel and Palestine is amorphous at best and predatory at worst; the idealized moderate line is a two state solution, a border that exists somewhere close to lines drawn before the 1967 Six Day’s War, with certain concessions made for settlements. But in the lack of any international agreements, Israel has set up a system of checkpoints and walls a fair distance into Palestine from those borders. They decide who can pass almost at will; there seems to be very little procedure, process, or appeal when crossings are denied. If you have family or friends on one side of the checkpoint, you have to rely on the goodwill of a border guard to get through.
The museum owner’s mother was sick; she needed an emergency triple heart bypass surgery, and the wait time for the procedure in Palestine was almost a year. So, he decided to try and take her to Jerusalem. On the first attempt, their crossing was denied. They drove to another checkpoint. At the second checkpoint, a superior officer told her that she could cross if she showed him her heart medicine as proof of the illness. She showed him the medicine, but the conversation quickly changed; he started to demand medical records instead.
Frustrated, they left to the hospital in Palestine, and the hospital faxed the medical records to the checkpoint. An ambulance stood waiting on the Israeli side to take her to the hospital in Jerusalem where the surgery was to be performed. She returned to the checkpoint. Waited for several hours. Finally, the border guards returned. She couldn’t pass. Security concerns.
A year later, she had heart bypass surgery in Ramallah. In between the attempted crossing and the surgery, she received a special pass for Christians to go on holidays within Israel, a pass reserved only for those who Israel knew presented no security risk.
I asked him about his life during the Second Intifada, the Palestinian uprising between 2000 and 2005 that saw an uptick in suicide bombings directed at Israeli cities and an Israeli invasion of the West Bank, with an occupation of Ramallah. When I mentioned it, he pulled out his iPad, and opened the photos app. Scrolling through for a while, he came across scans of images he took from his house of tanks rolling through the city. You could recognize the street; it was right next to where we were sipping coffee. He told us about a friend’s brother in Bethlehem, who opened a window in his apartment during the occupation only to immediately receive a sniper’s bullet directly to the head, killing him instantly. He told us about the curfews, where they had a few hours to go shop, and anyone left in the streets afterwards would be shot, no questions asked.
When I asked him what he wanted out of the peace process, he told me he didn’t really care. A one state solution or a two state solution; either would be fine, so long as they had a sense of law in Palestine. A protection of their rights. Some sort of long-sought-after normalcy.