Staying put: the nonviolent resistance of daily life in the West Bank

Nonviolence has many faces in Palestine, but the most fundamental act of nonviolent resistance is probably the simple act of staying put. I’d like to share with you the stories of three families who resist the military occupation of their land by staying in their own homes and on their own land: the Anastas family of Bethlehem, the Nassar family of Tent of Nations near Bethlehem, and the family of Hani and Rema Habuhaikal in Hebron.

What each of these families has in common is that Israel and/or its settlers want their land/house. The Anastas family lives in their family home housing three generations and their businesses on what was once a busy thoroughfare in Bethlehem. In 2005 Israel built a nine-meter high concrete wall in Bethlehem that surrounded their house on three sides and cut their street off from traffic. Below is a photo taken in the early days after the wall was erected.

I’ve snapped a photo (below) of the Bethlehem map that shows the incursion that the wall makes into Bethlehem land in their area. Israel annexed Rachel’s tomb which is on Bethlehem land with plans to build a settlement nearby. They offered the Anastas family a handsome sum of money to sell their property, but Johnny and Claire believed it was their right to stay in their home. They believe that staying is the most important way they can struggle for the rights of their fellow Palestinians. They operate a travel hostel in their home and a Christian gift shop featuring religious olive wood carvings.

Johnny moved his brake shop for cars to another street in Bethlehem so that he could attract more business. Recently the Israeli military entered his shop, took the machinery he uses for grinding brakes, and shut down the shop with a sign alleging that the owner was making weapons in the shop. Two weeks later Israeli military officials admitted that they were mistaken. Johnny asked for his machinery, but was told it was destroyed and he would have to sue for compensation. The suit may take three years to resolve. In the meantime, Johnny is deprived of his livelihood. The action puts pressure on him and his family to vacate the house and leave it to the Israelis. The Anastas family is determined to stay.

From Bethlehem we made a drive to Tent of Nations, the environmental and educational farm belonging to the Nassar family. The drive would have been shorter, but the direct road to their farm has been blocked by the Israelis forcing the family and their visitors to take a longer and more difficult route through the narrow streets of the small Palestinian village of Nahalin. Why would Israelis want to block the road and make life difficult for the family? Take a look at the map below for clues.

Tent of Nations is at Daher’s Vineyard near the center of the map. Surrounding Daher’s Vineyard are the Israeli settlements of Bitar Elite, Gush Etzion, Eliaza, Nev Daniel, and Erfatz. Each settlement sits on a hilltop and smack in the center of the ring is the hilltop where the Nassar’s Tent of Nations farm is located. Settlements are attempting to join together into settlement blocks encompassing large swaths of land, and Tent of Nations stands in the way.

Daher Nassar was the grandfather of Daoud, Amal, and Daher who now operate the farm. Their grandfather bought the 100 acre farm on a hilltop near Bethlehem in 1916 and registered it with the Ottoman Empire. The family lived in caves on the farm and cultivated it in grapes, olive trees, and other crops continuously since that time. In 1991 the Israeli government declared the Nassar land and its surroundings as Israeli “state land.” The Nassar family has the documents to establish their claim to the land and have been in court for many years. The history of their struggle is at this site.

In 2014 Israeli bulldozers arrived in the middle of the night and bulldozed 1500 olive trees. With the help of the international community, including Jewish people living in England, 1000 new trees were planted. The Nassar family is determined to protect their family land and at the same time “embody a positive approach to conflict and occupation.” Tent of Nations seeks to “work with others in the local area to lay the foundations for a future Palestine, in the belief that justice and peace will grow from the bottom up.”

Yesterday in Hebron, we spent time with a family being squeezed at very close quarters. Hani and Reema Habuhaikal and their children live in the Tel Rumeida area of Hebron where settlers live in close quarters next door or across the street from Palestinians. Hani and Reema can no longer keep a car at their home, since their cars have been burned by settlers in the past. They must pass through checkpoints staffed by Israeli soldiers to go back and forth into the heart of Hebron. Their car is now parked on the other side of Tel Rumeida where they haul all their purchases up and down steep rocky slopes and long paths to reach their house, passing security cameras and armed soldiers along the way.

Sometimes the power lines or the water pipes to the family’s well have been cut by settlers. On one occasion Hani organized the neighborhood in a nonviolent action to demonstrate their community’s legitimate need for water. They ordered a tank truck to deliver water to the community after the well had been disabled. When the soldiers refused to let the truck pass, down the hill came all the little children with bottles and bowls and pitchers to fill with water and take it back up the hill while major media network cameras rolled.

Hani is a strong believer in using nonviolence to work toward social change. He said he learned about nonviolence when he was jailed during the intifada along with many professors and activists with “huge minds” who held discussions about their methods. He said jail gave him lots of time to think. When an oppressed people uses violence, he says, their actions feed into the hands of the powerful oppressor who uses it against them. He has taught his five children not to hate the settlers or the soldiers and to greet each person with respect. I’ve encouraged him to ask his daughter who intends to study journalism to write down these stories to share with the world. We all need inspiration for ways to demonstrate the realities of oppression without engendering new hate.

That evening Hani’s family invited us to celebrate Iftar, the breaking of the Ramadan fast, with them, and we are grateful for their hospitality.

What unites all of these stories and many others we heard is the families’ conviction that staying put is worth it. The occupation has made their daily lives difficult, and they could let the difficulties drive them out. They choose to stay, however, and view the simple acts of daily lives in their homes as their own contribution to nonviolent resistance on behalf of their people. Capturing the spirit of their lives is the tree that Amal Nassar told us about at Tent of Nations. The bulldozers left one fig tree standing in the middle of the grove and they have named the tree “Sumud” or “steadfastness.” At the entrance to the Tent of Nations stands a rock with these words inscribed in three languages: “We refuse to be enemies.”

Palestinian farming: land, access, water

Maybe because I grew up on a farm, the plight of the Palestinian farmer speaks to me. When Iyad Burnat in Bilin tells me his father and grandfather used to take their sheep out across the hilltops to graze, I remember my own father’s stories of shepherding in his native Holland, where he took the sheep out all day walking out across the heather to find enough grass to graze. Holland’s heather is more lush than the dry, rocky hills of the West Bank, so the Palestinian shepherd needs to take his sheep out for long distances and many days to find enough grass to feed them.

The Burnat family can no longer make their living from sheep herding, because Israeli settlers hace colonized the hilltops where the family’s sheep once grazed. There is no longer enough area to feed many sheep. Iyan took us out to the wall that separates their fields from the settlements. We looked out across a steep gulley to a development where many multi-story buildings are being built. These settlements have grown greatly since I visited four years ago, confiscating land that by rights belongs to the West Bank, bringing it under Israeli control. Our eyes sweep out 180 degrees from our perch and I see that not much wild ground remains for sheep-grazing.

Next we walked a hundred meters over to the wall that is meant to protect the settlements from the villagers. Bilin’s residents succeeded in the courts and through their popular resistance movement to get this wall moved closer to the settlements so that Bilin farmers could have access to their own farmland, but it has been a rare victory. Even so, some of their farmland remains behind the wall. In many spots across the West Bank, the wall has cut across farmer’s olive groves and vineyards, cutting off farmers from their own land. They may apply for permits to pass through openings in the wall to work their land, openings which often are far away from their plots of land. In some cases these permits are issued only to the owner of the land. Even if the owner is elderly, he alone can access the land, not his sons and grandsons. Many olives, grapes, and other crops go unharvested. To make matters worse a farmer can never be sure that the Israeli soldiers will give him access on any particuar day. The soldier might tell him to go home and come back another day.

Not only is land confiscation and access to the remaining land a problem, obtaining water for irrigation is also a critical issue. Iyad took us on a tour of villager’s vineyards and organic vegetable farms. We saw cucumbers planted beneath grapevines to make the most efficent use of the land, and efficient drip irrigation systems were laid out across the beans, peppers, tomatoes, and more. Yet we learned that not all the land can be planted at one time, because the farmers do not have access to enough water. Their farmland sits atop the West Bank’s mountain aquifer. Israel uses 80% of the water from this aquifer while the Palestinians receive only 20% which they must buy from Israel at inflated prices. Meanwhile the settlements are able to fill swimming pools and irrigate landscaping while West Bank farmland goes dry. Water rights will be a critical issue for any peaceful solution for Israel-Palestine.

Several years ago my father and I attended a talk back home in Ohio given by Daoud Nasser, a Palestinian farmer, who shared stories of similar difficulties at his educational and environmental farm, called Tent of Nations, near Bethlehem. My father was delighted to find out that Mike Phillips was on the board of Friends of Tent of Nations. My father used to milk cows for Mike’s father, Norm Phillips of Risingsun, Ohio. Through Mike’s farm experience, he understood well the plight of farmers who suffer from land confiscation, access restrictions, and water shortages, and so did my father. Daoud told us that he has spoken with a number of American farmers on his US speaking tours and finds that they are sympathetic to the Palestinian farmers’ problems. My father died at the age of 90 in 2015, and I’m sorry I won’t be able to share this trip with him. The Palestinian cause interested him for the last decades of his life.

I hope I’ll have the chance to tell you more about the specific challenges the Nasser family faces in another post. Many thanks to fellow delegation member Tessa Laubacher for providing the photos for this post.

P.S. After our land tour with Iyad we returned to the Burnats’ home to share in their Iftar meal, the breaking of the Ramadan fast. Later some of our delegation members got up at 2:30 am to share Suhur with them, the last meal before dawn and the start of a new fast. We’re grateful to the Burnats and their children for sharing their wonderful food, fellowship, and warm hospitality.

Day 4 Blog: Art as Resistance

For me Bethlehem is about art and the human spirit. When we drove into town on Friday, the brightly-painted images with their heartfelt, yet light-spirited commentary reached out to us from the high wall that snakes through the heart of town. And that was only the beginning. We witnessed the role of dance, filmmaking, and other art in the lives of refugee youth, the artwork of Banksy in the Walled Off Hotel, and the memorial murals at Aida Camp. And yet another kind of artistic expression in the gardens and collections of the Palestinian Natural History Museum.

In the face of oppression, artistic expression reasserts a person’s human dignity. When Israel built the bleak gray concrete wall and watchtowers that cut off the people’s views and their movement, Bethlehem residents answered the wall with their graffiti. The mysterious artist Banksy made the wall famous with his sly commentary. Here is a well-known example:

But many other artists grace the walls with their own interpretations of liberation. And international visitors often leave messages of solidarity.

At Aida Refugee Camp in Bethlehem, teenagers from the camp performed a beautiful and spirited Dabka dance for us that brought tears to my eyes. The Alrowwad Center for Culture and Arts works with youth in the camp to foster their self-expression and help them become “change-makers.” Their mission is to encourage “beautiful resistance against the ugliness of occupation and violence.” One of the directors explained to us that they teach teenagers filmmaking to put them on the other side of the lens where they are not the passive subjects of the film, but the active creators. These youth are probably the 3rd or 4th generation descendents of the refugees who first entered the camp after the war of 1948.

Heartfelt murals graced the walls of Aida Camp with memories of villages left behind and loved ones lost. A brand new mural commemorated the Palestinian prisoner hunger strike that had just concluded the week before.

The newly opened Walled Off Hotel (next to the wall in Bethlehem, of course) featured social commentary on its lobby walls, like the following example. (Check my Facebook page for more.)

And not to be too narrow in our notion of art, I’d like to include the work of biology students from Bethlehem University who are volunteering at the Palestinian Natural History Museum to collect, preserve, classify, and mount species of grasshoppers and other indigenous insects of Palestine, which they proudly displayed for me. Their work encourages Palestinians to recognize and value the rich diversity of their own land.

All of this artistic work touches the hearts, minds, and spirits of both the creators and those of us lucky enough to observe it. If you’d like to see more examples, please visit my Facebook page.

Now I’ll try to catch up on some sleep, after two very busy days of travel and meetings. Hope to talk to you again next time the Wifi is good. Thanks for reading, friends! Josie

Day 3: Gaza and the Psychological Trauma of War

No, I’m not in Gaza. The Israelis give very few people permission to enter and witness what has happened there. But our group heard from a man today who was there just days after the conclusion of the 2014 Israel-Gaza conflict which Israelis named Operation Protective Edge. Sami El-Yousef, regional director for CNEWA, Catholic Near East Welfare Association, told us about the psychosocial services his agency provided in Gaza to hundreds of children traumatized by the military assault. He maintained, however, that the conflict left all 2 million people of Gaza needing psychological services.

Sami interviewed many Gazans about the military violence they had experienced and in every case, he told us, they could not complete the conversation without both of them ending up in tears. He was so overcome by the level of psychological trauma he observed that he decided to look for some measure of the trauma these people had experienced. Using United Nations figures for the number of bombs and other munitions inflicted on Gaza during that conflict, he calculated that the people of Gaza heard one explosion every minute for 51 days.

One explosion per minute round the clock day after day. Add to that the fact that the people of Gaza cannot leave the narrow confines of their land to take refuge from the bombs. They are walled inside a strip of land 25 miles long and 7.5 miles wide at its widest point with no exits allowed them. During the 2014 conflict Israel declared half of Gaza a closed military zone and people were crowded even more densely together. Most war produces streams of refugees leaving the country, but for Gazans this was impossible. For 51 days they could not escape the walls that form what is called the world’s largest open air prison. And for 51 days the constant explosions did not even allow escape into sleep. It is no wonder that the conflict produced so much trauma. Yet the resources to meet that trauma are severely limited.

We were impressed by Sami’s account of CNEWA’s work. As a pontifical mission, it was established in 1949, intended as a temporary mission to care for the 30% of Palestinian Christians who became refugees during the 1948 war. 68 years later the refugees have not been able to return and CNEWA’s work has become long-term. They have kept a Christian presence in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza providing healthcare, education, and social services for all Palestinians regardless of their religion.

An aside for my husband, Scoutmaster Denny Setzler of St. Ann’s Troop 339: CNEWA supports 32 Scout troops within Israel to promote Christian community amoung the Palestinian youth, providing them ways to come together to do volunteer work and socialize. I know Denny will enjoy CNEWA’s appreciation for the role scouting can play in Catholic life.

A little more about our day

Tonight we made our way out the Damascus Gate and up the hill to the conference center Notre Dame to have dinner with Archbishop Michael Fitzgerald, retired from the Pontifical Council on Interreligious Dialogue, arranged by our delegation member Jeff Abood. The Archbishop specializes in Christian-Muslim relations and recently spent a year at John Carroll University teaching a course on the Koran and finishing a book. I hope I’ll have a chance to share our conversation in a future post.

As we left for dinner and passed through the markets of the Muslim quarter to approach the Damascus Gate we were swimming upstream it seemed. We passed through crowds of Muslims entering the old city to head to Al Aqsa mosque for the breaking of the Ramadan fast. Sundown was still more than an hour away. As we returned from dinner after dark, we encountered the festive lights for Ramadan strung all around the Damascus gate. We made our way through throngs of people celebrating the breaking of the Ramadan fast with food, music, children’s fun, and general high spirits. Even if I’d had my camera with me, I could not have captured the warm, spectacular vitalitiy of it all for you. As I sit here on the hostel terrace, I can still hear the singing at the gate at 11 pm.

Now I’ll capture a few more moments in photos.

Watching Bar Mitzvah processions pass by as we stood in line to go to the Temple Mount.

My favorite view of the old wall with Al Aqsa mosque visible on the left. We stood in line for an hour and a half to make it up to the Temple Mount to see the mosque and the Dome of the Rock.