Socks

I wanted to finish writing about tour – about hitching through England and France, the incredible squats in Holland, all the kind folks that took care of me – but that’ll have to wait… which probably means never. It wasn’t for lack of sweet kids along the way, though, and I owe a huge thanks to everyone who helped put together the tour. I hope I get the chance to return the favor(s) States-side soon.

For all the books and articles I’ve read, for all my solemn awareness of the conflict, Palestine was fucked up to a degree I was not prepared to handle. I’m sitting in my Dad’s apartment in New York – with disconcerting swiftness growing re-accustomed to all the small and large luxuries of being home – trying to sort through this ambiguous mix of rage, indignation, and profound sadness that barely a week in the West Bank has left me with.

There is a lot of controversy, both within activist circles and increasingly in the mass media, over whether it is appropriate to refer to Israel as an “apartheid state.” In many ways, I’m still uneasy with the cavalier way people throw it around: expropriating language, particularly terminology signifying such a specific time and place, risks obscuring the equally unique historical circumstances that are central in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. (An excellent exposition of an opposing view comes courtesy Tony Kushner monologue). But if it helps people get a better visceral understanding of the intensity of the occupation, I guess I have a hard time objecting now.

I’ve never been to South Africa, though, so as an American my closest reference point to what I saw – and, again, the obvious caveat of historical difference –was Jim Crow.

There aren’t segregated bus stations. Instead, you get entire networks of road that - through military checkpoints, earthen barriers, and bridges and tunnels - have become effectively off-limits to Palestinians. I visited the Friends School of Ramallah, where just a few years ago the Lower School had over 60 students who lived in nearby Jerusalem; now, because of the Qalandiya checkpoint, there’s just one. From Nablus to Ramallah, maybe 30 miles apart, we had to go through three checkpoints, each of which takes anywhere from a few seconds to a few hours depending on the soldiers’ mood that day and the color of your skin. (Just so folks understand, 63% of the checkpoints aren’t along the “Green Line” between Israel and Palestine, or even along the Separation Wall; they’re between towns in the middle of the West Bank).

There aren’t burning crosses. But Palestinian shops and homes near Hebron’s city center – where approximately 500 well-armed, right-wing Israelis have built six settlements – get stoned on a near-daily basis. Over the historic central commercial thoroughfare the Israeli army had to install netting, due to all the refuse and bricks raining down on shoppers from the Israeli settlement overlooking it. There are literally thousands of Israeli soldiers in the neighborhood to keep the enclave secure, but they’re under strict orders not to touch the settlers; I spent a while talking with international monitors who now have to escort the Palestinian children to and from school to keep them from being pelted near the settlements. And so the Old City has become a ghost town: 42% of the Palestinian homes and 77% of the Palestinian businesses in the area near the settlements have been abandoned.


In Bethlehem, I got beers with this rad Palestinian community organizer named Samer Jaber, who, when I mentioned I was from Chicago, IL, went: “Saul Alinsky!” He threw a rock when he was 15 years old, and like many Palestinian kids, spent the next six years in an Israeli prison for it. (His friend described his experience being tortured in jail: “If you go through that process, you will see both God and the Devil at the same time”).

There aren’t restrictive housing covenants. But there are streets in the West Bank that non-Jews just can’t walk down anymore.


There aren’t laws preventing blacks from testifying in court. But I spent a few hours at the emergency room and the police station in Hebron with a Palestinian man and his family after a drunken settler beat him on his doorstep. The Palestinians’ entrance to the police station - which consists of a barbed-wire fence, metal detector, and ten-foot concrete barriers – is around back; the settler entrance is in front. Still covered in his own blood, the man was told by the Chief Investigator that his testimony, that of multiple Palestinian witnesses, and videotape of the attacker weren’t enough. No one had expected any different, of course: they were there just to get a written confirmation that a complaint was made, “so maybe for history they will remember.”

And there aren’t separate water fountains for blacks and whites. Instead, Israel just takes a grossly disproportionate share of the water from shared underground aquifers and the upper portions of the Jordan River. Whereas Israel consumes 280-330 liters of water per day per person, consumption in the West Bank is 60 liters of water per day per person, 40% well below WHO and USAID guidelines for basic need. While Israeli golf courses stay green year-round, hundreds of villages in occupied Palestine are complete without running water.

While it’s still fairly unacceptable to call Israel an “apartheid state” in America, many people (including very well-intentioned folks) without hesitation decry the absence of a Palestinian Mandela or a Palestinian Gandhi. The thing that struck me most from my time in the West Bank, though, was how extraordinary it was that any sort of non-violent organizing was happening at all.

When I arrived in Israel I was supposed to stay with an Israeli friend Eran in Tel Aviv, but he was recuperating from being shot in the leg by an Israeli soldier during the weekly Friday demonstration in Bil’in a few days prior. It was a rubber-tipped bullet – one of the advantages of being an Israeli or international activist as opposed to a Palestinian – but it still ripped through his leg muscle and had to be surgically removed.

Samer invited me to come witness the Friday demonstration – they happen all across the West Bank – outside Al-Khader. When the wall construction there is completed soon, it will expropriate 5,000 acres of the small agricultural community’s land. The protest consisted of about fifty men saying Friday prayers for fifteen minutes in the street, at least a football field’s distance away from the nearest soldiers, who had blocked off the street with armored jeeps and barbed wire barricades for the event. Then they went home. Up on the hillside, Israeli snipers trained their rifles on the men the entire time.

But it’s also important to remember that non-violent resistance means a lot of different things, and it’s pretty much everywhere. It’s the weekly protests against the Wall, but it’s also those folks in Hebron who take the time to fill out those police reports even though they know nothing will come of it. I spent the day with this guy Issa who was documenting every broken, interviewing evicted families, making reports with the authorities, and when I asked why he kept it up he replied, “because they want us to stop.” It’s also the teachers and parents who continue educating their kids during curfew or other adversity, or anyone else just managing to get along day-to-day under what are truly brutal conditions.

Post-Script:

Israeli intelligence stole my dirty socks, and everything else I’ve been traveling with for the past three months.

During the typical pre-flight questioning they decided to search my bags, during which security came across a Palestinian soccer jersey, which I explained I had picked up as a gift in Ramallah. This set off all sorts of alarm bells, and upon closer inspection they then found information from B’Tselem – perhaps the foremost Israeli human rights organization – and the Alternative Information Center, a joint Israeli-Palestinian NGO. Furiously I was asked why I was “exporting enemy propaganda,” taken into a back room where I stripped down to my underwear, and interrogated there for the next two hours. At one point I counted thirteen people going through my clothes, music, and every piece of paper in my wallet.

Twenty-five minutes before departure I was escorted through security, directly onto the boarding ramp for my flight, sans any of my belongings. I want my friggin’ socks back, please.