What's It Like for a Minnesotan in the Midst of the Intifada?

One evening in May I went to hear hydrologist and environmental consultant John Reese, from the International Solidarity Movement, talk about Gaza and the West Bank and the environmental impacts of the occupation on Palestinian communities.

During the question and answer period, a pleasant and quietly forceful middle-aged woman stood up and said she had just spent 15 months in Bethany, West Bank, Palestine. She wanted to know how to let people in the United States know what is going on in Palestine. She said it was always the people who already knew who attended these educational and informative events. She wanted to get beyond “preaching to the choir.”

Later I asked her what organization she was with-how had she gone to Palestine? I was amazed to learn that she had gone on her own, and had worked in a nursing home. Kathy Pierson’s travels started in 1995 when she decided to go on a Holy Land tour offered through St. Michael’s Catholic Church in Farmington where she was a member. As a young person growing up in Minneapolis she was always interested in the Peace Corps or some kind of international service but, except for when her husband was stationed in Taiwan, where they lived in the village instead of on the military base, she had never traveled outside the country.

On the trip she made numerous friends and generally fell in love with Palestine, the Arabs, the hospitality, the olive groves. “People were so friendly. If they saw you in the street, they’d invite you in, whether or not they spoke English” She made so many friends, she was determined to go back.

Two years later, she took a three-week leave from her job as a social worker with the elderly to work in a nursing home in Abu Dis, West Bank. Her husband died suddenly that summer and at the beginning of 1998, with her youngest child almost out of high school, she spent three weeks in Palestine looking for some kind of service work she could do. She found a position in a school for blind children in Biet Jala, West Bank, where she spent six months in the fall and winter of 98-99.

In December 2000, three months after the beginning of the second Intifada (In Arabic, the word intifada means “shaking off” and refers to Arab uprisings which intend to shake off their Israeli rulers-the first one took place from December 1987 through September 1993), Pierson sold her house and planned for a long stay in Palestine. Her intention was to work with old people but she didn’t know where to begin looking for a long-term volunteer opportunity- “Palestine isn’t even a country!” she said. Finally she found a Christian information center in Jerusalem who put her in touch with a nursing home in Bethany, a suburb of Jerusalem. Everything was set for her to leave in October of 2001. The terror of September 11, 2001, did not dissuade her. She went in October as she had planned.

The home was actually for disabled people of all ages with a few old people stuck in. Eighty percent were severely disabled. It was an awful place. There were 87 people, all Palestinians, mostly Muslim and a few Christians. Some had family, some were abandoned, there were no services for them. Everyone got therapy twice a week. That was it. It was an overwhelming situation to walk into, but the nursing staff was very friendly and supportive to her. There was a new director, a Palestinian raised in London, who made changes. But he had to quit. He lived in Bethlehem and with the missiles landing there all the time, he was afraid for his children. He wanted to be near them.

The daily violence touched many people that Pierson knew. The fiancé of one of her co-workers was killed by Israeli soldiers in Hebron. Another nurse’s cousin was killed in a refugee camp in Bethlehem. In March of 2002 the Israeli military reoccupied the insides of the Palestinian towns in the West Bank which until that time had been controlled by the Palestinian Authority.

Various incidents happened around that time such as the seige of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. Also, a U.N. official was shot by an Israeli soldier in Jenin; the refugee camp at Jenin was leveled and Israeli soldiers trashed the Peace Center in Bethlehem. (Pierson says she wonders why USAID paid for the cultural center at Bethlehem University and then the United States paid for bombs to bomb it.)

One night Pierson stayed over at a friend’s house in Bethlehem and that was the night Israel bombed the city. Seventeen people were killed and the bombs fell close to where she was. The next morning she felt she had to leave so she dressed as American as possible with her frizzy/curly light hair, pink pants and tennies. The streets were completely deserted except for tanks. She walked past them and continued walking until she was out of the city.

Living in Palestine, checkpoints are the main danger. Since the Palestinian towns are surrounded by Jewish settlements, the people are trapped inside and can only get out by going through checkpoints. Throughout Pierson’s stay, the checkpoints gradually got worse. One of Pierson’s friends in Bethany, a young student who ran a furniture store full-time and studied full-time at the university—-at least tried to-lost four of her friends who were shot and killed at a checkpoint as they tried to get to school.

(Palestinian university students get up every day, get dressed and try to go to school. They never know if they will get through a checkpoint.)

A doctor friend of Pierson’s in Bethlehem was taking in casualties. A body with the head shot off turned out to be another doctor, his best friend. Later they learned that the first soldier at the checkpoint had waved his friend through and the other soldier blew his head off as he went by. Pierson says the people say, “Every soldier is his own government.” She says, “If a soldier kills or hurts innocent people, they are never disciplined. They [the Israeli government] say it was a mistake. They might apologize if somebody writes a letter, makes a formal complaint. But nothing much happens to the soldiers.”

Besides dangerous, checkpoints are tediously inconvenient. You’re always figuring out a way to drive around or walk around a blockade. It takes hours to get anywhere. If by some miracle you get to another village to visit someone, you should be prepared to stay overnight.

Bethany is five miles from the Old City of Jerusalem. Bethlehem is southwest of there and both are in the occupied West Bank. It used to be easy to go around the checkpoint into Jerusalem. You could drive up a 45 degree inclined dirt road and the soldiers would see people driving there but would just let them go. Then the dirt road was blocked off. Then the checkpoint into Jerusalem was blocked by cement blocks so you couldn’t drive in. You had to walk around and get a cab. Then the cement blocks were extended to become a low wall which got longer and longer. It got so long it took forever to walk around it so people piled up rocks to make places to climb over. However, Pierson said, only old people and pregnant women needed the “bridges.” Any young able bodied person could just jump over, so the wall provided no security. For a while, there was a way to drive around through a winding uphill and downhill fire road through the mountains but that was eventually barricaded, as well.

The curfews were also irritating. Pierson said that even more than the danger, the hardest thing about being there was the constant inconvenience, not being able to plan your life. “It’s psychological warfare.” Curfews can last for days; people are not allowed to leave their homes except for certain times to buy food. It just wore her down.

Pierson returned to the United States at the beginning of 2003 because she “couldn’t stay in jail any longer.” She felt guilty leaving all her friends because she had a “free ticket to leave, and they didn’t.” Actually, she said, some Palestinians do get free tickets to leave: there’s a group of conservative Israeli families offering Palestinians visas and transportation fees to get them out of the country, to leave and never come back. She says that now Sharon wants all Palestinians out of Israel. It used to be a sideline issue but by now, 20 percent of Israelis say “transfer” and “ethnic cleansing” is the solution.

Her Palestinian friends say “They’re [the Israeli military] making everyone’s lives miserable to put them under pressure to WANT to leave.”

While Pierson is not a peace activist, nor did she ever try to get involved in conflict situations, she believes, as do the peace people, that what the Israeli military does to Palestinians is terrorism just like suicide bombings are terrorism-violence aimed at innocent people.

Pierson says the stated g oal of the Israeli military, that is, security, is not being reached. The checkpoints do not provide security and neither do attacks on Palestinian civilians.

Pierson believes the suicide bombers have no strategic or tactical goal. Their ultimate goal is to end the occupation but for now they are simply trying to cause as much damage as possible. She said it alleviates the shame of having your home violated. In Arabic culture, if someone enters your home, a thief, or anyone who shouldn’t be there (such as soldiers), it’s a great shame. The result of the bombings, though, is increased checkpoints and increased Israeli violence. Just as increased violence against Palestinians is always followed by increased suicide bombings.

In 1995 when Pierson went to the Holy Land, she knew nothing about the politics and the conflict. Now she knows a lot about it but knows there is nothing she can do about it. For now, she has no plans to return.

“Life on the West Bank is impossible. To accomplish anything, as far as developing a program [at the nursing home], is impossible.”

Why I’m Writing About the Middle East Again

I didn’t want to write about the Middle East again, but stories come up and beg to be written down. When I met Kathy I felt her view was unusual because she was not a professing pacifist, not anti-Semitic, and not representing any particular organization. She was “just a person” drawn to a culture.

As always, my interest in conflict is how nonviolent conflict transformation could take place. When I listen to experiences like Kathy’s, in my mind I’m always trying to figure out how this conflict could be transformed.

My friend Peter, who spent several years in the Middle East, says we shouldn’t even try to understand or be involved. He said, “Yeah, it’s about land [two parties wanting the same land], but it’s more about religion.” And he just threw up his hands to indicate we could never begin to comprehend.

I reflected on the fact that we truly can’t grasp a mentality (whether it comes out of the religion or the culture) that gives rise to suicide bombers and we, unless we are part of the Judeo-Christian tradition in a particular way, can’t grasp the notion that there’s a book that says God gave these certain people this certain land thousands of years ago and therefore it belongs to them. (It’s easier to grasp that they own it because they used to live there and were violently driven away. It’s easier to understand that they want to reconnect with sacred sites.)

But most of us can grasp the idea of fairness. Who could deny the right to a safe refuge for a people who have been persecuted all over the world for millennia, the most recent example of which being the Holocaust? And more recently, who could not feel compassion for the dire conditions in which thousands of Palestinians are forced to live-in the occupied territories. (In earlier Zionist literature they were called the disputed territories but just this past week Sharon himself acknowledged that they are indeed “occupied.”)

I personally see the conquest of Palestine in 1917 by the British as unjust (similar to the injustice of all colonial expansion in other parts of the Middle East at that time and somewhat earlier in Africa). For some reason the League of Nations interpreted this conquest as fair and gave Britain a mandate over Palestine in 1920. Then, it was easy for the U.N. to declare the existence of the state of Israel in 1948. Although the purchase of land in Palestine by the Jewish National Fund was just and fair, how much of Israel was actually bought, I don’t know.

Since 1948 it has been abundantly clear that the Palestinians and surrounding Arab nations are not in favor of the state of Israel. They don’t want it there.

Leaving aside the issue of how Israel was formed, the Arab world should have compassion for the Jewish need for a refuge. And the Israelis should have compassion for people who don’t want their land taken away, and don’t want to be ruled by foreigners. (It always needs to be acknowledged that there are Israeli and Palestinian peacemakers who are compassionate to one another and do everything they can to end the animosity by recognizing each other’s situation.)

In a book of examples of nonviolent solutions to violent situations, “Transforming Power: Alternatives to Violence in Action,” I found this story: “In the early days of the Palestinian Intifada there were frequent incidents involving rock-throwing Palestinian protesters and trigger-happy Israeli soldiers. One such altercation occurred near a street intersection, and when the two groups were temporarily disengaged with the soldiers out of sight around the corner of a building, a young Israeli, not knowing what had just happened, drove up to the intersection and stopped. Seeing this, eight or ten Palestinians rushed up to his car, tore open the door, pulled him out and beat him unmercifully.

“As he lay bleeding on the ground the group gathered around him and stopped the beating for a moment. He was able to sit up——but decided not to-and lay contemplating those in the circle around him. He turned to one and said directly, quietly and kindly, ‘Thank you.’

‘What!?’

‘Thank you all.’

‘What are you saying?’

‘I just want to thank you all for showing me what it’s like to be a Palestinian. I won’t forget how we’ve treated you.’

“The circle stepped back. Someone helped the Israeli to his feet. They helped him back into his car and escorted him safely out of the area.”

The latest plans for the “Road to Peace,” and the vote in the Israeli Knesset, and the recent peace talks might bring a solution. I am praying.