Hey all, I get a little rambling and philisophical in this update; let me know if it is too much and in the future I do intend to stick more to the facts.
Well, here I am in the Daheisha refugee camp outside Bethlehem in the West Bank. I arrived two nights ago, walking past rubble, trash, make-shift stores, and concrete houses to reach the home of Abu Rabee, whose family I am staying with. I was immediately welcomed in and offerred food and tea, as I have been in every Palestinian home that I have visited. The family also welcomed me to stay there for three nights (I am paying SHIRAA for the place to stay but I am sure they would have welcomed me to stay in their home regardless). Abu Rabia's daughter, Leyana set up a mat for me in her room, which she was already sharing with another American visitor, Rosi. Abu Rabee and his wife, Najah, live with their four children in a three bedroom house, and the night I arrived, along with Rosi and me, they also had another overnight guest sleeping in the living room. The generosity and the huge amount that people here do with so few resources has completely blown my mind and has made me think differently about my own life and the ways that I can be more welcoming and generous to people.
Abu Rabia is a leader of the SHIRAA organization in the Daheisha camp, which is an amazing organization and their website is http://shiraa.org/index.htm in case you want to learn more about them or donate money to them. I have spent the past two days working at the circus summer camp that SHIRAA is running for around 50 9-15 year-old youth. There are circus trainers from Holland here and I have been helping one of the trainers teach groups of kids acrobatics which is fun and challenging. The kids are also learning to ride unicycles, use a trapeze, walk on stilts, and juggle. The kids are excited to learn, want a lot of attention, and all want to be the first to try anything.
Staying at the camp is a strange experience because the situation is so messed up here; with 87% unemployment, often no water for much of the camp, no garbage collection, poverty, few resources, restrictions on peoples' ability to travel.. but the impression that I am getting of the camp is not a depressing one because I am around amazing people doing great work here. The situation is terrible but the people I have met are doing an incredible job of trying to make their lives and the lives of those around them livable, and on top of that they are still open, generous, and welcoming to me, an American Jew.
Yesterday after the circus camp Rosi, who is from Philiadelphi and who I love already, took me to a meeting of Rabbis for Human rights in Jerusalem. In order to get there we passed through the checkpoint between Bethlehem and Jerusalem. This was my first time walking through this checkpoint because until now I have taken services (like busses) the long way around to avoid going through it. It was a maze of metal gates and there were Israeli soldiers everywhere who looked to me like children carrying automatic weapons. They took one look at my US passport and waved me through. Meanwhile, Palestinians passing through needed to show visas and id cards, as well as having their hands scanned in a machine.
Rosi and I had met up with a group called Rabbis for Human Rights with the intention of helping them take profiles of Palestinian families in order to try to help stop their homes from being demolished by the Israeli army. Let me explain what I mean by this. After Israel took control of Palestine in 1948 Jerusalem was divided into two parts: West Jerusalem was mainly populated by Jews and East Jerusalem was mainly Muslim and was ruled by Jordan. In 1967 the Jerusalem municipality took over East Jerusalem but it is still moslty Palestinian.
The Jerusalem municipality and some right-wing Israeli organizations have been trying to make life as difficult as possible for Palestinians in East Jerusalem. One group, El Ad, buys up Palestinian homes and tries to bully Palestinians into selling their homes in order to move Jews into the neighborhood. People need permits to build, and the municipality rarely to never grants permits for Palestinians. Meanwhile, the Palestinian population in East Jerusalem is increasing and as people marry and have children, they need a place to live. This causes people to build without permits. The Jerusalem municipality's response is to issue home demolition orders for houses with no permits. They also issue demolition orders arbitrarily for houses that do have permits. A demolition order for a person's house means that the army could come with Catapillar tractors and destroy families homes, which often happens.
Spending time with the Rabbis for Human Rights was informative but also upsetting. Instead of taking profiles we were taken by the group to visit the Bustan Center, a Palestinian community center being built in Silwan, which is a Palestinian neighborhood in East Jerusalem. The center seems like an amzing project, but basically what the organization I was with did was stand around and make one of the leaders of the Bustan Center answer all of the group's questions about how home demolitions worked- which did not seem to be what the Bustan Center had signed up for in a visit. The whole experience seemed so exploitative, with internationals asking a barrage of questions. I tried to intervene during and also tried to talk to the people involved after, but I was left with such a disturbed feeling. The group felt like a charitable organization, not a solidarity organization, and the power dynamics had felt so imbalanced and racist to me.
On the way back to Daheisha Rosi and I had a long talk about solidarity verses charity and why we do the work that we do. I often find charity to be patronizing and exploitative and I try to do my work because I want to do it, because I have a personal stake in its success, and because I do not like things being done in my name that I do not agree with (ie US support of Israel and a state for all Jews-including me-that I see as racist).
It is so easy to write off activist organizations like Rabbis for Human Rights because I think that they are fucked up in some way or because I disagree with their politics, but if we don't make alliances how will we ever win? And if I am not the one to talk to predominately white and Jewish peace organizations like this, then who is? I want to do this work somehow without being self-righteous and also without being complacent in racism.
My experiences yesterday made me think a lot about my privileges and how to deal with them. Being able to pass so simply through the checkpoint, a barrier which my host family is not ever allowed to pass through (because they are Palestinian and above the age of 15 so are therefore not allowed into Israeli territory), made me so uncomfortable and seemed so unfair. I can walk around Jerusalem at will, I can go home to my beautiful one bedroom apartment that I live in alone, I can enter and leave this area at will, I can afford luxeries, I can see my family whenever I want.. The list could go on for pages. But what do I do with these privileges? I am still thinking about this question.. I do not want to reject these privileges; instead I want to use them carefully and hopefully use them for good. I want to influence my community and my country's goverment to help stop the injustice that I am seeing all around me. I want to make myself happy and be a productive and whole person who has the energy to fight injustice in order to make this world better for myself and others. And I want to keep learning and being challenged to live the best way that I can.
Today has been another day, with a million other things in my thoughts and I will send off this email and start the next! As always, I welcome thoughts and criticism.
Love from Palestine,
Rachel
Also, the organization I was travelling with earlier and will be travelling with later is http://www.birthrightunplugged.org/ if you want more info on that or want to donate to them.
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