Pool in Palestine

It can be hard to make an update every day here - when I'm not very busy, there's more than a little down time when I'm not doing much at all.

I'm teaching an English class to some Palestinians - the class varies, usually we have around 5 people who come. It can be a challenge teaching because I've never taught before and the English capacity of the students ranges from very limited to more advanced. Thankfully a fellow coworker has stepped up and is helping, so we can split the class according to ability.

After class, one of the students invited us to his house for tea, and then we shot some pool. It had been ages since I'd shot pool last, so it was a lot of fun. I'll only be teaching another week and a half of classes, but it's been a good experience.

On a more serious note, there was another protest this past weekend in Beit Ommar. The military was very aggressive, and I got pushed around more than a little. It's tough trying to hold a camera while a soldier's in your face. I did a good job filming though. Media work scares me because you need to be up front in the action, and need to relatively close, which means that you put yourself at risk of arrest without being as liquid as other folks in the protest. But, I survived!

Conferences and Tear Gas

For the past 6 days I've been extremely busy preparing for and supporting a conference on the popular resistance in Palestine. That conference ended yesterday, so now I'm free to make an update.

Volunteering here isn't all supporting protests and confrontations with the military. While they may be some of the most exciting parts, just like the US there's a lot of basic, mundane stuff that happens as well. I spent the last three days waking up at 6 or 7 AM to attend a conference, at which I helped take notes on speakers and film. In the days leading up to that, I was working with the other volunteers here to prepare handouts - meaning collating papers, stapling, and stuffing folders. Not exciting, but important.



The conference was alright. I didn't get too much out of it myself - there were a few interesting speakers, but most of it was speeches. The point of the conference wasn't to cater to internationals, and I hope that the folks who are struggling here were able to move their cause forward. My friend put it well though when she said that the main point of the conference was to build visibility and morale for the resistance, because it hasn't been doing so well in recent years. The Palestinians have been fighting for some sort of existence for decades, and neither violent nor non-violent resistance have achieved the goal of self-determination, so there is a lot of apathy and cynicism they must resist.

One extremely beneficial aspect of this trip has been the chance for me to get a better sense of Palestine and Palestinians. It isn't all rioting and protests here - they do happen fairly frequently, but that means once or twice a week. In the US, and perhaps in general, Palestinians are only in the news when there's dramatic protest footage. They are usually associated with a political party or resistance group like Islamic Jihad. Here on the ground, identities are much more complex. And just like anyone else in the world, most days of the week are spent doing things like working, studying, caring for a family, etc. There are people who organize demonstrations, and there are people who go to demonstrations and throw rocks. Unlike in the US, there's a general acceptance and appreciation for the latter.

On the final day of the conference, there was a demonstration in the town of Budrus. It's a pretty famous area - they were able to stop the Apartheid Wall from cutting through it with a massive, long-running struggle. There's a movie named after the town that I need to check out after I get back.

It was pretty intense. The military was firing tear gas almost immediately after the protest started. While protests are tolerated to some extent in the US, in Palestine, no matter how large or even if people are throwing stones, they are almost always dispersed by violence.

This protest was only underway for a few minutes when the soldiers began launching tear gas. There was tons of it, although I was told they may have held off some because of the presence of internationals. I was filming all of this going down, so I was gassed as well. Much worse than any previous experiences with tear gas - not only was I coughing and my sinuses were going crazy, but my skin stung as well.

When we fled the initial tear gas barrage, a friend and I ended up behind a wall near a few houses in town. The soldiers continued to fire tear gas canisters into the residential area, including a school. An older Palestinian woman put some perfume on our hands so that we could control the effects of the tear gas. While what tear gas does is a chemical reaction, some of its effects can be controlled by distracting your body with other smells, which remind it to breathe again.

That kind of support was really nice. It reminded me of Pittsburgh, when people assisted us in running from the cops. It feels good to know that kind of solidarity exists.

Today I go to court for a friend of mine who the Israeli government is trying to deport. Israel really doesn't like internationals working with Palestinians, so the case is very political. The worst thing that will happen is that he is deported. Hopefully he gets off, but I will let you know what happens.

Face to face with the occupation

I went to my first protest in Beit Ommar yesterday, and it was pretty wild.

The march was to land occupied by a settlement called Kiryat Arba. Settlers have built a security fence which steals land from farmers in the village. Though they went to court for the right to farm the land (and won) in 2006, they have only been allowed to work their fields behind the fence twice.

The last time the farmers went to the land, one of them was brutally beaten by soldiers who kidnapped him and dumped him outside of the town entrance. This time wasn't quite as bad, but it was very messy.

The protests was made up of around 40 international activists, who accompanied around six Palestinians and some Israelis to the farmland near the security fence. Many of them came on the Welcome to Palestine action, or "flytilla," in which hundreds of people attempted to enter Palestine to support the struggle here. Their presence was a mixed blessing - it added many people to the action, but I think it drew more attention from the soldiers at the settlement. They also didn't know anything about what would happen if they got arrested, and had little protests experience as a whole.

The group marched up a line of soldiers, who said were weren't allowed to enter the land. They declared the are a closed military zone, which works kind of like the police declaring a protest an illegal assembly in the US. Protesters had 10 minutes to leave or they would be subject to whatever the military wanted to do with it.

During those 10 minutes, we spent time clearing the land of stones so it could be farmed. Once the time was up, they began advancing on the protest and arrested a few people, one of them very forcefully. I was doing media work, so that involved taking a lot of pictures, but things were hot enough that I was busier not being attacked by soldiers to get anything good. Even as we retreated beyond the field, the soldiers threw many sound bombs and chased us further.

It was pretty scary - the group wasn't very tight and communication was lacking. Many of the Welcome to Palestine group only spoke French, and the head soldier only made announcements in Hebrew and English. At least one of the people arrested who weren't Israeli is in the process of being deported, which is unusual and demonstrates the political nature of how the soldiers acted.

Unfortunately, attacks on Palestinian farmers attempting to farm their land are common is Israel. The military blocks their way, settlers beat them, and settler security attack them, sometimes with live ammunition. The vast majority of adult men in Beit Ommar are farmers, and they depend on this land for their livelyhood. The theft of land by settlements is expanding as well - if not by literal building of houses, then by expanding security fences which the settlement then grows towards.

Also, check out this awesome blog some friends of mine are keeping about their time here and elsewhere in Palestine.