A Summer Without Justice

We were sitting in a restaurant in silence. It wasn't that I didn't know what to say--I just didn't know how to say it.

"How-how," I stammered. "Do you have so much--"

"Hope?" Before I could finish my sentence, Rana found the word I was searching for. "If we didn't have hope we couldn't live here," she said. "Not like this anyway."

I nodded, slowly taking in what she said and before I knew it, we were back to our usual conversation. But I couldn't get that word out of my head. Hope. For some reason it sounded different coming from Rana. Maybe I just wasn't expecting a 24-year-old to have so much wisdom. Or maybe my understanding of hope changed the minute I heard it spoken by a Palestinian.
....

I jerked out of bed. An Arabic voice was reciting the Quran from a nearby mosque on loudspeaker. As the cryptic sounds entered my window, I realized that I was not only miles from home; I was miles from anything familiar.

For over 50 years, University Presbyterian Church has been sending college students to serve in different parts of the world through their World Deputation Program. This year, I and 27 other students took a leap of faith and agreed to be sent anywhere.

But it didn’t hit me until I heard the Muslim call to prayer that I was in Bethlehem. For the next two months, I would be living here.

My mind drifted back to Seattle. What had my church pastor told me? I would be volunteering with Palestinian nonprofits and learning Arabic, while bringing a message of peace and hope to Palestinian people. My mind was racing. What would that look like? How was I supposed to be a peacemaker? What exactly does it mean to have hope?

Before I exploded with questions, I got up and walked outside. An orange glow was dipping behind purple hills in the distance. Stone houses covered a vast landscape descending before me. It looked like an oil painting. Nothing was concrete; everything molded into one broad desert stroke.

For a minute, the voice in my head quieted to a whisper. I forgot about everything. I forgot that I was in a place I did not understand. I forgot that there was a war. Instead, I listened to the peaceful start of a hot summer night. If I listened hard enough, I knew there was something it was trying to tell me.
….

I was sitting on a bus holding my breath. We were winding our way down Wadi Nar or “The Valley of Fire.” To my left a well-paved, flat road cut through the desert. We were told that was the Israeli road. We were on the Palestinian road, a vertical zigzag crumbling off the side of a cliff. It ended at the Wadi Nar checkpoint or “the container.”

As we slid into the container, a young Israeli soldier greeted our bus, saying, “Bon Jour!” Walking down the aisle, he smiled noticing my blue passport. Then he stopped. He asked our guide, Elias, to show his ID. Elias handed him his green passport and the soldier said, “Arab, huh?” He then took Elias’ sunglasses off his face, looking at his reflection in the lenses, before shoving them back onto our guide’s head.

We drove through several checkpoints. Some were clearly marked. Others, known as “flying checkpoints,” seemed to appear out of nowhere with an Israeli military jeep blocking the road for hours at a time.

I didn’t understand. We weren’t crossing the border from occupied territory to Israel; we were driving within the West Bank from Bethlehem to Tulkarem.

When we arrived at Baqa, a small farming village in Tulkarem, a local began listing off numbers. “30,000 dunams of land were confiscated,” he said. “There are 4,500 dunams left.”

I couldn’t comprehend what he was saying. How many miles were in a dunam? Why was the land confiscated?

But, then I saw it. A few feet behind a row of small houses, 8 meter high slabs of cement stood forming a massive barrier. Dark, sorrowful eyes were spray painted on its face. I had seen the wall from a distance in Bethlehem, but here it was different. Palestinian houses were on both sides. To my left, the wall ran directly into a house that was now deserted, except for military netting strewn across the windows.

The local farmer was saying that the wall separated him from his land. He had to get a special permit to cross a checkpoint several miles away.

“The gate opens twice a week,” he said. “At most I can work on my land for three hours at a time because we are not allowed to spend the night on the other side of the wall.”

We turned to walk down a dusty road. The wall was no longer towering above us, but its presence loomed in the distance. A boy was sitting on a fence watching us. He looked tired with the sun beating down on his face.

“This is my house,” he said, pointing to the stone building behind him. “These were my neighbor’s houses,” he added, looking out at the piles of rubble we were standing in.
It seemed like his house was the only building still standing. We asked him why these houses were demolished.

“The Israelis thought they were going to build the wall here,” he said. “Then they changed their minds.”
….

We were sitting on the edge of our seats at Osh Ghrab, a park a few miles from Bethlehem. Italy had just scored. With ten seconds left in the half, we wondered if Spain could get ahead. Sure enough, Torres closed the deal. Everyone jumped out of their chairs, waving Spanish flags above their heads. The Euro Cup was in full force.

I was smiling, taking in the excitement around me. Puffs of “hubbly bubbly” floated through the air. Kabobs were sizzling on the grill. Foreigners and Palestinians intermingled, creating a mix of Arabic and English banter.

Up the hill, an Israeli flag was waving in the breeze. Two guards stood atop a water tower, watching the soccer fanatics below.

Osh Ghrab is an old military outpost. Years after vacating the land, Israelis soldiers and settlers had returned. They wanted to build a settlement in place of the park.

I’d seen other West Bank settlements. It was hard not to notice them. With sprinklers watering green grass around tall buildings, they stood in stark contrast to the world I was living in. Atop every house in Bethlehem, black barrels hold a family’s weekly water supply.

Watching the soldiers holding their large guns, I knew that a settlement was not just a new neighbor for Palestinians. A settlement meant more demolished houses, more refugees, more checkpoints, more security fences, and more inequality. And yet, building settlements in occupied territory is a violation of international law.

Earlier that day, the settlers had marked their territory at the park. “Death to Arabs” was spray painted boldly in Hebrew. Another settler wrote: “Arabs are stealing the land with the help of western anarchists.”

The words were filled with hate. Hate of the soccer lovers smoking hooka below.
….

Sitting at dinner with my host sister, I listened to her talk about the hardships facing her family under the Occupation.

Everything I’d experienced for the last two months flashed across my mind like a movie playing in fast-forward. I felt a lump forming in the back of my throat.

But, Rana looked as though nothing had fazed her. In fact, she was smiling at me.

That’s when I knew. In that moment, Rana confirmed the hope I have witnessed in Palestine. It is not a hope of overcoming an enemy; it is a hope rooted in justice.

“I don’t know justice,” a Palestinian refugee told me. “But I have heard there will be justice when injustice ends. I hope I can live to see justice.”

By: CD PSE 2008

Published in the September 22nd edition of "The Daily", the newspaper for students at the University of Washington.