Notes on a visit to Israel/Palestine
Where do I start?
Nine days only, and I had the most intensive of experiences. I want to capture it, but how?
From the start it was clear to me that I would not come to Israel without also visiting my colleagues in Bethlehem and our colleague and activist in Jerusalem. Farhad was invited to give two talks at a conference for psychotherapists and group analysts. It was held at the University in Tel Aviv.
What a special hotel in Tel Aviv, offering baklavas and dates at the desk, and a free ‘happy hour’ with wine and food!
The conference we were invited to was as difficult as we had expected, but even more so. There were people from the Israel Institute for Group Analysis, and people from the University. The anger was palpable: who were we, coming from outside, talking about the political situation in Israel. We, ignorant and wrong, needing a long long conversation to understand the truth of what was happening. Even though Farhad’s talks were never only addressing Israel, it was experienced as an attack. People claimed to be left wing, because they were against the occupation, and soldiers were needed to defend.
It was interesting to me how quickly people in the room were presenting as if they had one voice, the Israeli voice. In the break we heard other voices, other Israelis with different views. One Israeli told Farhad that he should not have accepted the invitation, especially not for it to be held at the University where military research was happening, and the truth about 1948 was not taught, and a place where it was difficult for Palestinians to attend. How had they been silenced?
We met our friends, stunning homes full of art, fantastic food, warmth and friendships. Colleagues and friends we want to keep and foster, only we are not able to really talk about the political situation. We are on different sides.
The next day we met our Israeli colleagues in a small circle at a beautiful home. We want to listen, hear what they experienced as so wrong about Farhad’s talk. We hear … and I feel more and more alone.
I hear what it is like for them, but nothing about what is happening for Palestinians. Do they know? When I voice it, I feel more connected: we hear how impossible it is to know and to live here: “If I really take it all in, I would have to leave, and I can’t”, and how difficult it is to know that your baby being a boy will go and do difficult things in the army, and how the Holocaust is in their blood and reduces all other pain inflicted on others.
Later I wonder about Nakba, the Palestinian catastrophe of 1948, also in the blood of Palestinians.
For the next days we walk around Tel Aviv, a beautiful European city, full of young people, music, dancing and happiness. It’s easy to forget here, I forget. I forget that most of these young people have been soldiers, or part of the military in some ways. But now they are happy, and why not? Life goes on everywhere, families, children, work.
We have a lovely time with our friends, talk about our relationships, lots of similarities, we laugh.
The next day we travel to Bethlehem. We are invited to the home of a colleague.
When I google travelling to Bethlehem, I learn that we will need passports because of the laws of the Palestinian Authority who are governing Bethlehem. Israelis are not allowed into Bethlehem. This is written on big red signs at the entrance to the town. “It is illegal and dangerous for Israeli citizens to enter.” But nobody looks at passports when you enter. The truth is that it is the Israeli checkpoint when leaving Bethlehem where you need your passport and visa to re-enter Israel.
We took the bus, the ‘Arab bus’, from Damascus gate into Bethlehem, where we were picked up by our colleague and friend and her husband, a biomedical engineer responsible for the Middle East. They both had taken time off from work to be able to be with us. We went to the nativity church where we could jump the long long queues, because our Muslim friends had connections. Then the Banksy hotel and museum, before picking up their 2 children from school. The Banksy museum was impressive, and I wished that all my Israeli colleagues could come and visit it. And I hear that they would be welcome. Some have been, but many are too frightened. “I wanted my Israeli friend to come, and I guaranteed her that I would look after her and make sure she would be safe, but she would not do it”, I am told by one of the friends.
Banksy has an impressive way of telling the story. The phone that rings, and when you pick it up you are told that you have 5 minutes to leave your home before it is destroyed. The scales where one stone weighs more than hundreds on the other side. A big field using empty gas cylinders for planting crops. Plus two rooms of art by Palestinians.
When we drive to our friends family home we realise that they live in the big refugee camp, the Dheisheh camp from 1949. It’s no longer tents, but houses. We are visiting a lovely two storey house. We have delicious food and meet a friend and colleague. She is an activist fighting for women who experience domestic violence. She wants this implemented in Palestinian law, so it is permanent. We are told that she often risks a lot: “You should look after yourself and don’t risk your children loosing their mum”, our friend tells her. A lovely women, full of life and passion. We are in a lovely family home with a kind and hands-on husband and two children. We brought them UNO and Dobble which we all play. We love playing games.
They took us to a lovely place where each of them goes when needing to find peace. There is water, the sound of flowing water is precious, and each of them have a special place where they sit and look over the green valley. There is also a restaurant with a view, and there we meet more colleagues and friends. We talk politics, but there is a lovely lightness with teasing and laughter, and a bit of grooving to lovely music. “You are kidding yourself thinking you live in Palestinian territory”, one of them says, “as long as soldiers can come into your house whenever they want, in Gaza or Bethlehem, it is Israel”. “Did you read the Oslo agreement? It is a joke!”
Later, walking through the camp, we see pictures drawn on the walls of houses, where young people were shot: one of them had looked down from the window while a soldier was patrolling the street. He was shot. Another had a car accident with a solder’s car. He was shot. This reminded me of talking with black people in America who were always frightened when stopped by the police, never sure whether they might be shot.
That evening we met a family friend, whose work was to teach and inform teachers and parents about the needs of children with disability. With him and our friends we had another very interesting conversation. We heard about the corrupt Palestinian government, supporting those they feel close to. As most of the leaders have come from the refugee camp they are well looked after, but not others. We heard about the harshness of their prisons. We heard about their belief that Israeli and Palestinian secret services are working together. We heard that when this friend had enrolled to be a Palestinian soldier, he was asked to arrest 10 of his friends. He couldn’t and refused, and had to go to prison. We heard about the celebrations when 2 friends came out of Israeli prison. One had been given 7 years, the other 21 years, so the one offered to take some of his friend’s sentence, so both served 14 years. We heard about his friend coming out of Israeli prison after 14 years, asking all his friends to come and bring their children, wanting to tell them about resistance. The feeling is that people are not together enough, that there is no more resistance. People just look after their private individual lives, feeding their families – having given up.
The next day we went to Hebron where our friend was born, and where we met her uncle who was able to show us around, and her sister and other relatives. This was a shocking experience. The beautiful market, which was once vibrant, and the centre of Palestinian life, was half empty. Settlers had put themselves right next to it, making barricades, wires, concrete blocks, and throwing a lot of rubbish, destroying the beauty of the place. In order to protect themselves from stones and rubbish being thrown at them by the settlers, or being spat at, Palestinians had put up a protective wire mash above their heads. You could see the stones that had been thrown. The people who had their stalls open said: “We do not mind not making any money here, what we want to show is simply that we are here.”
“Existence is Resistance” is one of the Palestinian slogans. “They want us to leave, but we are not going.”
We visited the mosque in Hebron, the place of Abraham’s tomb, and Rachel and Sarah’s. The mosque was divided by the Israel authorities, after an Israeli came into the mosque and shot 9 Palestinians. Palestinians can visit Abraham’s tomb once or twice a year. Walking along, we saw 3 religious Jews each carrying a gas spray, their weapon.
That evening our friend had organised for her colleagues to come and listen to Farhad talk. Most of them were psychologists, social workers or psychotherapists. Several were working with families and children coming out of prison or waiting to be sentenced. There were about 40 people. We heard that often children do not know how traumatised they are, as they also think of themselves as heroes. Children under 14 can get up to 6-month prison sentences, so sometimes Israeli authorities wait with their charges until the child is 14 years old, a waiting time when families need to feel supported. There was talk about context, how important it is to remember the context these children live in, and how hard it is for the psychotherapist who is also affected by the same context.
I asked how come these children throw stones when they know how harsh the punishment can be? “For them it is a kind of initiation. They see their older friends do it, and then dare do it themselves”, was the response of a young woman working in East Jerusalem. Most of these professionals were mothers or fathers themselves.
Most of the work people do here, is subsidised by oversees organisations or charities. Since Trump is in power lots of the support from the USA has been cut. “I love my work so much, I will continue it without a salary. I want to stay positive, and keep hoping”, said one of the psychologists who is teaching groups of parents and teachers.
After the talk we went to a beautiful restaurant, and had more occasion to listen to stories. Two months ago soldiers barged into the home of this young Palestinian psychologist in East Jerusalem. She was about to have a shower, so shut her door quickly to get dressed. The soldiers ransacked her house, breaking what they could break, emptying bottles of her medicine, and beating her son in front of her. She cried and screamed and phoned her husband to come. When he arrived, they said that they were not looking for him. A mistake. And still they forced her to strip naked in front of a female soldier. Reason: she had shut the door when they arrived. She pleaded with her husband to stop them, but he told her to do what the soldiers asked her to do. “At that moment something broke in me. My husband was not willing, even if not able, to protect me.” Her husband also asked her to delete the video which had captured the damage. He was too frightened.
A week ago, a child went missing in her road. Everyone was participating in the search, neighbours and friends. The suspicion was that the child had been kidnapped by the soldiers. Then in the evening the child was found drowned very nearby. They were not allowed an autopsy.
Since then every parent accompanies their children, not leaving them out of sight. It reminded me of my Israeli colleagues talking about not leaving their children out of sight when suicide bombings were active in Tel Aviv.
There is a bitter feeling of having had no compensation for their losses, while Israel is still receiving compensation from Germany.
Our hosts had different responses to the hoped for ‘right to return’: She would want to stay in their home and use the money to improve it, he would want to live in a tent where once their home had been.
To attain a permit to travel out of Bethlehem is special. These were proudly shown to each other and to us, but our host had to be back by 7pm. She came with us to Jerusalem to visit our friend and activist, and she was overwhelmed to see how many Israelis had settled in Jerusalem: ”It makes me sad!”
Jerusalem felt like a city full of tension. So different from Tel Aviv! I now wonder what would happen if a solution was found with Palestinians and Israelis, whether as one state or two states.
Would the differences between the various religious and secular Israelis become the focus of the problem?
Again, we were invited into our colleague’s home who had taken time off for our visit.
In Jerusalem we went up and down with the tram, looking at the different neighbourhoods and settlements, and walking the wall of the old city.
But most interesting was the meeting, our colleague had organised, with other Israeli activists, working for organisations like ‘Peace Now’. Here we had dialogues about their work, their relationship to living in Israel, coming from very different backgrounds. It was interesting to see their astonished surprise when hearing that we had visited the Dheisheh refugee camp. This camp has a reputation of being very unsafe, something we had been completely unaware of. We had only met friendly people.
I asked whether anyone had stones thrown at them: yes, one had a stone thrown through his car window when he was in his car waiting for his Bedouin friend, another had only received stones from settlers in Hebron. The friendship that had developed between our colleague and the Bedouin man, together with his friends and family, had become strong and meaningful. He had written a blog about it.
There was unrest in one of the Palestinian neighbourhoods near Jerusalem, where police were patrolling all day long, making the population feel unsafe. A child had been shot through the eye by a soldier only the week before. Two of our friends were missing a demonstration in relation to what was happening there, and some of the activists were going into that neighbourhood to help protect and calm the situation.
At one point I felt uncomfortable when the talk was about what motivated their activities. Helping and supporting the stranger was a strong part of Jewish teaching, for others it was simply an act of humanity. Somehow it felt patronising to think of my Palestinian friends as strangers who needed help, rather than people who had been owners of the land and cities and deserved to be treated with respect. We were able to talk about this. To my surprise it was an article I had written for the journal that people wanted to talk about. “Maybe we need to learn from the Germans how to take the position of being perpetrators”, one of them said to me.
For our colleague it was important to state that all this violence and intimidation was what people do when they occupy: ”If the Palestinians were the occupiers, they would do the same. You need to intimidate those you occupy to keep them in control.” I thought it was difficult to talk like this in front of our Palestinian friend. “I need to say that, because my parents were not bad people, they did what you do in the situation they were in.”
I am reminded of the talks we had with our friends in Tel Aviv: Our friend’s father escaping death as a 7-year old Jewish boy, twice. Heroic! He would have been drowned in the river like the other children.
My father’s heroic adventures during the war and after Germany’s occupation. I never heard about the French, only about the very kind and supportive Americans, the punitive and superior English, and the brutal and revengeful Russians. I was still frightened of the Russians when I was 5 years old, in 1957. Of course, nobody wanted our land, so occupation was very different.
Our next stop was Haifa. A spontaneous last-minute arrangement. We were to meet a group of Arab colleagues there. Do we call them Arab or Palestinian? Some have connections to our colleagues in Bethlehem.
Now the world is different again. Our hosts, colleague and partner, take us to the most beautiful restaurant, with view all across Haifa bay, and delicious Arab food! The meeting is in a lovely flat, again with a fantastic view. Here Arab and Israeli are more mixed, and Palestinian villages are still intact. It seems that Palestinian Christians have more opportunity to educate themselves abroad. The partner of our colleague has a very prestigious job.
We meet a nice group of people, one of them Israeli. They listen to Farhad talking, and exchange ideas about their work. But they tell us that the facilitated groups they had attended with Israelis and Arabs always hit a wall where they could not get any further. “It does not work when the power differences within the context we live in, is not really acknowledged. It’s not like sibling rivalry, not just about learning to communicate and understand each other.”
We talk about politics and psychotherapy. “Don’t talk about politics, talk about yourself”, one of them was told, as if the two could be separated in this context. “We seem to be so passive. When these horrible things happen to our people, we do not really protest, we just take it.”
We took a taxi back to Tel Aviv. It was Saturday when buses and trains are not working in Israel.
Again, we were able to sleep at a dear friend’s house to take a very early flight. “We are near the airport here. We are targeted from Gaza”, she said.
All these experiences, connections and friendships will continue, hopefully in real life, but certainly in our minds.
Angelika Golz
angelika@golz.org.uk