I want to write about Jewish theological responses to the Nakba. The topic has already been approved informally by my chosen supervisor (I’m so glad he agreed to supervise this project – he is an academic whose work I respect very much) and I’ve started the preliminary research. Jotting down all my ideas in the proposal got me quite excited. I didn’t manage to draw up the research timetable that the proposal is supposed to include, as my timetable is always simply, “Read a lot of books. Make tea. Sit down. Write. Replenish tea. Write some more.” The faculty suggests that this timetable be about a page long, and you can’t really get a page out of what I do when I’m researching, not even if you write in 24 pt Comic Sans. I’ve submitted the proposal without such a timetable in the hope that they don’t notice.

I glanced at the computer clock – ten minutes to go. Luckily the admin office is just down the corridor in the same building. I clicked ‘print’, grabbed my rucksack, and was about to log off when an e-mail popped up. My heart did its dying pigeon impersonation. My coursework grade was ready for collection in the admin office.

This is a comparative essay I wrote on the nationalisation of Holocaust memory in the United States, Israel, and Poland. It’s not my strongest work. I had two long essays due in at the same time. The other was on the development of Jewish Sufism in eleventh-century Spain and thirteenth-century Cairo – a topic that I had chosen because it seemed fascinating and little has been written about it. I was very happy with my topic choices until I realised that to understand the emergence of Jewish Sufism in Spain and Egypt it helps to be fluent in Biblical Hebrew, medieval Judeo-Arabic, and spoken Ladino. Also to have access to lots of fragmented manuscripts that are scattered round the globe, and a special qualification in paleography than enables you to decipher them. I spent so much time trying to make sense of these Jewish Sufis that I left almost no time for my Holocaust Studies essay. When I handed it in, it felt like a rough draft to me, and it shows. My professor for that paper is a notoriously tough marker, and I need a solid grade to progress to the PhD. I’ve waited for six weeks to find out how I did. And now the mark was waiting for me! I arrived at the admin office with my research proposal in hand and my pigeon-heart thudding about in my ribcage. “Good evening, I’d like to submit my research outline and collect a coursework grade.”

“Sure. Just fill in the coversheet for your research outline and I’ll give you the mark after.”

I filled it in as quickly as I could. She took it and popped it in the submissions box. Then started to head for the door. “The door’s locked, I’ll have to let you out.”

“Could I have my mark, please?”

“Oh, sorry, we’re closed now. We actually shut at five. You need to come back and get it in the morning.”

I let her shoo me out. I don’t know why. I made no protest; I just goggled at her like a grouper fish. As she firmly shut the door and locked it again, I turned to face the hall clock. It was one minute past five! How much time and energy would it have cost her to extract the envelope with my name on it from the box on the desk? How – what – why – URGH. I want my mark! I want it now! I don’t want to go home and spend yet another night worrying over my sketchy analysis of Bundism in pre-war Poland and my shoddily done bibliography. What did I ever do to her? More to the point, why didn’t I argue? When they threaten me with arrest at a checkpoint in Hebron, I don’t just do a grouper fish impersonation and allow myself to be steered out into the street. How is it that the secretary for the faculty can silence me where the Magav can’t? She doesn’t even have any weapons, unless you count six-inch nails (that are probably made of plastic).

One of my former students, a vivacious young man with Down’s Syndrome and autism, had two responses for people who treated him in that way. If he was feeling able to be dignified about things, you would just get a deep sigh and a reproving, “Th – that is f-fery b-bad manners, V-Vicky dear.” If he felt a bit more spirited, it would be, “F*** off, grandma, I in b-bad mood!”

I in bad mood too. Fortunately I have a £25 Christmas book token that I haven’t spent yet, and the big bookshop in the town centre is still open. I am going to get something nice with which to distract myself from those Bundists. As it is Shrove Tuesday, I may see if a few pancakes will perk me up too.

The Internet is a terrific invention. Without it, I would never have found myself living on top of a pizza shop in Newcastle with my close friend Danni and a wheezy arthritic old cat, having to wear heavy-duty earplugs to block out the cheerful karaoke coming from the pub next door. (‘Mr Blue Sky’ and ‘I Am the One and Only’ were popular numbers, sung very loudly and with Geordie accents.) Without the Internet, I would never have found myself being force-fed vast quantities of dubious makloubeh by a Palestinian girl from Gaza in a kitchen in northern England. I would never have made the acquaintance of Shai (who has been quite invaluable in helping me with colloquial Hebrew – now I can even ask for a drug dealer and a wide selection of other things that I am unlikely to want). Without the Internet, I doubt that I would ever have smuggled an off-duty Israeli soldier into Bethlehem and sent him home wearing a kuffiyeh. (That story has yet to be told on this blog – I’ll get to it.)

Danni and I met on a forum for disabled teenagers, which was my intro to the power of the Internet in bringing about change for the better. That forum gave me some of my best friends. It provided advice for teenagers who were struggling to cope with their condition. It even saved a few lives (literally). When Britain’s coalition government began to draft in an unjust and dangerous series of welfare reform policies, disabled and chronically ill people took to the Internet to launch a counter campaign. Many of the participants couldn’t leave their houses – some even struggled to get out of bed – but they turned to their keyboards. I was particularly moved by people’s response to Ali, a severely ill woman who shared on her personal blog that suicide would be her only choice if her benefits were revoked. She had lived on the streets once, she wrote, and she would never go back there again. Within hours, a group of disabled people had conceived of ’5 Quid for Life’. Donors contribute five pounds per month to the organisation, and the money will be distributed to people facing Ali’s trouble.

For something that has accomplished so much good in my life, the Internet is also a terrible headache. I read and comment on a variety of blogs – about Palestine/Israel, about disability, about feminism, special needs education, mental health, ecology, veganism, theology, and so on. Sometimes the comment threads dissolve into a cesspool of petty spite. The topic of discussion is abandoned in favour of having the last word or taking another commenter down a peg or two. When the topic of discussion is a family who has lost their home or a prisoner who is dying, this absence of compassion is inexcusable, and I find myself asking why I am joining in with these conversations. What does it achieve?

I have a hot temper and a sharp tongue. I can also be an insufferable know-it-all. Several years ago I realised that the Internet could help me to overcome these tendencies: it gives you time to think before you speak. You don’t have to hit ‘Enter’. Wait. Would you say this to a person standing in front of you? A friend? It is easy to forget that you are dealing with real people and not pixels unless you make yourself answer these questions.

In Palestine, I can usually temper my responses even when I feel angry: my desk is in a little alcove opening off the room where people gather for refreshments. The women of the choir troop past me on the way to the rehearsals in the big meeting room. “Vicky, hi, yallah, come and sing with us!” Teenagers from the youth group bob in just because they’re nosy and they like to see what I’m up to. Taghreed the housekeeper keeps flitting in and out with coffee and biscuits, clinging to the belief that without her tender ministrations I would pass out from undernourishment. Even when there is nobody in the office, faces look down at me from the photographs on the walls: elderly refugee women. Dabka dancers. Colleagues, family. The youth group on a field trip to Jericho, grinning for the camera, ice cream all round the mouths of the younger children. Non-violence is the ethos of this house. Not everybody who comes here is a pacifist; it would not be reasonable to expect that, or right. People of all political persuasions come knocking on our door, and everybody is welcomed as they are. But it is the pacifist philosophy that creates this atmosphere of welcome. Sitting at this desk, urges to get argumentative or spiteful are easy to push away. I am strengthened by the kindness of everyone who passes my alcove.

It’s not always so easy. I am in England now. I know that it is bitterly cold in Palestine; snow fell recently in the Hebron hills. Homes were demolished today in the Jordan Valley. A couple of weeks ago the bulldozers were flattening the houses (huts) of my friends in Umm al-Khair. I sit here in a centrally heated house, reading blog comments from people who characterise ten-year-old Hanadi and her family as illegal squatters who deserve to have their homes and livelihoods razed in the middle of a cold desert winter. Palestinian daily life always seems so much more brutal when I compare it with the normality of life here, the things that the neighbours in this quiet suburb take for granted. It takes me some time to re-adjust to the notion of being able to go where I like without encountering guns or checkpoints. Then I come online and read comments like that, from people who have never set foot in Palestine, never seen a home demolition, and the white-hot anger is like a whiplash. The mundane suburban tranquillity of my setting only serves to emphasise the unfairness of it all, and I feel bitterness taking root.

Would I say this to a friend?

Who cares? He’s saying that the ten-year-old children of my friends are to blame for being arrested in the middle of the night because they threw stones at the sodding occupation army! F*** him!

Keeping my temper in check in these circumstances sometimes makes me feel as though I am wrestling a Bengal tiger that has woken up in a particularly bad mood. Right now I haven’t got the arm muscles for a sustained wrestling match, so I’m taking a break from the Internet. I will still be keeping my own blog, but you won’t find me commenting on other people’s (unless the subject is poetry or how to crochet a tea-cosy or something of that sort).

Lent begins two days from now, on Ash Wednesday – the forty days of fasting and penance that lead to the celebration of Jesus’ death and resurrection. A few weeks ago I decided that this Lent I would think a lot about gentleness, try to be more gentle. It’s a quality that is often disregarded as weakness in this world and something that I want to understand better, having a rather robust personality myself (where ‘robust’ means ‘the exuberance of Tigger combined with the weight of a Sherman tank’). My Internet break seems to fit with this exploration. I may write about it as I go, or I may not. I am taking as my starting-point two sayings from Jerome, a fourth-century saint who died in Bethlehem. “Nothing is so strong as gentleness, nothing so gentle as real strength,” he wrote, and, “Have patience with all things, but first of all with yourself.”

P.S. If you would like me to pray for anything particular during Lent, please get in touch – my absence from online debates will leave me with a lot of extra time on my hands, and I plan to spend some of it on my knees. My contact e-mail is vickyinpalestine at gmail dot com.

This video was made by my colleague Toine. He describes his marriage to Mary (a Palestinian woman from Bethlehem) and the birth of their children.

For over ten years he had to leave the country every three months to get his visa renewed; the Israeli authorities wouldn’t grant him residency rights. (He still doesn’t have the right to reside, although he at least gets longer than three months before each renewal now.) When he flies out of the country, he has to ring the airport to let them know that he is coming. As a man married to a Palestinian, he is a security risk. As a man married to a Palestinian, he is not allowed to be unsupervised in the airport. An armed guard meets him at the entrance and escorts him to his flight. He once told me jokingly, “It’s quite nice. At least I don’t have to queue!”

I laughed. Perhaps there is a bright side to everything. Even love under apartheid. His family still can’t quite appreciate its advantages, though.

The devouring lion: graffiti near Bethlehem checkpoint

These things are not true. An unwavering commitment to justice ought to lie at the heart of all pacifist resistance. In surrendering their most basic rights in order to try and buy that crumbling slice of cake, Palestinians would become accessories to the state-sponsored violence that is being waged against their communities – the carving up of the West Bank into impoverished cantonments, the water shortages, the ongoing isolation of Gaza, the home demolitions,  the destruction of hundreds of years of Palestinian culture in Jerusalem and beyond. This meek acceptance of the status quo is not non-violence; you can’t have true non-violence without self-respect.

The West Bank village of Budrus is an epicentre of popular resistance in Palestine – the villagers’ efforts against the encroaching separation wall, which has eaten up so much of their land, have been thoughtfully documented in the powerful film Budrus. A recent incident from the village provides a vivid snapshot of Palestinian non-violence in action. If I could choose one story to illustrate my personal definition of what it means to be a pacifist in a country ravaged by oppression, this would be it.

Popular protests against the occupation sweep across Palestine every Friday, and are typically met with force from the Israeli army. Their preferred methods are tear gas, rubber-coated steel bullets, and a particularly noxious concoction known as ‘skunkwater’ that is sprayed from a purpose-built truck. (Note to activists: if you ever have to choose between the tear gas and the skunk, take the tear gas every time – it’s far pleasanter to feel as though you are inhaling fire than to feel as though you are trapped in a giant sewer. You will never get the skunk smell out of your clothes.) Sometimes live ammunition is used. There have been deaths and serious injuries – this past Friday, not one month after the killing of Mustafa Tamimi, the French activist Amicie P. was struck in the back of the head by a tear gas projectile. “The soldier asked if I were Palestinian,” she told Linah Al-Saafin. “They wanted to take me inside one of the jeeps. They were shocked when they found out I was French. One of the soldiers panicked and took me behind from where the rest of the soldiers were standing, behind a jeep…The soldiers tried to help me while I was waiting for the ambulance to come. They put some sort of liquid on my head – I think it was water – then tied a bandage on the wound. I was lying on the ground and was really scared because the soldiers were all around me looking down at me and holding their guns. They told me I was hit by a rock thrown by a Palestinian…The soldiers were talking about how I wasn’t a Palestinian but French.”

Her experience stands in stark contrast to Mustafa Tamimi’s: the soldiers delayed his transfer to hospital; his sister was not allowed to approach him; his mother had to apply for a special permit to see him in the hospital; and his father was not given permission to go at all. Mustafa was Palestinian. Amicie is French. This is one of many anecdotes which illustrates the contempt for Palestinian life that the occupation fosters in the unfortunate people who maintain it.

Budrus, like Nabi Saleh, is no stranger to military violence. What happened there last Wednesday must be understood in this context. The army raided the village in search of villagers who had been hurling stones at their jeeps. One soldier, apparently assigned to guard a particular street, was accidentally left behind by the others when they departed Budrus.

A Palestinian man identified as Mohammed said he went to tell a soldier he noticed standing alone on a village road that the others had withdrawn.

The soldier “seemed confused and his face turned red,” Mohammed said, adding he then escorted the soldier toward his own home where other soldiers later picked him up…Ayyed Morrar, a local activist in Boudros, told an Israeli television station of the assistance given the soldier:

“We oppose the occupation and are willing to pay the price for freedom, but not in a way that leads to killing.”

Something that has often come up in non-violence workshops with young people in Bethlehem: “Pacifism isn’t a currency with which you buy your rights. You don’t owe it to anyone, least of all to an oppressor. It’s your gift, not their right, so stand tall when you give it.” I recognise this same sentiment in the action of Mohammed and in the words of Morrar. They didn’t help the soldier because they wanted to buy credit with the occupying forces, to demonstrate that they are ‘good Arabs’, or because they thought that having a oppressive armed force hanging around the neighbourhood isn’t really such a bad thing after all. They didn’t help the soldier because his actions deserved it. They helped him simply because they believe in compassion at any cost – along with genuine justice and real freedom. It’s who they are.

That, to me, is non-violence: it comes from the inside, and it’s not something that can ever be stolen or walled away.

Some graffiti by Banksy in Bethlehem: A Palestinian girl frisks a soldier.

One evening late last summer, as I walked home from a day spent in Dheisheh refugee camp, I was stopped at a flying checkpoint. (These are blockades that pop up unexpectedly for a few days, or even a few hours, as opposed to the permanent checkpoints.) I took off my jacket so that they could search the pockets and waited patiently. This wasn’t anything out of the ordinary. What was unusual was the age and appearance of the ‘soldiers’. The eldest of them was nine. She is a little girl who lives just round the corner.

“Shoes!” she said imperiously, in a magnificent imitation of our local IDF, and I removed my shoes. She had a long wooden stick slung across her body in the manner of a gun. She made the motions of scanning my shoes, and then demanded, “ID!” To my horror, I didn’t have my ID on me. I stood and waited while they discussed what to do with me – would they just refuse to let me pass, or would I have to be interrogated first? Should I be arrested? In the end, needing the toilet rather badly, I bribed the occupation army by proffering a squashed packet of Oreos that I may or may not have sat on at some point. They accepted cheerfully. After I had dashed in to the bathroom, I came back out to them, and we spent a happy evening playing tag and hide-and-seek.

When I mentioned the checkpoint incident to my colleague Toine the next day, he laughed. “Oh, I remember my children doing that. Yara used to put her leg up against the door jamb as a kind of barrier, and Mary and I couldn’t pass until we had answered her questions and shown her our ID. We used to play because in a way it was good for her. I think it made her feel better.”

At the age of nine, the same age as the little soldier who halted me in the road, Yara was publicly stripped at Machsom 300. A soldier pulled her to one side and ordered her to take off her jacket and trousers. There were hundreds of people packed into the checkpoint; Yara was in full view of the waiting crush. Mary asked the soldiers to allow Yara to go into one of the private booths for strip searches if she must be searched, but please, not here, not in the line in front of everyone. The soldiers refused. “She takes her trousers off, or you both get out.” Yara stumbled out of her trousers, her hands shaking as she fumbled with the zip, and stood there in her underwear. The soldier gestured to the sad little heap of clothes on the floor with her gun. “OK. You go now.” Except they couldn’t go – this is only the second stage of crossing the checkpoint. After this come more lines, more questions, biometric scans, a harsh and taunting anxiety in the air. At home, Yara would block the doorway and scream at her parents: “You can’t pass. Your papers are not correct!”

Not long after this happened, Yara took part in a video project at our youth group. All the participants were aged between eight and twelve. They themselves would write the story and produce all the artwork. They would be taught how to use the video cameras by Sami, our media and communications officer, and a team of Dutch volunteers. They were given only one instruction: “Draw what you dream of.” Using ‘Warda’ as a basis (the Arabic version of the traditional folktale Red Riding Hood) Yara and her friends came up with this short animated film:

One day I hope we will be able to replicate this project in Dheisheh refugee camp. When I go there, I quite often find children crouching in the narrow alleyways between houses, playing their own variant of hide-and-seek: hiding from the army. My friend Taha, who is heavily involved in developing the camp’s cultural and educational programmes for youth, once told me with frustration, “If we give them a little bit of money and say they can buy a toy, the first thing they choose is a gun. Not a football, not a toy bear.”

As with all children’s play, the games of Dheisheh’s children are influenced by what they see around them. It even affects their imaginative play. Other children might take flight with winged unicorns in their games; for the children of Dheisheh, the fantasy involves defeating an army. The camp typically experiences three or four military raids per week. I doubt there are many children in the camp who haven’t woken up to find soldiers in their bedroom at least once. I don’t particularly enjoy dealing with the IDF as a fully clothed adult, so goodness knows how difficult it must be when you are eleven years old and wearing your Snoopy pyjamas.

Creative therapies have been identified as a good way of helping children who face this predicament on a regular basis. Children of Amal supports Palestinian refugee children through music. The problems experienced by the children and the possibilities afforded by the music (amal means ‘hope’ in Arabic) are documented in a series of short therapy reports on the website:

Anas is very afraid when the soldiers come into the camp. He cries and shakes when he sees them. He has a history of bed wetting. He will not sleep alone. He did not have friends because of his belligerent attitude…Anas liked it when the group sang together and he enjoyed the musical games. He also enjoyed learning to sing. Anas said he had fun and made friends at the course and plays with them at school and in the streets.

Qusai suffers from nightmares and shouts in his sleep. He plays ‘games’ which involve people being shot by soldiers and becoming ‘martyrs’. Qusai is very afraid of the soldiers…Qusai felt nervous when he first came [to therapy] but quickly made new friends and looked forward to coming to every session. He would have liked to come every day…Qusai was very enthusiastic and sang the songs he had learned when he came home.

Aysha did not relate well to other children and was happier to be with her mother. When the soldiers come she shakes with fear and tries to hide in the toilet. She has nightmares about soldiers…A neighbouring house was shelled and a window from the house fell into Aysha’s room…Aysha is making good progress and is much more confident. She now studies at home with the help of her sister and is trying hard to overcome her learning difficulties. For the first time ever she has friends outside the home. The mother feels Aysha got much benefit from the course and is grateful that her daughter was allowed to take part. The nightmares are fewer and Aysha is more active.

Something that I have always found very difficult to deal with is the reaction of many supporters of Israeli policy to the problems endured by these children. “Too bad their parents raise them to hate Jews,” is a common response, along with, “Maybe if Palestinians stopped using their kids as human shields for terrorists, they wouldn’t be in this situation.” When children hurl stones at the army jeeps, or play at being soldiers, it is taken as evidence of a thorough education in anti-Semitism – as though children living this life could have no other possible reason for loathing the army.

Children on the way to school in Hebron. They must pass the army every day.

Many of them don’t even understand who or what those soldiers are. A few years ago, the headteacher of a school in Hebron brought an Israeli Jewish couple into school to talk to her students, wanting them to realise that there are Israeli Jews who care for them and don’t want them to be hurt. The discussion was going well, until one small girl burst out, “But you can’t be Israelis! Where are your Israeli clothes?”

She meant IDF uniform, and the distinctive dress worn by the settlers. To her, this is what an Israeli is. It wasn’t her parents who taught her that.

Sometimes, when I am with children in the checkpoint or in another area where there is heavy army presence, I try to get the soldiers to give their first names. I want the children to be able to call them something, so they cease to be just a uniform with a gun. Usually the reply is, “Sorry, we’re not allowed to tell you that.” So these soldiers remain nameless. They are just people who can arrest you and make you wait, even kill you. The people who defend Israeli policy (“My son Udi is in the IDF right now, serving near Nablus, and he would never…”) obviously don’t see the soldiers like that, and I don’t think they pause to consider how a nameless figure with an assault rifle must appear to these children. To them, he isn’t Udi who enjoys football and plays piano and has a bamba addiction: he’s the guy with the gun and they don’t know what he might do next and he’s scary.

When I point out the abuses to which Palestinian children are routinely subjected – strip searches, denial of passage to school, detention under martial law – the sacred cow of security inevitably comes wandering into the conversation. Don’t I know that their parents train them to be terrorists? I look at Yara, and the film she and her friends put together after the wall split their families apart, and I wonder if any Israeli has ever felt more secure because this child was made to take off her trousers publicly by a woman brandishing a gun, on her way to visit the friends and relatives whom she barely sees any more. Then the terrible mocking words from Golda Meir come to mind: “We will have peace with the Arabs when they love their children more than they hate us.”

There are fewer more effective ways to dehumanise people than by trying to paint them as people with inadequate love. I wonder if anyone ever suggested to Meir, “You will have peace when you learn to see these children as children, and not as potential terrorists or ‘demographic threats’.”

Video courtesy of Jehan al-Farra.

Anne Frank, April 1941.

I met Anne Frank when I was eight years old. I spent most of lunchtime and every break in the school library, curled up on a rubbery cushion the colour and shape of a boiled sweet, reading and reading. The library felt cavernous at the time, as though I could never get to the end of it. (When I revisited the school ten years later, I was surprised at how much it had shrunk.) One afternoon, as I reluctantly eased Sense and Sensibility back onto the shelf and prepared to drag myself off to class (not very late this time. Well, only five minutes late…), I caught sight of a striking face in black-and-white looking out at me from one of the librarian’s special displays.

I knew a bit about the Second World War; we had done a project on the Blitz and the evacuee children last year. I also knew that Hitler had killed people for being Jews, although the Holocaust hadn’t been presented to us in any real depth, as we were only seven at the time. But the librarian never restricted the books she allowed me to check out (a source of some friction between her and my class teacher) and on that day I went home with The Diary of Anne Frank in my satchel. I read it in between teatime and bedtime, and afterwards I could not sleep. The agitation made me pace around my room.

She died. She wasn’t supposed to die.

The full import of Anne’s death wasn’t brought home to me by the short epilogue at the end of the book, which described the family’s capture and deportation simply and without emotion. It was the last pages of the diary that cut through me. Turning the last page was like putting out my foot for the next stair and finding only air. She had put the pen down after that last sentence, meaning to write again, and she never had.

I had never come across an unfinished book before. They all ended somehow. Even if the endings weren’t happy, they still satisfied the reader by affording a sense of completeness. Here there was no ending, just absence. This was my first significant encounter with what it meant to die – and not just to die, to be killed.

This was the beginning of a long fascination with the Holocaust in general and Anne Frank in particular. I reread the diary multiple times, noticing the changes in how I reacted to Anne as I grew older myself. As a thirteen-year-old, the age she had been when she started keeping the diary. As a fifteen-year-old, the age she had been when her hiding place was uncovered. As a sixteen-year-old, when I realised that I was now older than she had been when she died. The affinity that I felt with her wasn’t something unique – the enduring popularity of the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam and the sheer number of books and films about her life attest to that. Tonight, in honour of Holocaust Memorial Day, a new play about a young Japanese girl’s relationship with the diary and its writer is premiering in Manchester.

Initially I was wary of using Anne’s diary as part of my work in Bethlehem. I wanted to, but the Holocaust can be a sore subject in Palestine, as it is so often used to justify what is happening here. I have heard people using the Holocaust to downplay Palestinian suffering by pointing out that at least there are no gas chambers being assembled on the outskirts of Ramallah. (The message heard by Palestinians is: “You have no right to complain.”) Others try to implicate present-day Palestinians in Nazi crimes against Jews by emphasising the anti-Semitic views of Hajj Amin al-Husseini, who met Hitler and expressed support for him. (The message heard by Palestinians is: “You are guilty of genocide.”) The last time I visited Yad Vashem, I paused to sign the visitors’ book and saw that earlier that morning someone had written, “Only a strong IDF will prevent a second Shoah perpetrated by the anti-Semites of the Middle East.” Stepping out into the blazing July sun, I saw what remains of Deir Yassin, a Palestinian village that was the scene of a massacre in 1948 and now lies in the shadow of Yad Vashem. There is no sign to commemorate what happened in Deir Yassin, no indication of where its surviving residents and their descendents might be living now. Palestinians look at this and hear: “Your own tragedy does not matter, and you are retrospectively cast as the villain in ours.” It is a role that they resist fiercely, sometimes even to the point of Holocaust denial.

A member of Christian Peacemaker Teams stands next to settler graffiti left in front of a Palestinian home in Tel Rumeida, Hebron, 2008. Holocaust education can be problematic in this climate.

Usually the reaction is sensitive, but still wounded. The following was written by my friend Jehan, a twenty-one-year-old woman who is from Gaza:

I remember, as a child, the invasions of Israeli soldiers. Cracking down on houses, searching some and demolishing others. I remember the piercing sounds of bullets, and how my knees would fail me every time I heard one. I remember the first time for me to see a tank, I was in primary school, but I am not exactly sure what grade I was in. As I was leaving school and waiting for a car to pass by, a tank came out of the blue and was hardly 6 meters away. As soon as I saw that monster, my knees brought me down to the ground in a split second and a loud explosion caused my eyes to shut too tight that it hurt. I never knew why at the beginning, but then as I grew up, I became more aware. I read about Zionism, about the holocaust, and about the state of Israel. I never understood what our fault as Palestinians was. I never understood the relevance between what Hitler did and what my people had to pay.

I wanted to include passages from Anne’s diary in a creative writing course that I was devising, but I didn’t know how to introduce her to this thorny context. My class was supposed to be all about self-expression, yet the women in the group had mostly experienced the Holocaust as a suffocating gag designed to keep them quiet about their own experiences under occupation. I sought advice from a colleague, a Dutchman who is married to a local Bethlehem woman. He told me not to worry, it had already been done.

During the Second Intifada, when Bethlehem was being placed repeatedly under strict curfews and children were unable to get to school, an enterprising teacher named Susan Atallah decided to get her eighth-grade students writing diaries. It was something they could easily do at home, during the long days and even longer nights when it was barely possible to open the door without shots being fired. The students read child diaries from other painful situations, such as Zlata’s Diary: A Child’s Life in Sarajevo (penned by ten-year-old Zlata Filipovic as Yugoslavia was torn apart) and The Girl Who Chased Away Sorrow: The Diary of Sarah Nita (a fictionalised account of the dispossession of the Najavo tribe at the hands of the US government in 1864). Eventually Susan added Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl to the list.

As the diary project was ongoing, Susan penned an open letter describing the situation in Bethlehem. It is a cry from the heart, with no particular addressee. “I truly lost count of how many incursions we have been exposed to accompanied by curfews since March 2002,” she wrote. “We have lived through many hardships in our lives under occupation, but never this cruel.”

The decision to present young people living in this situation with Anne Frank’s diary was not taken lightly. “Some of us were worried,” my colleague Toine told me. “When the girls first read Anne Frank’s story, they rolled their eyes, according to Susan. The Second World War and the occupation of Holland by the Germans were not a setting to which they could easily relate or desired to relate. But after a while they started to identify with Anne, partly because they could understand the feeling of being closed up in a room.”

It helped that Anne was the same age as Susan’s students. There is a reason why this diary has resonated with teenagers round the world; you don’t have to have experienced conflict or persecution yourself to feel an affinity with its author. In many ways her voice is very ordinary, and this is why it endures. Anne Frank helped these young Bethlehem teenagers to come to terms with what was a very frightening situation through her humour, her candour, the simple fact of her youth. She knew what it was to be shut in with the sound of bombs and bullets raining down, and she had favourite film stars and problems with parents too.

“Some foreign visitors confided in me that they weren’t sure about use of the diary by Palestinian youth,” Toine remembered. “They thought it might lead to the comparison of two incomparable situations, even to subtle forms of anti-Semitism. They were wrong. The interest kept growing. It was warm and genuine. Susan asked me to bring more copies of the diary from Jerusalem, as with my foreign passport I was the only one of us who could get about freely. I went to the Steimatsky bookshop and bought every English copy of the diary they had, and then I ordered some more. Now it wasn’t just the teenagers who were reading the diary, but their parents. A parent all the way out in Ta’amreh wanted a copy.”

In her open letter, Susan wrote, “I started to ask people around me for the real reason behind being under curfew. Nobody knows! The ironic thing is that the Israeli army is so creative at disrupting our normal lives and making us more miserable and depressed. I think that some Israelis are even delighted to know about what is happening to us, others don’t even know what their government is doing against us, and that others don’t agree at all with what is going on.” Her students, trapped in their houses, living in fear of the tanks that rumbled through the streets, and receiving only a piecemeal education, also wanted to know the thoughts of people who witnessed their pain (even participated in its creation) and yet said nothing. This question was burning inside one girl in particular.

It was routine for the Israeli army to requisition Palestinian homes for hours at a time, often overnight. They would confine the families to one room, placing them under guard, and use the windows to shoot from. Such intrusions could be made without rhyme or reason. One of Susan’s students, a fourteen-year-old girl living close to Manger Square (a scene of terrible violence and bloodshed), grew very used to having the army in her house on a daily basis. She and her family would be shut in a back room, where they slept on the floor. They had to ask for permission to be taken to the toilet. On one such toilet trip, the curious student stopped to talk to the soldier in the corridor.

“Do you know the story of Anne Frank?”

“Of course,” the soldier said. He seemed pleased by the question, and he was friendly enough. “Do you want to read her book?”

“No,” the girl replied. “I’ve read it. I want you to read it!”

This to me is a profound act of remembrance. Never again, which has echoed across the world from Cambodia to Rwanda to Darfur, is meaningless. Persecution, ethnic cleansing, and genocide have continued to happen again and again, with denial rippling in their wake. Remembrance is about honouring the past, but it is also about creating a more compassionate present. This means that lessons from the past have to be applicable to many different situations. If that wide applicability didn’t exist, it would be impossible to learn anything from the past at all. The Holocaust may have been unique in scale and scope, but the beliefs that underpinned that slaughter are far from unique.

In her challenge to the soldier, Susan’s student highlighted the dangers of ceasing to be critical of your government and its policy, even when you see the consequences of that policy in front of your eyes: a fourteen-year-old girl who can’t go to school or even to the bathroom without military approval, purely on the basis of who and what she is. This path leads to dangerous places. Those dangers may not be the same from situation to situation, but they are always real and they are always gravely wrong. Remembrance involves uncomfortable reminders, the breaking of taboos. It is based on an appreciation of shared humanity, an understanding that you can’t hurt one branch without mutilating the entire tree; and it is embodied for me by that image of a teenage girl with a book standing opposite a slightly older teenage boy with a gun, and telling him, “Read.”

Written on Europe’s Holocaust Memorial Day, January 27th 2012.

It is a pity he didn’t have a loudspeaker to hand. I was sure there were some fishermen bobbing about in the Gulf of Aqaba who hadn’t quite caught that. “Err, Dad, you might want to try and be a bit discreet just while we’re in the -”

“I am always discreet. You did inherit your diplomacy skills from somewhere, you know, Victoria. You can count on me!”

I paled. Once again I caught myself wondering about the wisdom of this trip.

Reasoning that the elderly parents might be in need of some stimulating activity to keep them occupied (no pun intended) during their retirement, I had invited them to visit me in Bethlehem. I’ve been nagging them to come for years, but they’ve always had some excuse to stay in their quiet house in England, filling up their time with ballroom dancing classes and devising increasingly obsessive ways to keep the squirrels off the bird feeder. This time I managed to persuade them. We agreed that I would spend Christmas with them, and in the New Year we would travel to Palestine together.

I was feeling very satisfied about the arrangement until I went by the door of my parents’ room on Boxing Day and overheard Dad saying, “I don’t want the Israeli security people arresting us over these pickled onions.” This was the moment when a quiet and often marginalised part of my brain started to voice its timid opinion that maybe it hadn’t been such a good idea to propose a family junket to a conflict zone. I shut it up, but its warnings kept recurring as we passed through the airport and joined the queues at passport control.

“Do we go to passport desk one at a time?” my father enquired. “Or do we rush them mob-handed and hope for the best?”

In front of us, a group of youngsters wearing lime green Birthright Israel T-shirts turned round to stare.

I summoned up as much of the famed family tact as I could muster. “Dad, I think we need you to be quiet now.”

Before we left England, I had explained to my parents about the invasive and often overtly racist questioning that can be meted out in the airport, and I tried to impart to them what they should and shouldn’t say. We agreed that I would answer alone unless the security officials specifically asked my parents something. As we waited (it took nearly an hour for us to reach the front desk) my nerves increased. Something was telling me that my parents, in particular my father, hadn’t quite grasped the gravity of this situation. I couldn’t think what.

“Who do you know in Israel? What are their names and where do they live? Are all of them Jewish? What jobs do they have? How do you know these people? Where are you going now?”

It went much more smoothly than I was expecting, barely lasting fifteen minutes (my record is close on six hours). In the first sign of exactly how much I take for granted, my mum was nervous with it. “I was getting quite hot under the collar,” she commented uneasily, as we waited in the misty drizzle for the sherut to Jerusalem. “I wasn’t expecting it to be that bad.”

“That wasn’t bad. It was brilliant! No body search, no demand to see hotel reservations (which is an issue when you live in a Palestinian house), only two questions about the ethnicity of my friends. I wish it could be like that always.”

Even as I said it, I realised how strange it must sound to someone who isn’t familiar with this place. Being asked, “Are all your friends in Israel Jewish?” without any further probing counts as a good welcome for me. Never having been here before, my mum finds that question as disturbing and disgusting as it really is. I need to recapture the shock I felt when I first heard questions like it. It is a constant fight to keep this sort of thing from becoming normal to me.

Arriving home.

It was dark when we arrived in Bethlehem. My happiness swelled as we drove out of East Jerusalem, as everything we passed en route seemed like an old friend. Hello, dear old falafel stand that looks like it’s going to collapse at any minute. Nice to see you again, Old City walls. Oh, separation barrier, how I’ve missed you! And dear sweet Israeli military, it is so good to once again have you poking your suspicious noses into my busi – and here I realised that I was getting slightly carried away by my delighted fever at reaching home. Calm, Vicky, calm.

The house in Bethlehem lies in the shadow of the separation wall. My parents knew that (they have seen photographs) but it still came as a jarring shock to them. “I wasn’t expecting it to be this big,” Mum said helplessly, staring up at the eight metres of dour concrete. Pools of orange street light glimmered at the base. Those always remind me of the lava puddles of hell.

Before we had the chance to feel too despondent (and the forbidding proximity of the wall has that effect – it’s like chloroform) a sudden voice exclaimed from the shadows, “Hey! You’re back!” and the house burst in life. The children came leaping out to try and lug our suitcases up the stairs, my landlady Claire and I were clinging to one another in a long hug, a clamour of questions and welcomes filled the stairwell. Outside, as though on cue, the muezzin from Aida refugee camp began to chant the call to ‘Isha prayer. My parents followed Claire up to the room where they would be staying, but I lingered in the light rain and the darkness, letting the familiar melody wash over me. Home.

Bethlehem's Christmas tree at dusk.

It was good to snuggle down in my little room for the first time since my MA course began. It is not much bigger than a shoebox, containing a desk, a cupboard, a hard-backed chair, two slatted wooden beds (one is a new addition. I hope they are not proposing to put any spare children in with me), and a towel rail that I use as a ballet barre. Not that there is much room remaining for ballet exercises; I can only just extend my leg out in full arabesque without crashing into the door. No windows. It may be spartan, but I love it, and it is a significant hive of resistance activity for the West Bank. Well, for northern Bethlehem. Certainly for our street. So much of my best plotting gets done here.

Gripping the rail, I began a sequence of brisk battement tendus. As I did so I could hear my parents’ unpacking operations being carried out in the neighbouring room. (“Michael, have you seen that extra-strong quilted toilet paper that I brought? And are my dried chillis in that case?”) Battement tendus dégagés to all sides, elevating my leg high enough to clear the beds. One-and-two-and-three and change, one-and-two-and-three and change. (“No, Annie, why would we have your chillis with us? Do you really have to get them out now?”) Relevé and échappés sur demi-pointe. (“Yes, I might want them at breakfast-time.”) Close in first position, and bed. I could hear my mum rooting about in search of her super-strength toilet paper and crushed extra-hot breakfast chillis for quite a while. I’m pretty sure I fell asleep smiling.

It has been a bittersweet visit. My parents are not religiously observant in the most traditional sense of the word, but they were still very moved by our visits to the places associated with Jesus. I felt honoured to witness their excitement and curiosity when they stepped into the Church of the Holy Sepulchre for the first time. It was also wonderful to introduce them to my colleagues at the centre, where they sat in on a lively meeting about all the different creative projects that we want to launch this year. As a result they came away with a much better understanding of my work and why it is that I do what I do. Moving to a country in the chokehold of a military occupation was never part of the official game plan, and for a while my parents were distinctly wary of the sharp right-angle my career had taken. It was hard for them to come to terms with the fact that from now on I would be escorting Palestinians safely across checkpoints and arguing with the Israeli military over freedom of movement instead of sitting cosily in a Cambridge college and discussing the poetry of Baudelaire. But they’ve understood at last, and I realised that they had understood when my mum pressed my hand as we made our way into central Bethlehem and said, “You come alive out here, don’t you?”

Juxtaposed against these hopeful epiphanies were realisations of a darker and more painful kind. Having my parents with me has been like seeing Palestine through new eyes. A few days after our arrival, we set off for Hebron. My work is taking me there more and more frequently (to the point where I have considered relocating there – sadly ‘Khalili Blogger’ doesn’t have quite the same ring to it) but when I passed through the Old City with my parents I felt as though I had never been here before in my life.

At first it was all as usual. The market was bustling with noise and colour. As we passed the teeming stalls, Dad pointed out some impossibly sized cauliflowers and we joked over the prospect of sending a shipment to my aunt as a thoughtful tribute to her habit of serving up vast quantities of cauliflower cheese at any family dinner. Then we came to the wire netting that protects Palestinian passers-by from anything the settlers care to throw from their windows. This didn’t really affect me either. If anything, I was pleased that for once I could not smell urine or any other filth.

We reached the Ibrahimi Mosque just as a large party of Palestinian schoolchildren on a field trip were arriving, name badges pinned clumsily to their chests. They all looked about five or six. I had to press myself against the wall of the staircase in order to avoid getting swamped by a tidal wave of small child. There is something about having hordes of small creatures milling around me that I find a bit disconcerting. (What if I topple over and squash them? What if they bite my ankles?!) The occupying soldier standing across from me appeared to feel the same way; he was also pressing himself into the wall and clutching his rifle to himself as though it were a lifebelt. One little boy was very interested in him. He made a few awkward passes in the air, as though nervous, before seizing the initiative and reaching out to pat the soldier’s hand. This started a trend. Every one of the fifty plus children who were streaming into the mosque beyond this little boy now wanted to stroke the soldier en route. It took a while, but eventually the soldier held out his hand to them.

A quotation from Martin Luther King on the separation wall near my house in Bethlehem.

Any Israeli who opposed the Gaza disengagement with, “Give an Arab an inch and he’ll take a mile, you’ll see!” would have felt vindicated on witnessing this, as the children responded to the soldier’s tentative gesture by passionately embracing his knees. The soldier seemed to be entering a state of serious alarm, and I thought I was going to crack a rib from the effort of holding in the mirth. I wish I could have taken a photo of his face, but I didn’t dare in case his colleagues confiscated my camera. Gulping back the last gurgle of laughter, I followed the children into the mosque. My parents and I watched them with interest and some amusement as they bumbled around the beautiful ornate prayer hall, curious about everything they touched.

This is where the alloy crept in. After my parents had seen the mosque, we decided to visit the Cave of the Patriarchs and the attendant synagogue. This is the first time that I have been able to go there. When I last tried to visit, the soldiers turned me away because I was accompanied by an Iraqi Muslim friend, a Canadian citizen. They explained that they couldn’t let her in the synagogue. It’s a sensitive place, one soldier explained sympathetically, we don’t want to upset the settlers. On this day, after the soldiers had verified our religion and our nationality, my parents and I were allowed through without any difficulty.

The first thing I registered was the library of sacred texts and prayer books. The second was the presence of so many guns. There were soldiers with the ubiquitous assault rifles milling around everywhere, not praying, just chatting. There were one or two settlers who had pistols at their waists. Wanting to pray, I looked around for somewhere quiet to stand, somewhere that wasn’t bristling with weapons. Peering round a corner, I discovered a separate room set aside for women, which was full. I didn’t want to disturb the worshippers by crowding in, so I retreated. Turning round, I saw yet more guns. Was there nowhere to look? Suddenly my gaze fell on the little window that opens on to Abraham’s Tomb. I hurried over to it. There is a corresponding window in the Ibrahimi Mosque; I have often prayed there. The intervening space is partitioned by a thick pane of bulletproof glass.

I focused my gaze on the Tomb and summoned to mind the biblical stories of Abraham and Sarah. Suddenly I became aware of movement at that other window; one of the teachers from the field trip was standing there. I looked over at her, about to smile, and saw the shock register as our eyes met. I knew then that she hadn’t recognised me as the woman who had been in the mosque five minutes previously. (I was no longer wearing a headscarf and I look quite different without it.) A jumble of images came flooding into my mind: teachers and pupils from Hebron’s schools being harassed, spat on and physically assaulted by settlers as they make the daily journey to and from the gates. The headmistress of Cordoba School, who has herself been attacked by settlers, stating quite matter-of-factly that without the international observers who escort the children to school, it would be too dangerous for Cordoba to remain open. The way one young Bedouin child grabbed tight hold of my legs and hid behind me in fear as we saw a settler  approaching. And now this teacher, her beautiful olive face framed by a dark red scarf the exact colour of old dried blood, staring at me from the other side of bulletproof glass. No, I want to tell her. I’m not who you think. Please. But she has already turned away.

Now I leave the window, sick at heart, and all I see are the guns. I couldn’t talk to the Palestinian schoolteacher, but at least I can talk to God. The synagogue and the mosque are His house, after all. He is just subletting it. To people who are having serious tenancy issues. I try to think of something to say to Him, but the words won’t come. In the end all I can manage are, “I’m sorry, Big G.”

I strain for a reply. What would it be? “I’m used to it,” most probably.

“Let’s go,” my mum muttered, bringing me back to the present. In silence we left the complex and turned right down the infamous Shuhadeh Street. I was in no mood for talking now, which was unfortunate, as my parents started to ask questions.

Graffiti on the separation wall in Bethlehem.

“Vicky, why are all these buildings boarded up? It’s like a ghost town here.”

“It was done by the IDF,” I said tonelessly. “These are Palestinian houses and shops. The shops had to shut. People still live in the houses. They get in through back entrances, with ladders running up to the windows if they haven’t got a back door. It was because the settlers – “

“But there are metal shutters on all the windows, too. Don’t they get any daylight?”

I have been in some of those houses. “No, they use electric lights for the front rooms, and – “

“That’s terrible!”

My dad sounded aghast. My mum had come to a halt and was staring up at one of the buildings. “There are people living in here,” she said.

“Yes.”

My dad shook his head vigorously, like a dog trying to get water out of its ears. When he does that I know that he is seriously bothered by something. “As soon as we get home I’m going straight to see our MP about this!”

The part of Shuhadeh Street that runs near the settlement of Avraham Aveinu has been partitioned into two; settlers, soldiers, and foreign visitors can use the main portion of the street, and Palestinians must walk behind a concrete barricade on a strip of pavement. As my parents and I turned into the street, a Palestinian friend spied me and came running after us, shouting my name. We were walking in the main street. He was on the other side of the barrier. I introduced him to my parents. “How do you do?” they asked him politely, taking his hand and shaking it. Over a concrete barrier. All of a sudden the hideousness of the situation crashed down on top of me. As with the wall and the airport questioning, I had started to take this for granted. And if I had started to take this for granted, I who grew up in an entirely different country, what is it like for those kids I saw entering the Ibrahimi Mosque? They’ve never known anything different in all their lives. The same applies to the teenaged soldier whom they were trying to treat as a giant khaki cat, come to that.

Bollards at the entrance to Shuhadeh Street

I know all this on an intellectual level. I never cease to try and raise awareness of the problems. But having my parents with me brought back the sick feelings I experienced when I discovered it for the first time. I was reeling, and it was a relief to climb back into the service taxi to Bethlehem.

“What did you say we were doing after lunch?” my mum enquired. “Going to a refugee camp?”

“Yes. There are people who’d like to meet you.”

“Could we give that a miss for today, and just stay in Bethlehem?” my dad asked.

I was concerned. “Why, are you tired? Is your bad arm hurting? Let me know if we’re overdoing it.”

“No,” he said. “I just think that a refugee camp would be a bit of a sad place, and I’ve seen enough to make me sad today. And angry.”

We slipped into silence on the journey home. There was only one question from my dad on the road. Nodding to a cluster of spacious houses with red-tiled roofs, he asked, “Is that a settlement?”

“Yes.”

“Look at the difference,” he said bleakly. I didn’t have to ask what he was comparing it to. I already knew.

I was glad that my parents had booked themselves into a nice hotel in Galilee, despite my disapproving commentary. (I felt that they would have been better going to a small Palestinian-run hostel whose owners needed the money.) They would need a refreshing break after all of this. I promised them that I would join them there after a few days. I wanted some time to myself in Bethlehem, and I had business to attend to. Slightly illegal business, as it happened, involving a visit from a friend who happens to be a soldier whose superiors probably don’t know that when off duty he enjoys protesting against his own army and sneaking into Palestinian-controlled Area A.

I thought it would be best for my parents to be out of the way while I was dealing with this. They’re apt to get a bit anxious if they think I’m doing anything that might get me into trouble, even though I had assured them that as far as civil disobedience goes, this only ranks as mild to moderate. Much to my astonishment, they reacted to my brief sketch of my weekend plans with, “We’re very proud of you, you know.”

And they never would have said that before Hebron. I felt really rather proud of them as I saw them safely onto the bus for Galilee. I was halfway back home before my phone began to shrill out insistently. Anticipating a belated string of anxious warnings (old habits die hard) I clicked it open and spoke resignedly. “Hello?”

“Vicky, we need you to do something. This is urgent.”

“Yes, Dad, I promise I’ll be careful and I won’t take any unnecessary ri – “

“No, no, not that. Do you think you could go back to that restaurant where we had dinner last night? It’s your mum. She thinks she’s left her chillis behind.”

This evening, IDF spokesperson Avital Leibovitch issued photographic justification of Mustafa’s killing, captioning it, “This is what he was doing.” The photo shows a cosy-looking bed. Looking at this piece of incontrovertible evidence, I could only conclude that Mustafa had been threatening soldiers’ lives with a 10.5 tog fibre quilt in a floral-patterned pastel cover. Then I registered the slingshot lying on top of the quilt. Avital Leibovitch’s insinuation is that Mustafa had been throwing stones.

Several people who were present at the demonstration have responded to her claim by pointing to the photo that was captured moments before the canister was fired. Mustafa has no slingshot, and he is carrying no rocks. In one sense, it was right to point this out – but in another it is wrong. It misses the point.

This is not about stone-throwing. It never has been about stone-throwing. It’s about an illegal military occupation that is inherently violent and repressive, having a devastating effect on Palestinian daily life. Yet in any discussion of Palestinian popular resistance to the occupation, the issue of rock-throwing invariably surfaces, and often it comes to dominate the conversion. When +972 magazine reported on Tamimi’s injury, stones appeared in the very first comment:

So, the military told them to disperse, spends an hour firing tear gas canisters at you and you continue to throw rocks at them at close range… shouldn’t you expect and be prepared for getting hurt. Why complain about it afterwards?

Reading that, dozens of similar statements flock back into my mind. I am talking to a border policeman in Hebron about a Palestinian man who was shot twice in the head by an IDF sniper. The policeman interrupts defensively: “It’s not just us who get it wrong sometimes, they do it too, they throw stones!”

I am sitting in a pavement cafe in Tel Aviv, describing the difficulties faced by the family I live with in Bethlehem to a man who voted for Avigdor Lieberman. I relate an incident that happened just before Christmas last year, when my landlady’s twelve-year-old son and his young friends were snatched by soldiers and bundled into a jeep as they played in front of the house. Fortunately my landlady heard them screaming and tore outside, blocking the path of the jeep. In the end, after a tense argument, the soldiers released the boys. One child was shaking so much that he had to be helped back into the house. They had taken the children, a soldier informed my landlady, because the children had been throwing stones over the separation wall into the military ba -

“And were they throwing stones at the base?” my listener interrupts. I tell him no, that it is physically impossible – to get a stone over the wall from our narrow little street the children would have needed the muscles of Olympic shot-putters, plus the ability to temporarily suspend gravity. As soon as I say it, I wish I could take back the words. Even if Daniel and his friends had been hurling stones over the wall, that wouldn’t have justified the IDF’s behaviour that day. Arresting twelve-year-olds under martial law is never OK.  Neither is violently stuffing said twelve-year-olds into a jeep and trying to drive off with them without even informing their parents where you’re going. In allowing my listener to focus on the stones, I allowed him to walk away with the impression that the army’s behaviour would have been acceptable if only stones had been involved. That wasn’t true in Bethlehem in December 2010 and it wasn’t true in Nabi Saleh yesterday.

Stones are often thrown at Nabi Saleh. Protestors pelt them at the military, who come to the village armed with riot shields, tear gas, sound bombs, rubber bullets, assault rifles, armoured cars, skunkwater, and power of immediate arrest and indefinite detention without trial. When news of the protests emerge, readers point at the stones as they bounce off the jeeps that carry those heavily armed soldiers through a village that is occupied by military force. They ask how Palestinians can expect to have peace when they persist in being so violent.

It is not surprising that some Palestinians are deeply sceptical of pacifism as a philosophy. They equate it with passivity – and this is how it’s sold to them by various politicians from Israel and abroad, who tell them earnestly that if they are good and trade in the stones for olive branches (presumably cut from the orchards that the IDF has just uprooted), they will deserve peace. But not before.

Pacifism - being a doormat?

They are sceptical because this isn’t true. It’s not just stone-throwing protestors who are at risk of being hurt. Back in July, my friend Rousol took part in a non-violent demonstration at Bethlehem’s notorious Checkpoint 300. The demonstrators walked slowly down the road that leads to the metal sliding gate, clutching Palestinian flags and a banner reading ‘Pray for the Peace of Palestine’. Seeing them coming, the soldiers hastily shut the gate. Rousol walked up to it and knocked on the panels. “Why have you closed this gate? Why don’t you open it and let us talk to you?”

“It isn’t a gate.”

Rousol’s gaze travelled upwards, taking in the ten solid feet of metal. “What is it, then?”

“It’s to protect us from these people,” a soldier replied. Then he opened the little door in the gate and popped out just long enough to arrest her.

Supporters of Israeli policy might point out that this is proof of the IDF’s reasonable behaviour: providing you don’t throw stones, your demonstration will end with your arrest instead of your death. But even this isn’t true. Organisers of pacifist resistance (which typically takes the form of cultural events) have also been physically assaulted and even killed. Dedication to non-violence will not protect you, not in the face of a military machine that feeds on violence. I realised this when I read the story of Mohammed Manasrah, a trade union activist from Dheisheh refugee camp who was arrested and severely tortured multiple times, always on some nonsensical charge. The torture left him with permanent hearing loss and injured genitals. His final arrest took place after he organised a cultural exhibit at Bethlehem University in his capacity as president of the student senate. Student organisations are technically banned in the West Bank under military law, and the army chose to enact the ban in Manasrah’s case.

Not long after I read this story (along with a host of others) my boss’s father was arrested as he tried to return to the West Bank after receiving eye surgery in a Jordanian hospital. He is a pacifist and a very prominent figure in our local community. His name was on a list in the border police computer, and they arrested him on the spot. He has never raised a hand to hurt anybody in his life, and he and his daughter have done more to promote non-violent living through their educational work with Bethlehem’s youth than any other people I know.  When I told my neighbour about Abu Reem’s arrest, she was horrified, but not surprised. She burst out, “It’s because of this institute! They don’t want him to have it!” I nodded. By then I understood the way things worked pretty well. Abu Reem hadn’t beem arrested in spite of his peace work. He was arrested because of it. Sometimes there is no reason visible at all; being Palestinian is enough. As Linah al-Saafin wrote in her poignant angry eulogy to Mustafa, whose death she witnessed:

They killed you, Mustafa. My insides crumple. You, in front of me…You were wanted by the army because of who you are: a Palestinian who resists the occupation he directly suffers from. I think of your father being denied a permit to be with you, of your mother who had to be granted permission by them to see you in the hospital.

There is another reason why pompous exhortations to keep calm and put down the rocks can sound grating to Palestinian ears. The people who are urging them to embrace non-violence and dramatically enquiring as to the whereabouts of the Palestinian Gandhi are rarely committed to non-violence themselves. Last year Foreign Secretary William Hague visited the stricken village of Bi’lin, and he praised non-violent protest as the best solution to the occupation. Yet he himself had just voted for the replacement of Trident, Britain’s nuclear weapons system. Such a person has no business to be telling the Bi’lin shabaab not to chuck stones at the IDF. If you believe that armed resistance and warfare can ever be legitimate – and Hague’s voting record tells us that he certainly does – then the people of occupied Palestine have a right to use it.  When I look at what the occupation does to Palestinians, and hear people expressing disapproval over the stone-throwing, a line from George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion flashes to mind: “And then you were surprised because she threw your slippers at you! I should have thrown the fire-irons at you.”

It is no wonder that some Palestinians interpret this hypocritically fulsome support for non-violent resistance as an attempt to neuter them and render them passive. Yet there is no room for passivity in genuine pacifism. As Reem and her father show, Palestinian pacifists have to face the reality that their work may bring them into harm’s way. There is no hiding place for people involved in non-violent resistance. A candid remark from IDF Major-General Amos Gilad – “We don’t do Gandhi very well” – suggests that pacifists may be at even greater risk from army retaliation, because the army doesn’t know any other way to deal with their approach and outlook. Unlike the onlookers who beseech Palestinians to renounce violence and thereby secure their safety, Palestine’s pacifists understand very well that they are not safe, and that so long as there is occupation, they never will be.

They are pacifist not because they expect the Israeli army to start handing out lollipops as a special reward for their good behaviour. They are pacifist because of a deeply held belief in what it means to be free. The army might confiscate land, demolish homes, expel the residents, but there is one thing that they will never be able to touch, and that is the integrity of the people they are oppressing. Palestine is occupied, but in each person who refuses to succumb to violence there is a place that is unconquerable, and there is a formidable strength in that place. This is what Amos Gilad was referring to with his rueful remark. Intimidation and theft are part of the IDF’s everyday routine. What do they do when they come across something they can’t take? This is one aspect of what Palestinians call sumud – steadfastness.

I’m going to write a series of posts on pacifism in Palestine, because there is a lot more to say about what it is and what it means for the people who embrace it. But first it was important to make it clear what I don’t mean when I say ‘pacifism’. I don’t mean passivity, and I don’t mean giving up. The moment I realised that the just war caterpillar had tumbled out of its chrysalis as a clumsy new pacifist (something for which I will be forever grateful to my colleagues) was the moment when I realised that my own participation in this fight had only just begun. But I could never condemn a Palestinian who tugs rocks loose from the earth and hurls them at the occupying army, because that is her earth, and her choice. Pacifism can’t be enforced on anybody; in a land where there is very limited freedom, everybody has the right to choose how to resist.

Mishnah fragment in the handwriting of Maimonides.

I am very absorbed in my course. It’s a full-time MA in Jewish Studies, drawing together history, theology, ethics, politics, cultural anthropology, and language study, amongst other things. I’m writing my thesis on a topic relevant to conflict resolution in Palestine and Israel, but I am also getting the chance to explore other areas of interest. Two weeks ago I was in the conservation studio, holding in my hands a Judeo-Arabic manuscript penned by Maimonides himself, which was a pretty special experience. “You can tell he was a doctor,” the tutor commented. “His handwriting’s awful.”

At first I planned to concentrate just on Judeo-Arabic and its dialects, but I ended up registering for modern Hebrew. A long time ago I thought about attending an ulpan (intensive Hebrew school) in Jerusalem, but the checkpoint wouldn’t permit it. Most classes start at eight or eight-thirty in the morning, and there was no guarantee I would even have reached the metal detectors by that time. It would have meant getting up at an hour so obscene it ought to be banned from the clock and standing in an interminable line with thousands of exhausted Palestinian workers who make this trip daily. Sometimes they get through in time for work, sometimes they don’t. It depends on the mood of the soldiers operating the turnstiles.  Often the workers are huddled up in the metal cage leading into the checkpoint building by three a.m., trying to snatch some extra sleep on pieces of cardboard as they wait for the soldiers to begin processing people. Vendors come and poke pitta breads and fruit through the bars by way of breakfast.

Keen as I am to learn Hebrew, I’m not that keen.

So I signed up for modern Hebrew as part of my MA. On the first day of class I felt a bit daunted. The textbook (for beginners) is all in Hebrew – except for the helpful glossary, which is in Russian. Which I don’t speak. Looking at it caused me to experience a sudden flashback from my piano lessons as a child: I was taught by an eccentric Russian lady who always wore full evening wear in the middle of the day and who used to give me my musical theory homework in Russian. If I wasn’t able to complete it (as happened often, seeing as I couldn’t read the instructions) she would pinch me by the shoulders like a tea-towel to be pegged out to dry and drape me over the piano stool with quite unnecessary vim.

I’ve been taking classes for five weeks now, and I’m surprised at the progress I’ve made. I can understand many of the scenarios in the textbook, which are quite typical of language courses. Sometimes they feature Dan and Dina, off to visit their grandmother on the kibbutz; and sometimes it’s Ron and Ruti placing an order for falafel. As reading is my weakest area, a student in the class above brought me a children’s book (Bambi in translation) for extra practice, so my vocabulary has expanded to include lots of words on a pastoral theme. Now our teacher is setting us short compositions to write, encouraging us not only to use the vocabulary we have acquired from the books but to experiment with other words and phrases we might know. I looked at her a bit doubtfully as I thought about the words I had before I came to class, and the sort of thing I now know how to say.

Where are you from?
My mother works at the hospital.
I speak English, Arabic, and French.
I would like falafel with lots of salad.
Excuse me, but would you mind moving your gun?
I want to buy some books.
Bambi is a little deer.
The little deer has fallen over.
This is a closed military zone. If you don’t leave now you will be detained.
The flowers are pretty.
The moles are sweet.
We are being followed by the border police.
That is the student accommodation block.
That is the office.
That is the military command and control post.
I hate the Ministry of the Interior.
Do you agree with torture?
I need to speak with your commander about this.
I don’t like hummus.

It is very difficult to unite these things in a composition, you know. It took all the creative power I possessed. In the end I had Dan and Dina going not to the kibbutz or to the falafel stand, but to a closed military zone (shetach tseva’i sagur) to build a new house (bet chadash) for some Palestinian refugees (plitim falastinim).

I showed the first paragraph to Shai. He objected to the political content, and pointed out that it might not be sensible to submit a piece like this without knowing the political views of the teacher. I saw his point, and made some amendments.

My composition now has the moles (ha’parperot) and the rabbits (ha’arnavim) standing in solidarity (solidariyot) against those amongst them who eat more than their fair share of the flowers.

One of the personal events was the arrival of Sameeha in England. As regular readers will know, she’s a girl from Gaza whom I initially befriended online. In August I sent her some post, care of a peace worker who was heading out to the Gaza Strip, and I prayed as I taped up the box that we’d meet someday. It was a prayer without much conviction behind it. Gaza is within easy driving distance of Bethlehem, but the place feels unreachable.

She still hasn’t got her post, and she won’t get it for another year – because I ended up getting her instead! Now she’s here. And when I mean here, I don’t just mean in England, but literally here. On the floor of the room. Curled up in my sleeping bag as I type, bearing a strong resemblance to the dreamy oversized caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland.

She has come to England on a scholarship provided by a British charity that aims to support Palestinian postgraduate students. When I sent her that parcel I didn’t even know that she had applied for it. We had the usual nail-biting wait for papers and permits and stamps, the hallmarks of Palestinian existence. Then there was the day-long wait to hear whether she had been successful in crossing Rafah. (That border is allegedly open now. In reality it is not.) At last a Facebook status popped up – “I’m in Cairo!” – and I knew she was on her way.

Now, as I said, she’s ensconced in the sleeping bag. She chose it over the bed. At first I thought she was just being polite, until she produced a c amera and insisted on taking about two hundred pictures of herself. “I’ve never been in a sleeping bag before! I’m so curious to try it.”

“Don’t you have them in Gaza?”

“I’ve not seen one. I want to show these photos to my mum. But look, Vicky, it’s tight! Is it too small for me? How are you supposed to move in these things?”

“You don’t,” I told her bemusedly. “You just sleep in them.” She tried to struggle to a sitting position, and then gave up, collapsing back on the pillow in a fit of giggles. I held out my hand for the c amera. “Look, your photos are all at an awkward angle, I’ll get one for you if you like…”

Her curiosity and excitement were infectious, and by the time I had snapped the picture, even I was thinking, “Oh, WOW, a sleeping bag!!”

Having her here is like seeing the world through new eyes. She is fluent in English and already quite at home here – anybody seeing her going about her daily life could easily assume that she is a British postgrad. But little things keep reminding me of where she has come from. Her habit of checking her mailbox multiple times a day, for example; she is obsessed with the whole concept of getting post. The way she treats turning on the tap and getting running water as something extraordinary instead of something routine. “I can even shower whenever I like – I don’t have to worry about there not being any water! It’s good water, not salty, it doesn’t ruin your hair. You can even drink from the tap. That tap is so clean!”

Over 95% of Gaza’s water is unfit for consumption. It was always bad, but things got worse after Cast Lead, when the desalination plants sustained heavy damage in Israeli bombing raids. When Sameeha started enthusing about the benefits of the Water Board, conflicting emotions surfaced in me: I didn’t know whether to laugh, hug her, or give way to the suspicious smarting feeling at the back of my eyes. Talking to people like her always reminds me of why I got involved in all this in the first place.

Sameeha (left) and Vicky (right), England, October 2011

Tomorrow we are off to explore the countryside, hopefully ending up at the sea. Sameeha has only been here for two or three weeks, so she hasn’t seen anywhere outside of her university town yet. We’ll try to get some more photographs, and a description of our (mis)adventures will follow.