Fifteen Days in Palestine

by Jacob A. Mundy

Leaving Seatac International for Israel, I was filled with anticipation and hope. Arriving at Seatac International, half a month later, I was mentally exhausted, emotionally traumatized, and filled with the memories.

In an ideal world, I was supposed to spend my two weeks in the Israeli occupied territories--the West Bank and the Gaza Strip--with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM). In the real world, I spent the majority of my time living under the same day-to-day terror that Palestinians have known since 1967, if not 1948.

For almost a year now, ISM, a Bethlehem-based NGO, has been staging non-violent direct action campaigns against the occupation in which internationals from around the world are invited to work against the occupation. With the presence of internationals, the Palestinian non-violent movement has been able to accomplish things that would otherwise have resulted in violence, bloodshed and possible death. I was set to join the ISM's third campaign in April 2002. The April campaign's itinerary included marches on checkpoints, rebuildings of demolished houses, farmland reclamation, and several solidarity visits to towns all over the occupied territories.

When I arrived in Tel Aviv, the Palestinians were still recovering from the March Israeli Defense Force (IDF) invasion. As I was riding in a taxi from the airport to East Jerusalem, the driver mentioned the recent suicide bombing, over a dozen killed, only two hours prior. "Oh, shit," I thought.

In the following days there would be four more bombings. On the first day of the ISM campaign, over 50 internationals massed in the Bethlehem star hotel to receive their affinity group training in consensus and non-violence. But the news from Ramallah, where IDF tanks were knocking on Arafat's door--and where half the ISM leadership was trapped--kept distracting us.

By the second day of the April ISM campaign, the IDF had invaded Beit Jalla, a town adjacent to Bethlehem.

On the third day of the campaign, the ISM attempted to march into Beit Jalla to check on the citizens of that town. Standing in our way was an armored personnel carrier (APC), and the IDF soldier inside shot bullets at our feet, sending ricochets everywhere, wounding several people, including an Australian girl who received a bullet in the stomach. This was an unprecedented attack on internationals who approached the vehicle with their hands raised, white flags raised. On the fourth day of the campaign the IDF invaded Bethlehem and began the now infamous siege at the Church of the Nativity.

By then the ISM split into three groups: one group stayed at the hotel, to arrange and support possible actions; one group went to the Aida refugee camp; my group went to the Azzeh refugee camp. The refugee camps requested our presence as human shields, and we were more than happy to be welcomed into their homes.

It is during this period, during my stay in the Azzeh refugee camp, where I became familiar with the day-to-day fear and horror of the occupation. The sound of gunfire, frightening at first, soon became a part of the atmosphere, like crickets on a summer night. Tanks and APCs rolled by day in, day out. We learned to avoid being in eyesight of any building in the distance, like Bethlehem University and the Paradise hotel, two favorite positions of IDF snipers; we walked hunched, running across the main street in the camp--"sniper alley". One of Azzeh's martyrs is a 15 year-old girl that was shot by an IDF sniper for the crime of leaving her house.

I slept with my boots on. Once I was able to sleep an entire night through, hoping each and every night that this wouldn't be the night when the soldiers would come and perform house-to-house searches. The two young men in the house where I stayed haven't slept through the night in two years; like most Palestinians I met, they sleep after sunrise, and catnap through the day.

The third night in the camp, a dull buzzing sound was heard overhead. The Palestinians said it was a drone-plane, and they added that in two hours the Boeing-made Apache attack helicopters would come. Like clockwork, a little over two hours later, an Apache announced its presence by firing its cannon into Bethlehem. It was the loudest, most blood-chilling sound I'd heard in my life.

During my stay I also acted as a human shield in Palestinian ambulances. One time, while returning with a heart attack victim, the ambulance I was riding in was shot at by an IDF soldier while we were just three blocks short of the hospital. The soldier was telling us to go back, and go another way. We eventually found a way around, using dirt paths to avoid the main road. The driver was amused that I quickly ducked behind the dashboard when the soldier fired at us; for him, being shot at is a part of the job.

Towards the end of my stay in Palestine, I joined a small group of internationals that attempted to sneak into Jenin during the siege there. The night before we were set to try and get in, we interviewed several men from Jenin who had been detained, tortured and left naked in the surrounding towns. One of the men had cigarette burns all over his body; another, a UN worker, had half his face paralyzed from repeated blows from an IDF soldier; and there were already hundreds of other such men, all from Jenin, with similar stories.

Trying to understanding how it has come to this--that an entire population must collectively pay for having lived on coveted land--will drive one crazy.

The easiest thing to do is to stand between the tanks, the guns and the hate, to try and save lives. "At this point in Israel's endgame, it's not about peace building. It's about damage control," says my friend, Trevor Baumgartner. It's about saving lives. And that's the simple part.

The hard part is getting this country, our country, our government, and our fellow citizens to understand that our 14 million dollars a day in aid to Israel isn't buying anyone peace or security, neither Palestinians nor Israelis, and certainly not us.

Jacob A. Mundy is a graduate student in Middle East Studies at the University of Washington and was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Morocco (1999-2001). Jacob can be reached at mundy@u.washington.edu