B o s t o n t o P a l e s t i n e :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

bio: Ruppat Rani works as a psychologist. She grew up in a family with a
long history of public service.

In Jenin, I meet Ibrahim, a sensitive, smart, sweet young man of 22. He's a university student, the oldest in a family of 7 kids. He's our host for our stay in Jenin. He looks after us in the most loving and caring way. I like him. He's real and deep and he's in touch with what he feels. The conditions of his life have not taken away his humanity.

One night over fruit and conversation, Ibrahim tells us about a time his village was under curfew for 15 days without a break. He was 18 then. There was no electricity because the IDF had cut it for cover to move around at night. The villagers were out of food. The mayor of the village pleaded by cell phone with the IDF commander for a break in curfew so people could get food. The commander refused. Soon after, Ibrahim was moving quietly from house to house at night to get food and take it to people. Neighbors were helping him (saying things like, Go away, the soldiers are right there, Come now, Move quickly this way, etc.). As he was making deliveries, a sniper saw him and began shooting. He dropped his bag and ran as fast as he could. He remembers the feeling of the wind rushing against his face. For a moment he thought of stopping and letting himself just get shot. By the end of the story, he was crying in this painful, quiet way. He told us other stories too, one about being used as a human shield by two soldiers who invaded his dorm and kept a gun in his back as they walked him over to another dorm. This is his life.

About 14,000 people live in the Jenin Refugee Camp. In 2002, the camp was under siege by the IDF for weeks. The first part involved shelling and shooting out the roof water tanks so people ran out of water fast as they hid in their homes. The second part involved IDF invasion with troops and bulldozers and then hand-to-hand killing, demolition of 400 homes, and serious damage to another 200. What happened in Jenin is considered a massacre by the international community but not by the governments of Israel and the U.S. On the hill walking down into the camp, we pass a man in his 50's who chats with us briefly. Later, our host tells us this man has six children. Three are in Israeli prisons. Two were killed by the IDF in the 2002 invasion. His sixth child is wanted by the IDF and is now in hiding. This is his life.

Later that day, I meet a university student whose family used to live in one of the 400 houses in the camp demolished by bulldozers in the invasion. Unlike some unfortunate residents, she was not killed in her house during this mass demolition by giant bulldozers without adequate warning. Walking around the camp, the buildings that remain are covered in bullet marks and other damage from the invasion. A local tells our host (who himself grew up here) that, a few weeks ago, the IDF were again in Jenin, dressed in civilian clothes. They opened fire—killed three, wounded 11—and fled. Our host tells us this is why people are avoiding our group; they don't know if we mean them harm and just look harmless.

Our host tells us that his niece, who is 3 and lives in the camp, runs into a corner and starts shaking whenever she hears a helicopter overhead.

I see a beautiful antique urn in a shop window in the Old City of Jerusalem and walk into the shop to ask about it. The shopkeeper Ziad and I hit it off and he starts hanging out with us. Ziad works with a foundation that brings Western doctors to the West Bank to perform specialized surgeries on children. A 3-year-old girl in Gaza needed a back operation that the doctors in Gaza weren't trained to do. A Swiss doctor was willing to perform the surgery in Israel or Egypt. Ziad arranged things and tried to get permits for the child and one family member to travel into Israel. Permit denied. And then into Egypt. Permit Denied. The reason: Security.

Ziad also told me about a young boy who had the first in a series of eye operations. When the surgeon called to schedule the next operation, Ziad tried to locate the boy and his family and learned that they'd all been killed in an IDF invasion of their refugee camp home.

You encounter the word security a lot here. Just about everything done by the IDF is claimed to be done for reasons of security. This includes land confiscations, curfews, closures of towns and villages, group arrests, denial of entry into West Bank towns, denial of entry for Palestinians into Israel, the uprooting of olive trees, all the movement restrictions, the permit system, restrictions on visits to prisoners. The list goes on and on.

I meet Rebecca, an Israeli activist married to a Palestinian and living in the West Bank. They have two toddlers. To visit their grandmother, Rebecca's children need a hard-to-get permit to enter Israel. So Grandma comes to them. Even she has to get IDF permission to do this, as non-settler Israelis are not typically allowed in the West Bank, but still it's easier for her than for the grandkids. Rebecca herself cannot travel around the West Bank because she is an Israeli and isn't supposed to be there. So, to visit paternal family, her husband and the children take a servis van through the checkpoints. But Rebecca has to walk through remote countryside and over mountains to avoid checkpoints and soldiers. And then she has to do the same thing to get back home. This involves hours and hours of walking.

Ayesha, my translator, is one of the 50,000 Palestinians who don't have a Palestinian ID card at all. You need one of these to go anywhere at all because of the checkpoints and the random soldier checks. People don't ever leave home without theirs. Officially, Ayesha doesn't exist. She can't travel at all outside of Bethlehem without doing it by walking through remote countryside or trying to convince soldiers to let her through without the ID she claims she forgot at home (a very dangerous game that risks arrest). Her six siblings are all in the same situation as she is.

I'm waiting for the secretary to come in and unlock the office at the university where I'm doing research. I'm sitting on a bench outside in the cool morning air. I strike up a conversation with a young blonde next to me. She's stylish in a skirt, long hair, and high heels. She looks like she could be from anywhere in the world. Her name is Melissa. She's 18 and here to take a university entrance exam. We chat about getting together in Jerusalem that weekend. I ask her where she lives there. She says unfortunately she lives right behind the Wailing Wall (one of Judaism's holiest sites) in East Jerusalem. I ask what is unfortunate about that. She says that on Friday evenings, she and her family, especially her mother who wears hijab, can't go out onto their street because religious Jewish men going to the Wailing Wall attack them on their way to prayer because they are Palestinian.

Later that week, I hear I'd just missed a demonstration of right wing religious fundamentalists chanting slogans like Kill the Arabs and Arabs to the Gas Chambers . They walked through the Old City protected by a contingent of IDF.

The thing about all the above stories is that they are so typical. You hear things like this over and over. Everyone has a million stories like these. These stories are not exceptional. They are the norm. These kinds of experiences are parts of everyday life for the people I meet on the street, people I meet in shops, people I interview, just about everyone.

I am really starting to get that above and beyond everything else, this is a situation of human rights abuses by an occupying army.

At the airport in Tel Aviv, I am in a shop buying a paper and snack. At the counter, a map of Israel is for sale. I open it and see that the borders of Israel include all of the West Bank and Gaza. There is no West Bank on the map at all. Much of what is the West Bank is labeled Judea and Samaria. There are tiny little zones within Judea and Samaria that have stripes on them. You can hardly see these zones. I look at the legend. It tells me these miniscule striped areas are Autonomous Areas. I think of how the Chinese call Tibet an Autonomous Region. And I think of Native American reservations in the west of the U.S.

In the heart of this darkness, people are incredibly warm and hospitable. I feel at home here. I am surprised and moved by the welcome and kindness. I did not expect graciousness and gentleness in occupation and trauma. The culture is highly communal and social. Families are huge and connected. The people, even the refugees, have a sense of place that runs deep. They are of the land in a way I've not encountered before. Refugees, now in the third generation, still say they are from the village their grandparents fled in 1948. When I ask, a 15-year-old girl tells me, I am from Zakaria. Zakaria is a village in Israel proper about 20 miles away in distance but galaxies away in access. It is in ruins. It no longer exists as the village of Zakaria. Much of what was Zakaria is today a moshav, an Israeli farm cooperative named after Zaharia. This girl has never been to Zakaria.

The families that are from the West Bank have been here as far back as memory goes--centuries and more. Until the early part of the 20th century and for centuries before this, people lived together on this land in a pluralistic society of Jews, Muslims, and ancient Christian communities (Druze, Coptic Egyptian, Greek Orthodox, and others). Mostly, they lived without hatred. I meet an old man who remembers the twilight of that time. Each week on the Sabbath he used to turn off the light switches for his Jewish neighbors. These stories are dying now.

There is a powerful sense of history here. Jericho, a town in the West Bank, is the oldest known human settlement on earth. People have lived in Jericho for 10,000 years. This settledness creates deep connections. There is high trust between people. People share what they have. The Palestinians are wealthy in the social capital we no longer have. On the street strangers greet me and ask where I am from. They say, You are welcome in Palestine. Every morning the man at the cab-stand offers me tea and a handshake. We have all had invitations for meals in the homes of people we met in shops and cafes.

One evening, I am the only woman in a servis (taxi) van, nervous about traveling at night alone to a new city. A man asks if I've been to Ramallah before. I say no. In halting English he says, If you need help, I am ready. It is an elegant and kind offer and indeed he does not leave me until we arrive at my hotel. Another member of our group tells us about a fellow who walked with him for 2 hours as they searched for somewhere he was supposed to be. Stories like this are common.

Before we got here, I was told that people are polite and greetings and manners important. I was also told that if I am ever in a dangerous spot, I can knock on any door and those inside will shelter me, that the ethic of hospitality overrides everything. When I heard this stateside, I thought, yeah, right. But now I too am a believer because I have experienced that kind of welcome. Sad to say, we are all startled by the warmth and trust that Palestinians extend to each of us, whether we are American, Indian, white, Jewish, black, whatever.

An irony of being here is that though I am anxious around the soldiers and their guns and their drunken excesses of power, I feel safer in Palestinian society walking around at night than I feel in the U.S.

So far I have encountered two rude Palestinians. It has been amusing to tell other Palestinians about them because they are so baffled and kind of head scratching about it. It tells me how unusual such behavior is.

I have been impressed by how educated and sophisticated this population is. Education is highly valued. Literacy rates are 95+%. In the last 30 years, several universities have been founded in the West Bank. A monthly magazine called This Week in Palestine lists artistic and cultural events all over the West Bank and East Jerusalem. This ancient, refined society is trying hard to keep up the semblance of a shared cultural life despite the imposed confinement, the wide-scale poverty now, and the literal destruction of institutions, infrastructure, and public gathering places. Even teenagers are knowledgeable about history and politics. I have heard several teens offer sophisticated analyses of global geopolitics. One night a student quotes Emerson at length to us and tells us about Romanticism. I can't help but think what a sharp contrast this is to what U.S. teens and adults know about the world and art and history.

Among the people I have met in these weeks, I have not encountered hate. There is outrage. There is talk of justice. There is talk of human rights. There is frequent talk of how Israel and Israelis are poisoning their own souls with the brutality they inflict on Palestinians. There is concern that Palestinians must not let themselves become the next generation of oppressors after their decades as victims. But so far, there is no talk of hate. It is a soulful and pacifist philosophy I find amazing and surprising. Sometimes I find myself impatient with the perseverance and the lack of rage. I myself feel a lot of rage about what I see. More than anything, people want peace and the normal life they have not had for nearly three generations now. They are tired. They speak of living with Israelis in peace as citizens of one country with the same human rights for all citizens. This is the only solution I hear discussed. No one speaks of a 2-state solution. The facts on the ground of Israeli settlements all over the West Bank and the ways the Wall has annexed to Israel so much of the fertile land and the water and carved up and made the West Bank noncontiguous--these things make a sovereign Palestinian state no longer a possibility. People here recognize this. The evidence is in their faces. Everyone is clear that Israel is never leaving the land it calls Judea and Samaria and that we call the West Bank.

The culture I see here makes me sad beyond words. I am here as a witness to the destruction of Palestine and Palestinians. I wonder how long these people can continue to persevere and hold onto dignity.

Resilience cannot continue endlessly through anything. These people have endured 38 years of occupation, collective punishment, and spirit breaking humiliation. And now in the last five years the violence of the occupation has accelerated to a level of brutality for which there are no words. The events of September 11, 2001, gave the Israeli army license to do whatever it wishes in the Occupied Territories in the name of eradicating terrorism. And the army and government of Israel have taken full advantage of this historical moment to crush, oppress, shame, and break. I have felt despair at how the IDF comes up with twisted sadistic ways to snap souls, to take away the humanity of these people and reduce them to something less than they are. Palestinians are suffocating in suffering. One man tells me that the IDF have taken away everything he has; all that is left now is the air he breathes.

Ruppat Rani

Taxi! I'm waiting at a cabstand.
I meet Jack. He looks about 45.
We laugh about how he, a Palestinian, has a Western name and I, an American, have an Arabic name.
Early on he asks, Do you know anything about lymphoma? I don't.
Why does he want to know? He has lymphoma.
A cab comes. We're traveling to the same part of town and share it. Jack's wife has multiple sclerosis. She's in a wheelchair.
They have two kids, aged 15 and 11.
Three times he's applied for and gotten medical permits to take his wife to see specialists in Jerusalem. He wants to see a Jerusalem specialist himself.
But he doesn't have the physical strength anymore to stand hours in line in the sun to apply for a permit at the IDF command center.
And in the last 5 years, most permits are denied anyway.
Plus he doesn't have money for medical care. He pays for the cab and won't let me pay. I insist.
After much cajoling, he takes my money.

His parting words are that he expects to be in a cemetery shortly. In 2001, 25% of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories lived in poverty.
The UN definition of poverty is living on the equivalent of $2.20 USD or less a day per person.
In 2006, 75% of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories live in poverty. In the West Bank, people must travel to Jerusalem for specialty medical care.
My interview with the Director of the local Palestinian office that serves as liaison to the Israeli Army (IDF) for permits indicates that over the last 6 months about 5% of requests for medical permits to enter Israel have been granted.
In the past, 50 - 70% were granted. When permits are granted, they are time limited (e.g., from 5 a.m. until 10 p.m. on a specific date).

To apply, an Israeli hospital (that has never seen you) must fax the IDF information about your case and justify why you need care in Israel. Information from a Palestinian hospital (where you have actually been seen) is not acceptable.
To travel to Jerusalem, the sick have to wait in the sun at checkpoints, sometimes for hours. Sometimes the soldiers don't let them through even with a permit. And sometimes the lines are so long that the permit expires during the waiting. Or by the time they get through, getting to Jerusalem and back before the expiration time is impossible.
No matter the reason, if you don't use your permit, you have to reapply from scratch for another one. Another day, I interview Charles, brother of a 24-year-old Palestinian prisoner.
Charles' brother is 4 years into a 396-year sentence in an Israeli prison. The brother was a member of the armed resistance and committed violent acts against the occupation.
The family is Catholic and Charles' brother was in the Nativity Church in Bethlehem during the siege a few years ago. Charles isn't allowed to visit his brother because Israel doesn't allow brothers of prisoners to visit if the brother is between the ages of 16 and 35. Charles is 30. He hasn't seen his brother in 4 years.
Their parents are dead.
The only family member allowed to visit is their 87-year-old grandmother who walks with a cane. Each visit involves a 12-hour journey and some walking. This journey is becoming impossible for her. She has seen her grandson 4 times so far for 20 minutes each visit. At the last visit the prison authorities allowed her to take photos. I look at the photos. They are sweet and sad.
Later, almost parenthetically, Charles happens to mention that a few years ago he was standing in front of his house when the IDF arrived and asked who owned the house. Worried, he said the owners were abroad. The IDF sent him to the top of the street to tell people not to come down the street. While he did this, they blew up his house. The next year the UN rebuilt the house.
My interview with him is in the rebuilt house. Later I see a UN plaque on the outside wall saying building funds were donated by Canada but not mentioning why the house needed rebuilding. I read about a girl of 15 who pushed and then ran away from a male soldier who wanted to body search her as she entered a mosque. He shot her. This put her in a coma. After she came out of the coma, she was sentenced to 2 years in prison.

There are about 10,000 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons. They are not petty criminals. They are political prisoners who have acted in resistance against the occupation, some violently, many non-violently. Many committed “crimes” we would not consider crimes (e.g., holding a Palestinian flag, being in a nonviolent demonstration, being in any political party). A few have been in prison 30+ years. About 4% of prisoners are children (i.e., 450 kids). Israel arrests children 12 and over. It charges and convicts children 14 and over. Being tortured in prison is standard. Random mass arrests of men are common (e.g., all males between ages 16 and 40 in a particular village).

Almost every man I meet has been arrested or in prison. Often people are released from jail after many days and don't ever learn why they were arrested. There is a military order called administrative detention that allows Palestinians to be held 6 months without the prisoner or his lawyer being told the charge (only the judge and prosecutor know the charge).
This military order allows infinite 6-month extensions of the detention.
There are about 600 prisoners held this way now. Some have been in prison for 8 years.
To visit a prisoner, you must be a first degree relative (except for brothers who are restricted as noted above).
First, you apply for a permit to enter Israel.
The Red Cross serves as liaison to the IDF for this.
The Red Cross staff person I interviewed told me that about 40% of permit applicants are denied for reasons of security and another 10% to 15% are denied because of IDF difficulty establishing kinship (i.e., the info isn't on their computers).
The journey to see a prisoner can take 5 to 12 hours/each way because of movement restrictions in the Occupied Territories.
Many visitors are strip-searched at each checkpoint along the way and then again at the prison itself. Visits with prisoners are 30 minutes long.
To get there, first visitors take Palestinian transportation to the Green Line (1967 border) and then get on an Israeli bus.
Israeli police or military escorts accompany visitor buses from the Green Line to the prison.
Because of these restrictions, prisoners have few visitors.

First off, I am safe and away from the hotspots. I've meant to write but what I've seen has been so overwhelming, scary and demoralizing that it’s been hard to know where to begin. I wake up at night thinking about this place and am frightened about the future. This is far worse than I had imagined. I thought I was prepared and well informed—but to really see it is another thing. To keep you close to the ground, I will begin by describing my first several days. I've been here about 10 days but here will share just my first experiences so that you can have your own sense of wading into occupation. Most everything I relate I've heard multiple versions of from many different people (every single Palestinian I've met is filled with terrible stories that cover similar themes).

On arrival at Tel Aviv airport, as the Passport Control woman was looking at my passport, a male security person picked up my bag, took me to a room, placed my bag 8 feet away, and told me to sit. There were 15 others there, mostly Arabs, brown-skinned non-Arabs like me, and a few young white people (Europeans and Americans?). One scared Muslim man was sweating and praying. I was nervous. At one point, I went to get a book out of my bag and a security person rushed over and said forcefully not to touch my bag and, again, to sit down. I followed orders. Finally, after 2 hours of mostly sitting, someone brought me my passport and said I could go. The sweating praying man was still there when I left. As I exited to Baggage Claim, I was again questioned by yet another security person.

I've heard far worse entry stories from Palestinian-Americans I've met here. They can be held for 8 to 14 hours (sometimes without water or food) and interrogated aggressively. One college student told me he was held alone in a room that got hotter and hotter (maybe as high as 130 degrees, he thought) so that he had to strip to his boxers. Then the air conditioning came on and he froze. After 10 hours of this, he was interrogated and taunted for several more hours. Palestinians (40% of Palestinian men have been arrested at least once) report that for them arrest, torture, and indefinite detention without charge are typical (I've confirmed this with the head of a prisoners' rights group).

On Day Two, I wandered around the Old City in East Jerusalem. Since 1967, East Jerusalem has been under occupation by the Israeli military, known as the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). I walked through the walled Old City and saw the holiest sites of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. I also saw IDF soldiers everywhere with guns and many surveillance cameras along the Old City's walls.

The next day, our delegation left East Jerusalem to enter the West Bank proper. The West Bank makes up the majority of the Palestinian Occupied Territories and has been under Israeli military occupation since 1967. Bethlehem, the birthplace of Christ, is 10 kilometers south of Jerusalem and was our first stop in the West Bank. It is a majority Christian city.

The checkpoint to enter Bethlehem actually occurs 1.5 kilometers inside the boundary of Bethlehem district. This was my first viewing of the 26-foot-high concrete Separation Wall, which extends from both sides of the checkpoint. It is called "The Wall" but really is a series of walls (and walls within walls). It snakes through the West Bank in convoluted configurations that sometimes slice through the center of Palestinian villages or enclose entire villages or might even completely enclose individual Palestinian homes (I've now seen two of these). Anyway, the Wall around Bethlehem is placed such that Bethlehem’s residential and commercial areas are on one side of the wall, while its open land and olive groves are left on the “Israeli side” of the wall/checkpoint and thus effectively annexed to Israel. Given this set up, the citizens of Bethlehem can only access their land with hard-to-obtain permits that, in any case, don't allow for multiple entries and exits.

The Bethlehem checkpoint is, like a cattle processing plant, designed such that you enter without seeing what you’re getting into. It is a militarized zone—with surveillance towers, barbed wire, and metal fences within fences not visible from outside it. In the checkpoint, you walk through a turnstile-like gate and show your identification to IDF soldiers enclosed in glass booths. As you exit, you see a sign that reads “The Israeli Ministry of Tourism Welcomes You to Bethlehem.” This is strange because Bethlehem, of course, is not in Israel but rather is in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Thus the Israeli Ministry of Tourism does not have domain to bid you welcome. When you leave Bethlehem and pass through the checkpoint from the other side, there is likewise a sign that reads “Welcome to Jerusalem.” Again, this is strange because the checkpoint is in Bethlehem, and Jerusalem, including occupied East Jerusalem, is 8 or 9 kilometers away.

This is my first experience of such an extreme manipulation of language, boundaries, and framing to assert ownership.

In the last 11 days, I've seen the Wall from various vantage points in several different towns and villages. There is a visually recognizable pattern to its placement. Palestinians towns were built with clustered population centers surrounded by agricultural land. This leaves much of the countryside open. But the Wall, everywhere as in Bethlehem, encloses Palestinian population centers and strands the open land and olive groves on the “Israeli side” of the Wall (still the West Bank, really, but effectively annexed). I've been told by both Israelis and Palestinians that there is an unspoken Israeli state policy of taking maximal land and minimal Palestinians and that the wall is designed accordingly. This is apparent when you look at the various walls around the West Bank and compare their location to that of the 1967 border.

Palestinians living in the West Bank have different license plates than do Israelis and East Jerusalemites, so that the IDF can easily identify who is who. I've learned from UN literature that the IDF has created about 650 obstacles to movement in the West Bank, an area about 1/5 the size of New Jersey. The two main obstacle types are the roadblock (an earthen mound, a stretch of 1-meter-square concrete cubes, or a trench dug such that cars can't pass, for example) and the checkpoint (a large terminal like the one in Bethlehem or a smaller, mobile or “flying” checkpoint, for example). Generally, roadblocks are not patrolled, while checkpoints are manned by soldiers. Our delegation leaders, who've been coming to Palestine for several years, say that such obstacles are really hindering the movement of Palestinians and thereby strangling the economy. Journeys that used to take 30 minutes can now take 2 to 6 hours because of circuitousness and checkpoints.

Many Palestinian towns are placed under curfew at night, so if a medical emergency occurs during the evening, they cannot get to the hospital. I've been told stories of women giving birth at checkpoints on the street as they try to get through to a hospital. I've also heard of people dying in ambulances at checkpoints as people try to convince soldiers to allow the ambulance through. A student I met up north told me how he once saw a heart attack victim die at a checkpoint. She also told me about some friends of hers whose car was stopped by soldiers. The soldiers told them to roll up the windows and, when the windows were almost fully rolled up, they threw a tear gas canister into the car. A man in a wheelchair, paralyzed from the waist down by a soldiers gunshot, told me he was recently made to sit in the sun at a checkpoint without any water for 5 hours.

These are just a few of the stories I have heard in the first week here. There are many more to come.

In Bethlehem, we went to the Dheisheh Refugee Camp and talked with Nidal and others, all of whom were born in the camp. Dheisheh is one of 59 refugee camps in the West Bank, Gaza, Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria. Deheisheh has 11,000 people (6,000 of whom are children). In 1948, Nidal's mother and her siblings fled their home in Zakaria (a Palestinian village in what became Israel) because Zionist forces were bombing Palestinian villages. She thought she would return soon after things quieted (as had happened before) and so left behind everything in her house. However, she ended up in Dheisheh and never saw Zakaria again.

At first people lived in tents. Then the UN built a 9’x 9’ room for each family (which meant an average of about 6 people per room). Then, each building had 25 rooms, with no electricity, very little water, and two outside toilets (for all 150 inhabitants). Later, more cement block structures were built. Today Dheisheh is a tightly packed community extending up a hill. I expected a refugee camp to look more temporary—this looks permanent. After spending 1948 to 1967 under Jordanian rule, in 1967 Dheisheh (and the rest of the West Bank) came under Israeli military occupation. When the West Bank, under Jordanian rule since 1949, came under Israel’s military occupation in 1967, about 1/3 of Dheisheh fled and went abroad, having become refugees for a second time.

Nidal says that they’ve experienced militarily imposed curfews since the occupation began. Under curfew, people are forbidden to leave their homes and sometimes forbidden even to open their windows. You cannot leave your home to go to the toilet outside. People might sit in their cramped homes for anywhere from days to weeks. Sometimes, nights are spent in complete darkness. Often, there are Israeli snipers up high and troops on the ground. If soldiers see anyone outside buildings they can shoot to kill. Nidal has known many killed during curfews, including a 12-year-old boy and a 60-year-old man killed (via 30 bullets from a tank) while bringing food to his family. Nidal's cousin was killed as he jumped a fence to get from his house to his sister's next door. The longest curfew was 49 days long. One Dheisheh study has it that the camp has been under curfew for about 4 months out every year for the last several years.

Curfew is lifted 2 hours every few days. However, curfew in nearby Bethlehem (the place to buy food and supplies) is lifted during different hours than Dheisheh's. So, to get food, people from the camp often must risk getting shot at.

Nidal also told us that the local Arabic paper is censored by the military (and that the degree of censorship has varied over the years). Terms like "occupation," " Palestine," "Palestinians," or mention of the curfew system have been forbidden. (As an aside, I’ve been told that Israeli authorities recently told the Palestinian Counseling Center in East Jerusalem that they will lose their permit to operate unless they change their name to the Arab Counseling Center, and so they are changing their name). The Dheisheh library must submit a list of books they wish to order to Israeli officials for approval. They can and do forbid certain books (for example, a book by Algerian psychiatrist Franz Fanon about colonialism and oppression).

At night, IDF jeeps come regularly into Dheisheh regularly at night. Soldiers search homes and sometimes take young men. An American psychologist visiting here told me that 90% of Dheisheh children have chronic nightmares. Most understand the concepts of death and prison by age 7. I met a young man who, at the age of 10, was beaten by soldiers and who, due to permit restrictions, has never been to Jerusalem (just 6 miles away) and cannot go without a permit (which is very hard to get). Because they cannot enter Israel, many in Dheisheh (like those in other parts of occupied Palestine) have never seen the home villages (often just 10 or 20 miles away) from which their parents and grandparents fled or were driven in 1948. Walking around, I was reminded of a Native American reservation: Dheisheh is poor and lacking in basic amenities. It is also crowded. It has narrow alleys, rubble and garbage in the open, no greenery, and nowhere for children to play.

I stayed two nights with a family at Dheisheh. Water is scarce. There is running water 1 day a week in the winter, 1 day every three weeks in the summer. I didn't take a shower. At night, I heard shots and strange loud booms.

On a tour of Dheisheh, we walked by a rubble-filled site and were told that a 5-story building had been there. The entire building was demolished by the IDF because a relative of one of the 7 families that lived in the building had been convicted of a crime and was serving time in an Israeli prison. This type of house demolition and collective punishment is common in the Occupied Territories. The Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) estimates that more than 12,000 Palestinian homes have been destroyed this way, typically to punish the family of a prisoner.

A Dheisheh schoolteacher told one member of our delegation that he hasn't been paid for 5 months due to the refusal of Israel (and much of the International community) to allow for funds to go to the Hamas government for dispersal. His four children cry everyday because they are hungry.

Many in the West Bank have told me that military orders control all aspects of life for Palestinians, including getting a driver's license, getting married, building or adding on to a house. They need permission to leave the West Bank, permission to go from one West Bank town to another, permission to travel with your mother/father/whoever in your car if you each hold different residency permits, etc. My own reading indicates an arcane, bureaucratic catch-22 system of permits that makes it nearly impossible to do almost anything if you are Palestinian. For example, Palestinians in East Jerusalem must pay $30,000 USD to apply for a home renovation permit. Almost all applications are denied, leading to a lot of "illegal" construction, which Israel then demolishes. (And the people whose home is demolished have to pay the state for the costs of the demolition!)

Nidal and others say their message for Americans and for others outside Palestine is that, while they appreciate the humanitarian aid foreigners provide, more than anything else, they just want to be treated as human beings. They want basic human rights and justice for their people. Nidal believes that a 2-state solution is no longer viable (more and more Palestinians are saying this now) because of all the walls and all the Israeli settlements (450,000 settlers)—these “facts on the ground” render the West Bank noncontiguous, as well as help maintain the pretext by which the IDF controls all borders and all movement. A Palestinian “state” under such conditions is not viable.

Back to my personal reaction for a moment: beyond the humanitarian crisis here (which is huge), I have been shocked by the amount of control and power exercised over the Palestinian people. This has been really staggering to take in. The IDF are intent on controlling so many aspects of daily life, from movement to physical safety to language and even, in some ways, thought. It’s not exaggerating to say that Palestinians life each day at great risk. Though I don't live here—and I know I can leave anytime—I have felt tense, fearful, and have a sense of confinement and helplessness that is hard to describe.

There is much more to say. I'll save that for future emails. I'll try to keep those shorter (figuring out what to leave out is really hard).

Thanks for reading and my best to all of you,
Ruppat Rani