Time is Not Standing Still
It’s a difficult adjustment being home. I was welcomed with a huge family dinner through which I tried to condense five weeks of confusion into a coherent conversation. My pictures helped, but only so much. After dinner I went out to meet up with my friends. This may have been due to not having slept for 22 hours, but I sat there in a trance watching everything happen around me. This is what I had missed for five weeks.
I got the standard “How was Israel!?!?” question, to which I replied, “Well… actually, I was in Palestine. It was amazing/eye-opening/overwhelming/incredible/you fill in the blank.” Telling people I taught English made it easier for them to understand, but also skewed the real point of my trip. Every spring break or summer tons of high schoolers and college kids go to Costa Rica or Latin America or somewhere similar to teach English. But I felt like I was simplifying my whole reason for going to Palestine. A service trip to a tropical island isn’t the same as living in a war zone, albeit a relatively calm one. It’s not like living under an occupation. It’s also quite definitely not like a quasi-birthright trip for non-Jews to visit Israel, which is what one acquaintance assumed.
At the same time it’s my fault for not being clearer. How can I describe my experience in a way that resonates? How do I summarize what I haven’t yet figured out for myself? I feel like a reporter searching for sound bytes before my audience tunes out.
Despite the difficulties of discussing this controversial issue in the US, with young people who don’t particularly care, I am always surprised to find curiosity in the most unexpected people. My first night back, I ended up talking to a guy I know from high school for a while about my trip. He isn’t an activist or really political in any way, but some people seem to just have a gut reaction to things that are unfair. As I described how male Palestinians are viewed by Israel (basically that all males 18 - 40 are likely militants and bombers) and how many can’t travel outside their own city, I felt so incredibly gratified to hear him say “wow, I can’t even imagine.” It’s that basic compassion and putting yourself in someone else’s shoes that bring about awareness and change.
It’s tough to see how disconnected my world at home is from the conflict. I sit watching everything happen around me at parties and wonder what’s happening in Nablus. Well, I already know: everything is the same. The summer festival with its nightly concerts is continuing for another week, kids are still having water fights at summer camp, men are still being turned around by IDF soldiers when they try to travel out of the city, gunshots still ring out at night during IDF raids. I’m here, going out on friends’ boats and tanning and shopping and realizing that while I’m thinking of the occupation from time to time throughout my day, the majority of even my closest friends don’t really understand the situation there or why I’m so passionate about the issue.
I read in the news about more Palestinian families being thrown out of their homes because settlers allegedly “own” their land in Occupied East Jerusalem (backed up by forged documents from the Ottoman Empire). What is Israel doing? Anyone can see that instead of forcing Palestinians out all at once, it’s simply a gradual transfer of Palestinians from their own land in order to expand Israel’s definition of Jerusalem. The injustice continues whether I’m here or there. I guess here I can at least tell people about what’s going on. Let’s just hope they don’t label me crazy.
