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I lived with my family in Israel from 1982 to 1989 while working for Save the Children (SCF) and Catholic Relief Services (CRS), mainly in the West Bank and Gaza. I managed a CRS-sponsored “Health Education” project there from 1984 to 1989. The five-year project provided training programs in 160 villages in the West Bank and Gaza. As a result of the recent violence there, many have asked me whose side I am on. This is a complicated question that I can’t answer without relating some of my experiences there that formed my opinion.
Going with Israel?
During my work in the West Bank (WB) and Gaza, I often had to take public transportation. I also frequented small shops, delis, and people’s homes. As soon as people recognized that I was an American, the conversation usually went to politics: “Why does America hate Palestinians?” “Does America understand what we are up against?” These were typical questions which I couldn’t answer since I witnessed their plight daily and had no idea what was driving the U.S. policies toward Israel.
During these conversations, I always asked them this one question: “If you had a choice to go with Israel or Jordan, which would you choose?” In those days, the idea of a Palestinian state was not an option. The answer I got almost exclusively (certainly over 90 percent of the time) was that they would go with Israel. This astonished me given their presumed hatred for Israel.
Orthodox. Faithful. Free.
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When I asked why, they usually gave me three reasons: 1) They preferred Israel’s justice system over Sharia law. In their experience, Sharia law favored the big families who had all the power. 2) They wanted better infrastructure. The Arab towns and cities that were annexed to Israel after the 1948 and 1967 wars (like Haifa) had much better roads, telecom systems, water and sewer systems, etc. 3) Palestinians who had relatives in Israel (like Haifa) seemed to have a better life. They could still practice their faith, get jobs, and live without the threat of their neighbors. I have certainly had conversations with Palestinians who would disagree, but these were usually academics, Islamic extremists, or journalists. There was a stark contrast in their opinions.
The Settlements
From 1984 to 1986, Shimon Peres was Israeli president with the labor party. Due to a two-year split between the labor and Likud parties, Yitzhak Shamir took over for the next two years from 1986 to 1988. Peres reversed the policies of his predecessor, Menachem Begin, by halting (or at least slowing down) building new settlements in the West Bank and Gaza. At that time, you could see floods of Jews in the Arab markets and there was almost no violence in the land.
As soon as Shamir took over, everything changed, mostly because he escalated building new settlements. I drove through the Territories (West Bank and Gaza) almost every day. During those drives, I would see a construction trailer on one of the hills, followed by large construction equipment, followed by fences around the perimeter, and finally, large, imposing, white stone apartment buildings all built on land taken without permission or compensation from its Arab owners.
As you would expect, this sparked resistance, which mostly took the form of stone throwing. Jewish cars have yellow license plates and Arab cars have blue license plates. Over the next five years, I myself was stoned over 19 times because my CRS-provided car was registered in Israel and had yellow plates.
The Intifada
As violence escalated and Israeli fears grew with the bad press from the Israeli media like The Jerusalem Post, the Israeli public began to vote Likud from then on. Each subsequent Likud government put more pressure on the Palestinian population, mostly through the expansion of new settlements. The resistance on the part of the Palestinians was called the “intifada” (uprising in Arabic). This impacted everyone, including those (like me) living in East Jerusalem, the West Bank, or Gaza. There were “strike days” where Palestinians would burn tires, block roads, and try to disrupt public commerce. There were times when we would be confined to our homes for weeks. Probably the most dramatic thing that I witnessed during this time was an incident in a town called Beita.
Beita was a small, mostly agricultural village just south of Nablus. CRS had a training center there and one of the village health instructors lived there. One day, we heard from the Jerusalem news sources that an Israeli girl had been killed there and the Israeli forces (IDF) were sent to Beita to restore order. Beita was put under curfew (no one could go in or out), and the Israeli military bulldozed their olive groves and killed and wounded several villagers.
After the dust settled, I was finally able to enter the village and speak to the people who lived there, whose stories I have since corroborated. A group of Israeli settlers, including high school students, were hiking through the West Bank led by an armed man. They left the Nablus road in order to presumably take a shortcut through the Beita village.
Two teenage boys working in the field approached them to tell them not to go through the village but to continue on the road to avoid trouble. These days, tensions were high in the West Bank. The settlers argued with the boys, killing one of them. The other ran to the village yelling that “the Jews are coming!” The settlers proceeded into the village where they met with villagers. This happened directly under the window of the CRS staff person, who witnessed everything.
The villagers tried to persuade the settler to put away his gun. When he refused, they tried to disarm him. In the melee, a shot was fired, hitting one of the Israeli students in the head and killing her. The army was called. They bulldozed the village’s olive groves and destroyed 15 houses of people suspected to be involved in the “murder.” Several unarmed villagers were killed. I heard this story from the mother of the first boy who was shot as we sat on the rubble of her home. Her story was corroborated by our own staff person and other villagers who witnessed the event, and I believe it to be true. People were wandering around in a daze wearing white robes.
The Jewish media coverage of what happened in Beita was first false, then it disappeared. I don’t believe that the Israeli public ever knew what actually happened there that day. From what they knew, the actions of the government were justified. During the years of the intifada, over 1,000 Palestinian youth were killed, mostly for throwing stones.
Subhia Ghenem
One of the women who worked for the CRS “Health Education” project was Subhia Ghenem. She was from a village near Tulkarem (I don’t remember which one). She began to miss our once-a-week meetings and was absent for several months. Due to the constant curfews and other problems with travel and communication, no one knew where she was and assumed that she had quit.
One day, she showed up. When I asked her where she had been, she told me that her husband had been killed. He was stabbed to death on her front porch by a neighbor who accused him of “colluding with Israel” because he allegedly tried to get a job there. There was no trial, no justice. Apparently, it was OK with the rest of the villagers who, even if they disagreed with the murder, wouldn’t dare speak up.
Ruti and Yossi
Our first year in Israel, we lived on the West (Jewish) side of Jerusalem and became friends with a young Israeli couple named Ruti and Yossi. We met them through my wife’s birthing classes. Ruti and my wife were both pregnant with their first child. Yossi was in the IDF reserves (Milu’im), as was every male Israeli citizen between 18 and 65. He knew that I worked on the East (Arab) side, and he would often go to Salah Eddin Street with me to exchange money. He and Ruti had no beef with the Palestinians and had a pretty good working knowledge of Arabic. They were the “Sabra” or Israeli-born Jews. They weren’t religious or particularly ideological. We considered them as friends. They would say that the Palestinians were their “brothers,” a comment I heard from many Palestinians as well. They hoped that one day they would live together in peace.
Whose side am I on?
To get back to the original question of “Whose side am I on?” the answer is both. It was clear to me in the 1980s that there was willingness on the part of the everyday Palestinians and Israelis to live together in peace. I am not on the side of the radical Islamic academics, regimes, and movements who use the Palestinians as pawns for political reasons, using threats of violence to control the people. Neither am I on the side of the radical Israeli activists and politicians who refuse to acknowledge their crimes against the Palestinians and continue their settlement policies which are a direct violation of international law.
I truly believe that if there had been an anonymous election in the West Bank and Gaza in 1982, Palestinians would have voted to become part of Israel and we wouldn’t be having these conversations today. Clearly, things have changed since then, and I don’t know what would happen today. But I believe that the yearning for peace in the hearts of everyday Palestinians and Jews is the same.
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