Spring 2007 Communique
Dear Birthright Unplugged friends,
We’re back in Boston after another successful season of Unplugged and Re-Plugged trips, and are writing to tell you about our work this past winter and what we experienced in Palestine . We are receiving more Unplugged applications than ever before and are able to select people who will become involved in related social justice work after the trip. Finding participants for our Re-Plugged trips has never been a problem, as millions of Palestinian people would love to see their ancestral lands.
Our season began as a Palestinian-American colleague who we had planned to work with on a documentary was detained at the airport for two days, denied entry to the country, and boarded on a plane against her will. This case is only one of thousands since Israel has begun prohibiting Palestinian people with foreign passports from entering Palestine .
Movement restrictions affect not only entry into Palestine , but travel throughout the region as well. During our last trip in summer 2006, there were more than 700 physical barriers to movement in the West Bank (checkpoints, roadblocks, trenches, sniper towers, etc.). There are now around 500 of these barriers, but we find that people’s movement and access is restricted in other less tangible ways and that people are actually traveling less, not more, than we have ever seen before.
This winter twenty participants, ages 12-67, joined our Unplugged trips. One participant came on the trip to learn more for the Bar Mitzvah project he is working on. Many of our participants stayed in Palestine afterwards to continue the work with connections they established on our trip. All of our participants are interested in working for justice in the region, and many have already become involved in organizing efforts in the US and Canada since returning home.
Throughout the six days that our Unplugged groups traveled together, we heard stories of the effects of the continued US embargo against the Palestinian government and people. We heard about longtime Birthright Unplugged friends receiving demolition orders for their homes. We saw countless Palestinian people denied passage from city to city and village to village within the West Bank . And, as always, we heard and saw examples of daily life under occupation and the constant struggle to survive and resist injustice.
Every season we take our Unplugged groups to visit the city of Khalil/Hebron , a city that experiences more settler violence than any other. One neighborhood we always visit is Tel Rumeida, an area with a handful of ideological Jewish Israeli settlers living amongst the few Palestinian families that remain in their homes. To protect these settlers, dozens of soldiers patrol the streets at all hours, and the Palestinian residents must pass through three checkpoints and a metal detector just to reach their homes. During our first trip this year, as we tried to visit the family we have visited with so many other groups, we passed through the first checkpoint rather quickly, but at the second checkpoint were stopped. We waited in the rain while the Israeli soldiers took their time consulting their commander on the phone. We could see the family’s home 50 meters in front of us on the right side of the street, and the settlement trailer an equal distance on the left side. Finally a soldier informed us that the family could not receive visitors today, that we must have special permits to be in the area.
When we returned with our second group a month later, we were also prohibited from completing our trek up the hill to the home, but the owner of the house came to meet with us on the street corner, informing us as he pointed at a woman up the street that the true army commander of the area was Sarah, a settler who he says makes decisions about who can and can’t enter the neighborhood.
This and many other experiences inspired our Unplugged participants to become active immediately after the trips ended. Many people became involved directly with organizations on the ground right after our trips ended. One person went to teach English and learn Arabic with children in a Palestinian circus, one person began training to lead tours with the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, one person helped research land records for a Palestinian family displaced from Jerusalem in 1948, and several people volunteered with the International Women’s Peace Service and other organizations supporting Palestinian nonviolent resistance. In addition, two of our alumni staffed our Re-Plugged trip, accompanying the Palestinian children we travel with.
This winter our Re-Plugged trip began in Balata refugee camp, the largest camp in the West Bank . Located in Nablus , Balata is also one of the most dense camps, with around 24,000 people living inside one square kilometer. Approximately 14,000 of these people are children under the age of 18, and we partnered with the Yafa Cultural Center to take 26 of these girls and boys to visit Jerusalem , the sea, and the villages that their grandparents were expelled from in 1948.
Nablus is surrounded by checkpoints that have become increasingly difficult to cross since 2000. Oftentimes the checkpoints are closed altogether, with nobody able to leave the city. The best case scenario is that people of certain ages and with certain permits are able to cross after waiting in hot sun or cold rain, depending on the time of year.
The day we crossed with the children of Balata, we found the checkpoint “open.” We arrived at the checkpoint after a five minute drive in eight taxis from the camp. We reminded the children that if asked they should say we were going to Ramallah, because movement from Nablus to Jerusalem is even more heavily controlled than movement from Nablus to Ramallah. With our foreign passports and the children’s young ages, we were able to pass through the checkpoint relatively quickly, moving past a couple hundred people who continued to wait. One of the boys who looks older than he is was stopped and questioned, but joked his way to the other side, where we boarded the yellow-plated bus bound for Jerusalem .
In Palestine/Israel, Israelis and people with Jerusalem ID drive yellow-plated vehicles, enabling them freedom of movement that West Bank Palestinians do not have with their green-plated cars. We suspected that with our yellow-plated bus with Hebrew writing on the side, we would not be stopped at any other checkpoints. In case we were, though, we carried the children’s birth certificates with us, proving that they were under 16 years old and thus technically not prohibited from traveling because they did not yet carry Israeli-issued ID cards.
Over the next two days, as we traveled with the children, we shared another wonderful and bittersweet journey. We arrived in Jerusalem on a Friday, when thousands of other Muslim Palestinian people were entering the old city. Many of the children joined the crowds in prayer at Al Aqsa mosque, the third holiest site in Islam. After the prayer, a visit to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, a walk through the old city, and lunch, we headed to the sea in Yaffa. On the way, the children laughed, sang, and listened to the bus driver as he told us historical information about where we were and what we were seeing.
Upon arrival at the sea, the children were so excited that they ignored the cold and windy January rain as they ran into the sea. We had been sharing our phones with the children all day so they could talk with their families, and at one point a girl approached Dunya and asked to call her sister. Dunya dialed and handed the girl the phone, who did not even greet her sister before saying, “hold on,” and running to the sea to hold the phone directly above the ocean waves.
At the end of this long day, we gathered at a Palestinian youth center and school in Yaffa where we thought we would be spending the night. Only 24 hours before we had contacted people at the center, and by the time we arrived we were informed that every child would have a home to stay in. We were thrilled, and most of the children happily introduced themselves to their hosts who, though Palestinian, live in a very different situation than the children from Balata. Even the children who were somewhat apprehensive returned in the morning with smiles as they showed us pictures they had taken with their host families.
That morning we took a brief tour of the old city of Yaffa , since most of the families in Balata are from this area. We then set off with a Palestinian guide to find the villages that the children were from. Our first stop was Yazur, a Palestinian village of 4,030 people before it was occupied and its population expelled in April of 1948. The village is now an Israeli town called Azur. The village mosque, built in the 1600s, is the only building still remaining, and is now a synagogue. The old village cemetery is now buried under a new Israeli highway. Unlike some of the other villages that we have visited on prior Re-Plugged trips, the village of Yazur now reflects a pattern of urban sprawl that has almost completely replaced the Palestinian heritage of the area.
What we found in the second village, Arab As-Sawalimeh, was quite similar. In this village, it is a school room and not the mosque that remains to this day, and the building is now used not as a synagogue but as a yeshiva, a school for religious Jewish study. As we walked through the streets and playgrounds of the new Israeli community that has been built on the ruins of the old village, the children photographed stones from what may have been their grandparents’ homes, and gathered oranges from trees that their grandparents may have planted.
We headed back towards Nablus with the children, their oranges, and cameras filled with photos. Over the next two weeks we worked with the children to narrow their 1,200 photos down to the 30 that we would use in their exhibit. The day of the exhibit, like the days of our trip, was also double-edged. The night before a man from Balata had been killed by Israeli forces, and while the children were celebrating their exhibit, the camp was burying one of its young men. The children photographed the burial and other aspects of their life in the camp, and we printed a second copy of the exhibit to bring back to the US .
The exhibit is now hanging at the Honan-Allston branch of the Boston Public Library, and is available to travel more after May. In addition, the children’s channel of Al Jazeera joined us on our Re-Plugged trip and made a 3 minute piece that will air throughout the Middle East on Nakba Day (May 15 – the day that marks Israel’s declaration of statehood and Palestinian people’s displacement and dispossession).
We have attracted the attention of several journalists in recent months, some of whom have joined us for part or all of our Unplugged and Re-Plugged trips. Journalists from Ha’aretz, the Boston Globe, and National Public Radio (NPR) have all worked on stories about us that have yet to air. We will let you know if and when they do.
We are currently accepting applications for our summer Unplugged trips and hope to work with children from The Freedom Theatre of Jenin refugee camp on our Re-Plugged trip.
Thank you, as always, for your support and interest in our work.
With love,
Hannah and Dunya
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