Returning home from Palestine/Israel has been like entering another world.
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Any Jewish person has the right of return, return to a place she or her family has never been. No Palestinian person has the right to return to the place of her birth or her family home. Opposing the expansion of Zionism is not anti-Semitic.
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I saw Palestine today. Endless foothills without many signs of life. I can tell that someone lives there because the hills have been sculpted like steps leading to somewhere. It looks like a massive undertaking, carving steps from bottom to top, the full circumference of the foothill of a mountain.
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Last week we visited the Tent of Nations south of Bethlehem. Daher Nassar greeted us so warmly with the biggest, most genuinely joyful smile, and showed us his family’s farm. Though almost completely surrounded by large, growing settlements, his family has legal papers documenting their title to the 100-acre hillside farm dating back to the Ottoman Empire.
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It is tempting to think of the word 'tent' as a metaphor for a gathering of peoples together. In the case of Palestinian Daoud Nassar it also has a literal meaning.
The Nassar family is one of the few Palestinian landowners who have an official paper deed to prove ownership of their land near Bethlehem.
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My ancestors spoke to me. No, they yelled at me, pulled and pushed me, argued and turned their backs on each other in my tense body. Our Olive Harvest Delegation visited the Palestinian hillside village of Lifta. Just outside Jerusalem, Lifta was attacked by the Haganah Zionist militia in December 1947.
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We witnessed the village of Lifta today - a village attacked by Zionist militias in 1947 and soon abandoned by its people as not to experience the reality of neighboring villages like Deir Yasin whose people were massacred. This story is similar to the story of over 500 Palestinian villages.
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This place, atop a roof surrounded by partial walls and ceiling of cinder blocks, tin, burlap and tarps, has a feeling like home. It's not the physical surroundings that feel familiar, but the strong sense of community that clearly lives here.
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At the end of the first day, I haven’t looked into the part of my brain that tells me how I feel about today’s trip. My main focus today was to shut up the part of my mind that judges and evaluates and let my inner most self soak in the surroundings, the people and their lives, the words of the speakers and the emotion in the spaces.
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I’m not sure what day it is but my husband and I left Cleveland, Ohio Thursday evening. We arrived after a 10 hour bus ride to Washington DC for orientation. I was eager to meet everyone embarking on this journey and to discover why they chose to travel to Palestine/Israel.
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We have been hearing a lot about what is called 'fake news'. We have indeed been getting filtered and biased news for decades. But unfiltered news can be learned by eyewitness accounts today through the miracle of direct digital communication. The following is what our delegation witnessed today.
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Over the mountains, over the sea and through Israeli security... "Are you with this group? Please go to the waiting area miss, we need to do another check on your passport. . . Why are you here? You've been here before? Then why did you come back?"
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The delegation is on the ground in Palestine this week during a unique historic moment — the 100th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration and the reconciliation deal between Fatah and Hamas political parties.
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