Growing up under Occupation: in between game and reality

“One needs to spend at least two years here in order to get to know the situation in the West Bank well”, I was told few days ago by a local human rights activist. I have spent only two months. Most of the time I feel like I am in a place caught in the impossible, it just feels surrealistic. And my mind simply refuses to assimilate it. Often it takes me few days before I am capable of hearing my thoughts and then verbalizing my experiences here. During this time I find myself overloaded with people’s stories of suffering with no means to release them; I guess it will take me some time to “get used” to the situation here and have it not exhaust me mentally as much. Every family I get to interact with throughout the day has a story to tell: a settler’s attack they experienced, a family member missing or imprisoned, episodes of violence. What strikes me the most about it all is that these stories are usually not told intentionally. It’s not like we meet a family and they find it necessary to tell us about their troubles because they know we are internationals and we should be “educated” about the situation here. Instead their stories often come up unexpectedly in the course of the conversation; sometimes I hear them even by chance. It feels like they are part of the ordinary discourse and the ordinary life, nothing that really stands out in people’s memories and yet they are painful. Pain doesn’t stand out because it was always here. I guess this is what happens when you grow up under Occupation.

Two days ago we were back to Deyr Istya picking olives. Around noon the settlement’s security called the farmer and told him to leave the land (his land!) in five minutes because he didn’t have permission from the army to pick that day. He refused to leave. Then the army called and ordered him to leave once more. This time he complied. We had only three trees left to finish harvesting on this land. Half an hour more might have sufficed. “No, you have only five minutes, you can come back another day but now you have to go”. It didn’t make any sense… It was clear they just wanted to fool around. Leave now, but come at another time. Just so. And so we left. The settlement’s security car escorted us from distance as we walked away from the land not having had time to collect the olive bags off the land (a donkey was needed for that matter since we could not use the settler’s road that was nearby). It’s hard to describe how humiliating obeying this guy’s whim felt. Any interferring from us, the internationals, could have escalated the situation and created additional trouble for this family and so we did nothing. As we all got in the car, I listened to the conversation between the 4-year old that had witnessed the whole story and the 3-year old that had come with his brother to pick us up who didn’t know what had happened (the guys in the picture below).

The 4 year old explained that we had seen the “Bitachon” which would be the Hebrew word for “settlement security”. “Oh, is this like police?”, asked the 3 year old, eyes wide open. The 4-year old clarified this is different; these ones had M-16. “But you should not be afraid of them, you should just shake hands with them, this is what I do”, instructed the 4-year old knowledgeably and obviously proud of being the older one who knew the ropes. And indeed, this is the little guy whom I have seen myself greeting soldiers and “Bitachons” alike with not the slightest sign of fear. He did that today and the settlement security actually smiled, as shocking as this was. Now I just want to mention my ignorance in order for a comparison to be made between me and him: I learnt the Hebrew word for "security" and the fact that he had M16 from that very conversation, I had no clue about these details before.

Later I witnessed the pretend-game those two had. One of them pointed a gun toy at the other one’s head yelling rudely “Go!” and the other one followed the orders.They went around their yard a couple of times in this manner: “Go”, “Stop”, “Go”, “Stop”… At some point the boy with the gun pointed at his head got tired of the game and dropped out of it for which he was punished by being “shot”.

I myself keep on getting shot numerous times during the day by random kids playing with their toy guns, pointing them at me from cars passing by or while I'm walking by them in the street.

Yesterday we were picking olives again, this time at a different location, close to an army camp. A bit after we started working we saw two soldiers approaching us from the road. They were pointing their guns at us in a squatting position hiding behind a bush. They were such a ridiculous and absurd sight, it felt like an episode from some movie they must have seen and were enacting. After all, we were just picking olives, tarps on the ground and all, what were they doing, did they think we were a threat indeed? I couldn’t help but wave at them, it was my spontaneous reaction, I guess I did it to invoke some reality back to this situation. They returned later in their military jeep and ordered us to leave the land; we didn’t have permission to pick that day they said. The family actually did have permission but an oral not a written one and they couldn’t prove it so for about half an hour the soldiers would come, then go back and argue with us.

the military jeep stopping by

Usually we(activists) don’t interfere in such situation unless being asked to do so by the Palestinians we are with. This time I asked them if they minded me talking to the soldiers and the family welcomed the idea. Initially it was two soldiers, then more came, I started worrying this might get ugly as the family seemed determined to stay just as much as the soldiers were determined to make us leave. We had learned earlier in the day that three members from this family had been arrested after trying to plow this same land last year and questioned for 6 hours: what were they doing close to a military base without having sought permission first. I would say it must have been obvious: they were plowing their land. One of the soldiers seemed to really like his job. He asked us if we had taken pictures of them, then when we said we hadn’t, he yelled at my teammate Fred not to lie to him. During this conversation the youngest boy from the family(aged around 7) would stay really close to the soldiers and look at them and their guns up close with big curious eyes until an adult from the family would pull him back. I was observing one of those soldiers-teenagers (not more than 18 in age) if he would start feeling uncomfortable from us trying to obviously keep the kid away from him and maybe lower his gun that was almost in the kid’s face; he didn’t do anything of the kind. The whole story ended with another van of soldiers arriving, these ones happened to know of the permission the family had to be there that day and we were left alone and continued working eventually. I asked the boy’s father how come his kid wasn’t afraid of the soldiers and their guns. He answered: “Well, you know, we just had the Eid”[Eid al-Adha, Festival of Sacrifice, a big muslim holiday]. “Every Palestinian kid received a toy gun as a present. It’s all about war here. They are not afraid of guns”. So the soldier’s gun is like a toy to them? I wondered.

When leaving the land this day we were stopped by a flying checkpoint; soldiers were standing at the road stopping cars and checking documents, there were about 5 of them. One of them stood off the road and seemed to be entertained playing with a scope his gun had: he pointed it at different objects in order to look at them up close . There was nothing important he could possibly look at nearby, he was pointing it at random things, just as a kid playing with his toy indeed. A 18-19 year-old Israeli boy who have been given a gun and was playing around with it.