21 October 2017

Swiss cheese Palestine map

Before we visited it, Palestine’s largest city Hebron was described to me as “the occupation on steroids.” When you see the map of Israeli settler colonies in the West Bank, it looks like Swiss cheese, with the Palestinian territories resembling (ever shrinking) holes. Touring Hebron, I felt as though this same dynamic was manifesting at the level of the city block. We walked through the Palestinian souk in H2—the section of the old city under Israeli military control—where at street level, Palestinian merchants still operate their storefronts, while Israeli settlers occupy the floors above. Nets catch trash and rocks thrown by the settlers out their windows at the Palestinians. Each Saturday, settlers walk the souk in propaganda tours, accompanied by 1-2 Israeli Defense Forces or Border Police Officers per settler, and are known to be particularly hostile. A settler in a tour group once said to our guide Usama, “This is our land. We’ll occupy it all. We’ll kick you out, and kill all Arabs.”

Screens protect Hebron residents from trash thrown from above

I’ve been excited to visit Christian Peacemaker Teams’ (CPT) Hebron office, having been aware but not deeply knowledgeable of their work for some time. CPT staff and volunteer delegations provide Palestinians in Hebron, particularly children, with accompaniment, witness, nonviolent intervention, and other actions to help reduce the severity of violence they experience from Israeli Defense Force officers, and to document human rights violations.

CPT presentation

Listening to CPT’s presentation, I was impressed by the intentionality of their method, which prioritizes partnerships with the people most directly affected, following their lead regarding how and in what ways to intervene. We watched a video that one of their peacemakers shot, documenting a military officer’s excessive use of force on a Palestinian teenager. In addition to this documentation, the peacemaker’s intervention included calmly but emphatically drawing attention to the officer’s actions, by repeatedly demanding that he loosen his chokehold to allow the young person to breathe, and asking what the young person was accused of having done.

Amongst social justice-committed people of my generation and younger, I have felt like pacifism has begun to acquire a bit of a bad rap, associated with the complacency of privileged individuals who make theoretical arguments against violence while doing little to address injustice. The peace that they seek is one of comfort and the absence of conflict. The work of the Christian Peacemaker Teams reminds me that pacifism can be active, risk-taking, and maybe even a bit militant. In the social movements course for high school students that I teach each summer, I try to highlight instructive historical examples of faith-based pacifists, such as the folks (mostly church people) who committed civil disobedience by providing housing for individuals escaping conflicts in Central America during the sanctuary movement of the 1980’s, or the Quakers who in the late 1970’s broke into the FBI headquarters in Media, Pennsylvania and exposed the abuses perpetrated by the FBI’s Cointelpro program. There is currently a very robust conversation amongst young people about what it means to be a person with privilege, and operate as an ally to those who are systemically marginalized. To me, these examples provide compelling models for an approach to allyship that is especially relevant in situations like the one our Pilgrimage has been seeking to understand in Palestine.

~ Tim Jones-Yelvington