Listening to Palestinians
Now that the Obama administration's efforts to reach an agreement between Israel and Palestine are finally moribund, it is worth stepping back to ask what is really going on in this troubled part of the world. Understanding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict requires not only a grasp of cold facts and statistics, but an understanding of the daily experience of the real people who live on each side. American news media heavily emphasize Israeli perspectives, but provide few opportunities to hear directly from Palestinians. To help counter this imbalance, I am posting video clips of some of the Palestinians I spoke with on a recent trip.I begin with Joyce Ajlouny, who gave me a tour around Ramallah one morning. Joyce is the head of the Ramallah Friends School, a renowned K-12 coed Quaker school established in the 1800s. Her family is one of the original seven Christian clans that established Ramallah in the 1600s. Joyce's stories about her life were so riveting that I pulled out my camera, put it in video mode, and kept filming as she talked. Joyce was speaking informally and candidly just to me, but later I got her permission to share this video with a wider audience.
What does occupation mean?
I asked Joyce what living under occupation meant in terms of her daily life. In this clip, she begins by describing her early experiences of life under occupation (her brother being beaten up, her husband detained by soldiers in the middle of the night, her friend shot), and ends with a discussion of how the situation has changed since the Oslo accords of 1993 (Palestinians now control their educational system, but confiscation of water resources and land continue). Terraced hillside, olive trees, and new construction on the outskirts of Ramallah can be seen out the window as she talks:
What does Israeli settlement building mean?
The centerpiece of the Israeli occupation is the construction of Israeli settlements on Palestinian land. These settlements are connected to Israel proper by a network of roads cutting through the West Bank--that only Israelis are allowed to drive on. Joyce pulled over at one vantage point outside Ramallah to show me a settler-only road (visible in the valley in the clip), the Israeli settlement of Dolev (on the upper hillside to the right; the further one to its left is Talmon), and a large agricultural area that is controlled by the settlement, all built on confiscated Palestinian land. Across the valley on the ridge at the left you can see the Palestinian village of Al-Janiya, one of the oldest villages in the Ramallah district, with historical ruins dating back to the Romans.
What are Palestinian refugee camps; how did they come to be, and what are they like today? During the 1948 Israeli war of Independence, which Palestinians call the "Nakba," or "catastrophe," over 700,000 Palestinians left or were expelled from their homes in what is now Israel, and never allowed back...READ MORE
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