Today is officially the one week anniversary of my coming to live in Nablus, a city in the north of the West Bank, though it feels like an eternity. Everyday the seven of us living in our apartment wake up at around 530, travel in all directions of the city and set off to spend the day becoming experts on the many methods of picking and collecting olives, and in many ways these days have been some of the best in my recent memory, and yet some of the most sobering. The purpose of the accompaniment program is to help to deter the possibility of settler violence, military violence and in general exercise solidarity in one of the most essential parts of a Palestinian's life in this region, or really in them all, in the land. Once we arrive in a village there is normally a period in which we have to wait for the magistrate representative to show up, or as we often suspect, wake up. We are then assigned to the family picking in the most dangerous area that day, normally nearest to the settlement which inevitably, for most villages, is never too far away, normally placed above on some hilltop ruining the horizon. Most days go on with no problem and aside for the mini war which those of the Islamic fate have across the board been waging for my half arab soul, or far more commonly the war Palestinian women wage for our hands in marriage for their available young sons, they are normally wonderful days, we drink a lot of tea, eat a lot of hummus, have the excuse to climb some of the most amazing trees and laugh more than anyone doing physical labor should. Many times the conversations are rather stunted seeing as most of us internationals are working on very low levels of arabic and a lot of the palestinians know very little english but somehow the most intricate messages can be conveyed, namely those of political and historical value. My british friend cannot escape a day without Balfour being brought up and I certainly will never escape one without mention of the israeli lobby in America, though the conversation definitely takes an interesting turn whenever it is discovered that I am Libyan, one based on the pretense that I am most certainly lying when I say that the green book is not hidden somewhere in my sidebag. On a side note I have recently discovered that one of my international friends has had dinner with good old Momar and somehow accidentally had the green book in her bag last time she came through Israeli security, but still got in.
In general our presence is graciously recieved and most people believe that our presence does deter settler violence, seeing as settlers have had to come to terms that they are fighting the PR war, that their cruel and violent attacks, mainly with no retributions, are starting to be noticed especially when internationals with cameras are present, but that doesn't mean that our job cannot seem frustratingly futile a lot of times. The Israeli Occupation Forces (otherwise known as the IDF) have come up with a plethora of warrants and decrees that stop us from entering the fields and effectively seem to make our presence more of a nuisance than anything else. Also with low numbers of internationals right now it is impossible for us to be everywhere that violence is likely to occur and many times organization is not always key to the Palestinians who understandably sometimes wish to not have to discuss with three different people their plans to go and harvest their own land. But in many ways that is the point, the army has made it so that even the land that the settlers have not already stolen is impossible to access outside of a few times during the year, farmers arrive to find trees that have been in their family for hundreds of years are burned to the ground, cut down, ruined by chemical and sewage waste from the illegal settlements or simply barren from forced neglect. Though not all of the farmers depend solely on the harvest for their economic stability, many of them do, and just as with all occupations, a strong sense of capitalism has been forced on what was once a different kind of society and a bad harvest can mean something far worse than it ever did before.
Its this dicotomous manner of living that has been so hard for me to wrap my head around, that a people with so much hope, even more pride and overwhelming kindness can live in such a harsh reality. I know it is nonsensical of me to expect that people do not go on living, but the palestinian people do it in a way that simply cannot go unmentioned.
In the past three days there have been a rising number of settler attacks in our area, all of which we were always just a little too far away from to respond any differently than a journalist could, and so there is a definite level of frustration in the air, both with one another and with the various other groups that we work with, but we continue to remind ourselves that we are doing our best and that the thing about detering violence by being a witness is that you do not witness, we never know when there was a real victory because a victory is a quiet day. What has added to the frustration though is the fact that in the Ramallah area three boys have been shot in the past three days by the IOF and every night this week someone has been beaten up at the Hawarra checkpoint nearest to our house, and every single death is used against the Palestinians in the news, every paper claiming that there is a renewed intifada, making their deaths sound necessary instead of the violent acts of military terrorism taht they most likely were.
We do all seem to find solace in one another in the apartment though, despite our overwhelming differences. My roomates are; a"professional" witch(actually, listed that way in the phonebook) from Iceland who has children older than me and is the epitome of delightful, especially when she recounts her sex life, a lone traveller of the middle east from Austria, an antifa lifer who describes himself as "the only nerd of the radical left in my country" from Finland, a lawyer/exdrug cartel/friend of the wu-tang clan from the UK, a very nice long termer from Australia and a maid from Quebec. Nightly discussions are not exactly what my expectations would have depicted them as but certainly always entertaining.
Beofre I came to Nablus I was staged for my entrance into the ISM world with a training in Ramallah, and though it definitely was straight forward on a lot of the facts, like, what ways are best to deal with industrial strength tear gas, how to effectively "de-arrest" someone, how to escape being detained and what actions will surely get you deported, there was also a lot of really great discussion of what ISM stands for that I think made everyone in the room feel that much more confident in why we had come here, that is with the exception of the psuedo ex hippie from veterans for peace who was the sole believer that throwing stones was a "violent act", insisted on patronizing me in every political discussion and knew so little about middle eastern culture that most of us tried to not listen to him out of embarassment.
On a final note, I was on Al Jazeera on Tuesday night, like arabic language Al Jazeera with a live interview, and am now recognized by taxi drivers and shop keepers alike, which is really fun and really annoying all at the same time. Alright so I am going to end this monstrous post and go try and cook some dinner for the people who had to pick all day seeing as through scheduling error I kind of had the day off.