The Land

It's been an absolutely exhausting two days. After our adventure in Hebron yesterday we finished the day at Daher's vineyard, where we spent the night sleeping in a tent. We all awoke today still quite exhausted. The family running the vineyard are very inspiring people - they are working so hard and with such integrity to be peacemakers in a situation where they are surrounded, literally, by people who wish they would disappear. They have spent over $130,000 trying to defend their right to their land. They work the land, growing grapes, olives and farming with goats and chickens. They run summer camps for children and youth teaching them peacemaking skills and trying to give them hope for the future in a world that could easily look hopeless. We had breakfast at the farm at 8:30 and by 9:30 were on the road again, hiking back to our bus.

We then visited Nahalim, a small Palestinian village squeezed between Bethlehem and the surrounding settlements. We met with a representative of the Holy Land Trust which works with local communities teaching principles of non violent resistance to villagers. Many of the women of the village and their children joined us for that meeting. They expressed their willingness to work with the Israelis, to co-exist with them in this land and reading between the lines they seemed to favor a one state solution, with Palestinians gaining full citizenship rights and everyone learning to live together. The village was tiny and in a run down state as are many Palestinian areas. I felt like I'd gone through a time warp when I saw a Palestinian woman, dressed in full Muslim hijab and long black dress riding a donkey down the street with her child beside her!

We then went to Bethelem and visited the Church of the Nativity and had about 15 minutes to do shopping, before going to Badil Resource Center, a NGO that works for Refugee rights in Palestine. They do amazing work with refugees and have published a lot of material that is helpful in explaining the complicated refugee problem in this conflict.

Then we headed to the Deheishah refugee camp. This camp has been here for 60 years and many of the original residents, who fled from their villages in 1948 are still here. They are now on the third generation in the camp. We had a walking tour through the camp, which looks more like a ghetto than a camp, with very narrow streets (pedestrian only) with crumbling buildings filled with graffiti. I kept asking myself why people would choose to stay living in such a place after so long but now know, having spent the past two days immersed in Palestinian culture, that to Palestinians, "THE LAND" is in their blood. As they put it, "the land is our mother." You can no more leave your land or sell it than sell your mother or your child. The Daher family have fought for years to keep their vineyard, and the refugees here refuse to leave this camp because they are determined at all costs to retain some claim to a right of return if peace is ever negotiated between Palestine and Israel. One woman, born here, now 42 years old and mother of four, told us how difficult life is under occupation and particularly living in the camp and begged us to tell her story when we get back home and not to forget the Palestinian people. But there is no way these people will do anything that might compromise their chance of returning to the villages from which their parents were expelled 60 years ago. The stories of the village are told to each successive generation so that each one believes that they belong to that village, even though they have not seen it or lived in it. The story of the Palestinian people is completely tied to THE LAND.

Must get to bed now. I'm in a dormitory room with 10 other women at the refugee camp and am ready to drop from exhaustion. Tomorrow we are off to Sderot before returning to Jerusalem. More anon...