Imagine finding yourself surrounded by a group of armed forces, their guns and fists forcing themselves on your body, in the distance are the screams of your friends and family. Everyone is being forced out of their homes, your neighborhood is being violently emptied to be replaced by settlers who proclaim “if I don’t steal [your home] someone else will.” You are thrown on the concrete, your homes are sprayed with skunk water, teargas, and stun grenades.
Palestinians need little imagination to build this image in their minds. This is because the bruised bodies and empty homes testify to this reality as one that is lived from generation to generation since 1948, what we mark as the beginning of our Nakba (catastrophe) when the process of Israeli colonization began stealing our lands, our homes, and our right to exist as a people.
For more than a decade, Palestinian families from the Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah have led weekly demonstrations with the hope to garner international solidarity to stop the impending plan by the colonial Israeli government and settler organizations relentlessly working to force all Palestinian families in the neighborhood out of their homes. The families and community of Sheikh Jarrah need our support.
Text and art by Shirien Creates
TZVIA THIER
I was born in Romania during the Second World War. When I was six, in the wake of the Holocaust, my family immigrated to Israel. There, I grew up in Tel Aviv, spent years on a kibbutz, and was part of a “socialist Zionist” youth movement called HaShomer HaTzair. While serving in the army, I volunteered to teach in the Negev, mainly immigrants from North Africa. I continued as a teacher and a principal until I moved to the United States, where I taught at a Jewish day school and created curricula for Jewish and Zionist organizations. In 1995, I moved back to Israel and lived in Jerusalem. I was a liberal Zionist and felt strongly connected to Israel. I believed that Israel should withdraw from the Occupied Territories and blamed the settlements and the settlers for the occupation. I was against wars, racism, and discrimination, and felt that I had good values. I did not know that I lived behind an invisible wall. I did not know how much I did not know.
As a child, like any child, I was influenced by people and institutions around me: teachers, youth leaders, media, ceremonies, and the entire apparatus in the country. My education began in first grade, or I should say more accurately, my indoctrination began then. Starting in first grade on Fridays, before dismissal, the teacher used to pass around the “blue box,” asking for donations (which were mandatory) to the Jewish National Fund (JNF). We knew that the JNF was reclaiming the desert, planting trees, creating parks. Not a word about how it was instrumental in the expulsion of the indigenous Palestinians.
We had bible studies three to five hours a week in the second through twelfth grades. The Bible was used as a historical document that gave us, the Jewish people, the right to live in the promised land. In other words, a secular society was using a great collection of ancient writings, putting God in the position of a real estate agent.
We learned how the Holocaust survivors came to rebuild their lives in Israel. The fact that the Europeans had committed these horrible crimes, yet the indigenous in Palestine were the ones paying for them, did not cross my mind. Arabs were described as primitive cowards who took off their shoes and ran away. Or they were described as cruel people, hosting you nicely, but when you turn to leave, stabbing you in the back. We were told only the Zionist narrative, as expressed in Israeli literature, poetry, songs, history, and ceremonies. That is, only the Ashkenazi Israeli narrative. The expulsion of some 750,000 Palestinians, and over four hundred villages that were razed to the ground and replaced by Jewish towns, villages, and kibbutzim, or by JNF forests and parks, were not part of the story. I learned that, in the struggle over Palestine, my enemies were the Arabs and the British. I belonged to a particular society, and I knew who I was. It was my identity.
Tzvia with her family in Israel
Photo by Uri Thier
The 1967 war pushed me into thinking more about my political stand. The West Bank occupation, the settlements, and the right-wing settlers were for me the main political wrongdoing. It was not that I ignored the Nakba; I did not know this term at all, and 1948 remained holy in my mind. In this piece of land, Israel-Palestine, the population is divided about half and half between Jews and Palestinians. When Israelis say Palestinians, they can be referring to the Palestinian citizens of Israel—the so-called “1948 Arabs”—or those under military rule in the Occupied Territories who are not citizens.
Through most of my life, I did not have any contact with Palestinians, not one friend, acquaintance, or neighbor. The Palestinians were on the dark side of the moon. I never went to Arab towns, definitely not to the West Bank or Gaza (before the blockade). Sometimes, while driving to the north, I would stop at one of the Arab restaurants located along the roads to eat some good Arabic food. I lived in Jerusalem, the “united Jerusalem,” where 40 percent are Palestinians (residents, not citizens). I never went to Occupied East Jerusalem. I saw Palestinians cleaning the streets, planting flowers to beautify my city, working on building construction, carrying products in the supermarkets, and washing dishes in restaurants, but I really did not see them.
“Where a man cannot look, he cannot feel,” writes Richard Forer in his book, Breakthrough: A New Perspective on the Israel-Palestine Conflict, “and where a man cannot feel, he has not really looked. Without both he will never understand.” A deep fear has been instilled in our veins. I did not dare to cross the street to the Palestinian side. There is no need for formal segregation in Israel; it is enforced perfectly through this deep fear: two completely separate entities. This is a perfect way to dehumanize the other. “They” become demons, and you keep out of their space.
A major turning point for me came in November 2009. I heard on the news that the court ruled to evict two Palestinian families from their homes in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah. I knew nothing about this matter. I only vaguely knew where Sheikh Jarrah was, even though it sits in a very busy location alongside the Hebrew University, Hadassah Hospital, and the French Hill, where I lived for a couple of years in the 1990s, unaware that I was a settler living in a settlement. What I learned was that two families were being thrown into the street. It infuriated me. But when I heard that there was a group of people protesting the eviction, I did not join. I was not familiar with Palestinian neighborhoods, and on Jerusalem city maps, these neighborhoods are blank.
And … I was afraid. My daughter, Daphna, insisted on going there. I joined her; I had to protect her. Together, we found Sheikh Jarrah. This was the first time in my life—at the age of sixty-five, after living in Israel for fifty-nine years—that I had conversations with Palestinians! I realized that it was not my daughter who needed to be protected, but the Palestinians. My journey had begun. Sheikh Jarrah was my doorway to end the fear. I joined the weekly protests on Friday afternoons, where I met Palestinians and Jewish-Israeli activists. It was then that I started my inquiry. I wanted to see, I wanted to know.
My first tour was with the left advocacy group Ir Amim, to East Jerusalem. I was shocked. It is a third-world city. In this “united Jerusalem,” the Palestinian neighborhoods don’t look like the Jerusalem in which I lived. We were driving on narrow, bumpy, unpaved roads with no sidewalks. The schools we saw were very poor and inadequately staffed and resourced. There were no playgrounds, and the piled-up garbage was rarely collected. Israeli authorities carry out a tremendous effort to Judaicize East Jerusalem, and house demolitions are an important part of that. Demolishing Palestinian houses that had been built without permit is the pretext, yet permits are denied—a Catch-22. We met Palestinians and listened to their frustrating, sad stories. Their status as residents can be revoked easily, which indeed has been done frequently. Since the Oslo Accords, around fifteen thousand Palestinians have lost their residency; because they dared to go abroad, they lost their right to return home.
Later, I joined Machsom Watch, an Israeli women’s group that monitors soldiers and police at checkpoints, to tour the northern part of the West Bank. There, I observed poverty and restrictions on mobility, such as checkpoints that look like passages for cows and separate Palestinian villages and towns from each other. At these checkpoints, Palestinians are kept waiting for hours, from two or three in the morning, as they try to get to work on time or go to school or a hospital. They are processed like herds of animals.
Breaking the Silence is an organization of former IDF soldiers that attempts to show the realities of everyday life in the Occupied Territories. In 2018, I went on a Breaking the Silence tour to Hebron. This is one of the biggest cities in the West Bank, with about 200,000 Palestinians and around 1,000 Jewish settlers. It was hard to believe what my eyes witnessed. The once vivid city market had turned into a ghost town.
In Hebron, the stores are closed, with locked and welded doors. The streets are divided: the larger part for Jews only, and a path (cars are not allowed) for Palestinians. Palestinian apartments are fenced on all sides, protected from the stones and garbage that settlers routinely throw at them. The occupants don’t have access to the street; they have to climb over the roof and then down a ladder to go to a store, school, or hospital. Hebron, with its roadblocks, concrete barriers, guard towers, and border police patrol is well controlled.
I felt anger, shame, sadness, and pain.
Tzvia in the South Hebron Hills with Ta’ayush
Photo by Uri Thier
Once, at a Friday demonstration in Sheikh Jarrah, a guy was asking people whether they were willing to volunteer and join Ta’ayush (which means partnership) to go to the South Hebron Hills. I did not know what Ta’ayush was. I signed up anyway and joined. I showed up at the meeting point on Saturday, at six in the morning, and off we headed south in a van. From that Saturday on, this was what I did every Saturday for three years: working together with Palestinians doing whatever was needed, including harvesting, cleaning cisterns, rebuilding what had been destroyed, and more. Being part of Ta’ayush has been one of the most meaningful times in my life, one of the most meaningful things I have ever done.
It has been hard work to examine my own mind. Many questions leave me wondering how I could have not thought about them before. My solid identity was shaken and then broken. I have been an eyewitness to the systematic oppression, humiliation, racism, cruelty, and hatred by “my” people toward the “others.” And what you finally see, you can no longer unsee.