This guest post was written by John Hanna. John is an American/Palestinian, originally born in Nazareth and now based out of Nashville, TN. He has been living and volunteering in Palestine for the past year in an effort to rediscover his heritage and come to a clearer understanding of the ongoing conflict. John graduated in 2012 from Belmont University in Nashville, TN with a Bachelor of Arts in Religious Studies and a Minor in Philosophy. He currently has plans to return to the States in pursuit of a doctorate in psychology (unless he postpones that to live on a farm) while remaining politically active for justice in Palestine.

John writes:

I want to express my own feelings and thoughts on the current escalation of violence here in Palestine/Israel, but (and it’s highly encouraging) there has been such a flurry of articles and videos showing up all over the web informing people about the truth here, I sometimes wonder if I have anything to add. I think I do. And at the very least, I have an opportunity to communicate directly to my family and friends all over the world who may not be as privy to alternative media sources disrupting the mythical narratives of mainstream propaganda machines that distort the reality I live and breathe in Palestine.

Let me start by answering a question many of you have asked me since the missiles started flying: I am okay.

I am currently living in Bethlehem, which is located in the West Bank about five miles south of Jerusalem. Aside from nightly demonstrations taking place near the annexation wall on the north side of town, the daily routines and scenes of my life remain unchanged. I feel no immediate threat from the violence rising between Israel and Gaza. But I do feel sadness, anger, and frustration knowing mothers, fathers, and their children are needlessly dying in a war based on greed and racism less than an hour’s drive away. Do not be concerned for me. Be concerned for the people of Gaza.

This most recent outbreak of conflict is but another symptom of the issue that lies at the root of all conflicts in the Holy Land: Israeli Occupation. To understand why Hamas is motivated to make clearly futile attempts at damaging Israel by launching homemade rockets – attempts painfully analogous to the Palestinian children who throw rocks at Israeli tanks – one must recognize the sixty-six years of ethnic cleansing and systematic oppression that has plagued Palestinians since the creation of the Jewish State. Without knowing the historical context, any effort to make sense of today’s bloodshed is made in vain. Yet a heavily biased, inflammatory, non-contextual approach to the conflict is what most of us are presented through mainstream media.

At the core of the Jewish State is the ideology of Zionism. I’ll share my summary of its history and the creation of Israel from a previousarticle:

“Zionism is a movement that began at the end of the nineteenth century, which nationalized the Jewish people and declared Palestine their rightful homeland. Proponents of Zionism successfully motivated the Jewish colonization of Palestine, and, by end of the Second World War, Jewish immigrants constituted one-third of the area’s total population. Under the leadership of David Ben-Gurion, who went on to become Israel’s first Prime Minister, these Jewish settlers sought to capture and control as much of Palestine with the lowest number of remaining Arabs as possible.

On 10 March 1948, the Zionist leadership implemented its Plan Dalet to ethnically cleanse the country. The mass expulsion of Palestinians from Palestine was not a spontaneous consequence of retaliation or war, but rather a premeditated, coldly calculated program that had been formulated as an official Zionist strategy as early as 1937, eleven years before Israel was established. Israel’s second Prime Minister, Moshe Sharett, made the Zionists’ intentions clear: ‘We have forgotten that we have not come to an empty land to inherit it, but we have come to conquer a country from people inhabiting it.’ Prior to any conflict between Zionist forces and the Arab world, over 300,000 Palestinians had already been expelled from their homes and were subject to searches, seizures, executions and massacres such as that of Deir Yassin, a village of nearly 700 people, where Jewish paramilitary forces murdered over one hundred men, women and children. Due to the fact that most of Palestine’s leadership had been destroyed or expelled and their defensive capabilities disabled by the British in response to the 1936 Arab Revolt, Palestinians were left severely vulnerable to Zionist opposition.”

For many Jews, Zionism was the answer to the suffering they faced in Europe and elsewhere in the world. It promised a safe haven for the Jewish people, a place to call home where they could live without fear of anti-Semitic prejudice and persecution. This aspiration in and of itself is admirable. Yet the way Zionists implemented their plan amounts to deep hypocrisy. In fulfilling their dream of security and freedom, they threw the Palestinian people into a nightmare, dispossessing them of their land, their rights, and their dignity. When anyone questions Israel’s legitimacy, clichéd responses regarding the holocaust are quick to the fore. But one tragedy does not justify another. As Ilan Pappe, the Israeli historian, has put it: Imagine rescuing a battered women from her abusive spouse, taking her from her home to another’s, and kicking that family out so the suffering woman can find peace and solace in a new home. Is that just?

When Israel was established in 1948, 750,000 Palestinians, half of the total population at the time, fled or were forcibly removed from their homes. And those who were able to remain effectively became second-class citizens within the boundaries of an ethno-centric state. Those realities remain true today. The progeny of Palestinian refugees number around five million and still have no right to return to their homeland (in stark contrast to Israel’s Law of Return, allowing any Jew to gain immediate citizenship upon entering Israel). Palestinians in Israel suffer inequality institutionalized byat least fifty discriminatory laws. Those in the West Bank live under the shadow of a growing annexation wall that stands 25 feet tall and will extend 403 miles upon completion, over 50% of their land is occupied by nearly half a million Zionist settlers residing in over 200 settlements declared illegal under international law, and they remain subject to the capriciousness of Israeli military rule that goes so far as to imprison and torture children. And in Gaza, we are now witnessing the latest wave of atrocities Palestinians have come to face under Israeli rule, with a civilian death toll that has risen to 1000 — nearly 200 children — and continues rising as I write this. These atrocities mirror those enacted by Zionists sixty-six years ago to systematically cleanse historical Palestine of its indigenous population. Zionism has persisted with unwavering strength through Israel’s racist and belligerent policies toward Palestinians. Violence is at the heart of Zionism, and Zionism is at the heart of Israel.

Philosopher George Santayana’s ubiquitous sentiment that, “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it,” is epitomized by Israel’s failure to come to terms with its illegal occupation as the root cause of all the resistance it faces. To consider only recent history, in the past five years Israel has carried out three major offenses against the people of Gaza and the situation has only gotten worse. Israel continues to isolate itself among the international community, provoke continued violence from Hamas, and inflame tensions with the Palestinians inside its borders and in the West Bank who are bound to erupt under persistent persecution.

This latest round of conflict arguably began when three Jewish teens were kidnapped in June. Israeli officials had known almost immediately that they had been killed. Yet this information was suppressed and a gag order for the press commissioned. The Israeli Prime Minister immediately claimed that Hamas was behind the kidnappings, despite no evidence ever suggesting this, and his officials have now admitted that the kidnappers were acting alone. But merely making the claim was enough. Netanyahu’s government incited a wave of violence and racism across the land and had the pretext it needed for a massive military crackdown in the West Bank. As Israeli soldiers “searched” for the missing boys over the following weeks, nearly 800 Palestinians, purportedly associated with Hamas, were arrested, many being political prisoners that had recently been released by Israel during so called peace negotiations with the Palestinian Authority. A large number of the arrests were made under “administrative detention,” i.e. legalized kidnapping. When taken into administrative detention, no charges are ever presented or required, and the detained individual is never seen in front of a judge. In addition to arrests, Israel had “killed nine civilians and raided nearly 1,300 residential, commercial, and public buildings.” After this assault on Hamas and the Palestinian people, Hamas started what was claimed to be an “unprovoked” attack on Israel.

Israel is the occupying power, and as such it is incumbent upon the state to resolve this decades-long struggle by ending these provocations, these disproportionate and collective punishments for the actions of a few – in this case, the kidnappers – and by ultimately dismantling the entire infrastructure of occupation that strips Palestinians of their rights. Until this happens, the international community must recognize the right of Palestinians to actively resist injustice. The world must know victim from victimizer, and take action on both sides by supporting the Palestinian people and imposing sanctions on Israel until it conforms to internationally recognized standards of conduct.

Unfortunately, mass media is far from portraying the power imbalance that characterizes the conflict. Far too many news agencies utilize rhetoric that connotes an equal struggle on both sides. Or, especially in American media, audiences are simply presented Israel’s side with facile arguments for Israel’s right to defend itself against “terrorist” attacks. It is this word, “terrorist,” that is used so freely in our post-9/11 world to belie reality and manipulate popular opinion by appealing to the fears of listeners rather than their minds. It is a word that dehumanizes the victims of occupation, turning all of them into bearded bogeyman, and distorting what would otherwise be seen as a just struggle against severe oppression.

The Gaza Strip is one of the most densely populated places on the planet. 1.7 million Palestinians reside in 141 square miles of land, and in this strip of land every aspect of Palestinians’ lives are monitored and controlled by Israeli forces. Nothing can move in and out, whether people or supplies, without Israel’s consent, leading to food insecurity, water shortages (50% of Gazans have no access to potable water, and over 90% of the total water supply is unfit for consumption) and the mass psychological trauma that comes with living under siege. By no choice or actions of their own, Palestinians in Gaza are forced to live in a de facto open-air prison.

Why do Israel and its allies expect Gazans to accept these deplorable conditions of life, conditions enabled by Israeli policies that are tantamount to crimes against humanity, without resistance? How can they continue insisting that “terrorists” are using human shields (aside from their being absolutely no hard evidence for this claim) when every man, woman, and child in Gaza is forced by Israel to remain like fish in their proverbial barrel while IDF forces continue their indiscriminate onslaught? After witnessing the killing of four Gazan boys who were playing soccer on the beach, New York Times journalist Tyler Hicks wrote, “There is no safe place in Gaza right now. Bombs can land at any time, anywhere.” Considering these conditions, it is no surprise that 80% of all Gazan deaths are civilians, and significant proportion of them children. Israel has no excuse for the slaughtering of innocents.

In the documentary, “Peace, Propaganda, and the Promise Land,” Noam Chomsky, a prominent Jewish scholar, states:

“When Israelis in the occupied territories now claim that they have to defend themselves, they are defending themselves in the sense that any military occupier has to defend itself against the population they are crushing. You can’t defend yourself when you’re militarily occupying someone else’s land. That’s not defense. Call it what you like, it’s not defense.”

The reality to which Chomsky speaks is what Israel and the world must come to terms with. Israelis are the colonizers, Palestinians the colonized. As an occupied people, Palestinians are in a constant state of defense, whereas Israel as the occupier is offensive in whatever action it takes against Palestinians, including its sustained existence as a Jewish State.

Much of the Western world is invariably involved with the Palestinian/Israeli conflict in ways that facilitate the Israeli occupation, but no other country provides greater support to Israel than the United States. Adjusting for inflation, the U.S. government has funded Israel with $277.3 billion since its inception – an ever growing number with our annual contribution of over three billion dollars. Much of this money is provided unconditionally, and most of it is poured into Israel’s military apparatus. Additionally, the U.S. provides unconditional political support to Israel. On 23 July, the UN Human Rights Council passed a resolution to investigate Israel’s human rights violations in Gaza. Of the 47 Council Members, 17 abstained, 29 voted in favor, and only one country cast a dissenting vote – the United States.

This financial and political backing has implicated the U.S. government and all of its tax-paying citizens in Israel’s crimes, including the ongoing collective punishment of Palestinians in Gaza, condemned by various international organizations such as The Human Rights Watch. Among the wreckage of homes, mosques, schools and hospitals, Israel has added a UN Shelter to its list of destroyed targets, killing sixteen Palestinians and injuring 150 more. It is clear: Israel is not defending itself. Israel is not fighting a war. Israel is acting out a massacre, one that would not be possible without the sustained support of the United States.

As an American who is also Palestinian, I am asking fellow Americans to join me in pressuring our government to cease its blind loyalty to a country that carries out crimes against humanity, persistently defies international law, and causes us to contradict our own foreign policy, namely:

a. the US Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 which prohibits giving assistance to the government of any country which engages in a consistent pattern of human rights violations;

b. the U.S. Arms Export Control Act of 1976 which prohibits using U.S. weapons against civilians and civilian infrastructure, and

c. the U.S. foreign policy insofar as it pertains to recommendations for steps toward peace, in this instance, between Israelis and Palestinians.

I am encouraged by pro-Palestinian protests flaring up across the nation, in almost every major city, including my hometown of Nashville. I urge you all to continue demonstrating for justice and others to add their voices. But walking arm in arm down our city streets draped in keffiyehs and waving Palestinian flags is just one of many ways we can create change. We must educate others by organizing lectures, sharing articles and videos on social media, and publishing our own writing online and elsewhere. We must put direct pressure on our representatives by writing letters, emails, and making phone calls to our congressmen and senators (the Presbyterian Mission Agency has made this easy with a prepared form). And one of the fastest growing, most effective ways to bring about justice is through the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions movement. This kind of non-violent, economic attack contributed significantly to ending the racist apartheid regime of South Africa, and is well on its way to doing the same in Israel.

If peace is to come to the Holy Land, then Israel’s occupation of Palestine must end, and a viable political solution must be drafted and implemented. Unfortunately, history has taught us that those of privilege and power do not willingly concede their position without pressure or force. American citizens, and citizens of any government complicit in Israel’s crime, must demand their leaders to end support of the Jewish State unequivocally until it agrees to cease its colonial occupation and provide equal rights to all Palestinians. Until then, Palestine will resist.

What do you think? We welcome all comments shared with respect and in the spirit of understanding.

Kufr Aqab is a unique neighborhood of Jerusalem because it lies on the West Bank side of the Annexation Wall. This means that Palestinians living in Kufr Aqab can keep their rights as residents of Jerusalem but have access to Ramallah without passing through a checkpoint. It also means that the Israeli Jerusalem Municipality is responsible for all municipal functions in Kufr Aqab, although it is separated from the rest of Jerusalem by the Qalandia checkpoint. Kufr Aqab is not the only anomaly—where the legal status and geographic realities conflict—but it’s among the most important. Palestinians are fighting to keep Kufr Aqab part of Jerusalem and to keep Jerusalem part of Palestine. Nura Alkalili (Lund University), Muna Dajani (Birzeit University) and Daniela De Leo (Sapienza University Rome) conducted research to voice the realities and concerns of the voiceless Palestinians in Jerusalem, including in Kufr Aqab. Their research findings have been presented in conferences in Turkey, Argentina and Italy. In this guest post,environmental researcher and activist, Muna Dajani explains some of the complexities of life in Kufr Aqab and how residents are responding.

Israeli Sanctioned Chaos

I set out with two friends, Nura AlKhalili, an urban planner, and Daniela De Leo, an Italian professor, to research the construction boom and chaos of Kufr Aqab. Agno” between Jerusalem and Ramallah, there are shocking urban transformations in the neighborhood.

Kufr Aqab is easily identified by endless rows of towering buildings averaging ten stories high. Most are apartment blocks with commercial shops on the street level. Adjacent to each other, they threaten to fall over like dominos. The streets of Kufr Aqab are full of signs announcing vacancies and apartments for sale despite visible deficiencies: air contamination from the daily burning of garbage (because it is hardly ever collected), lack of proper water and electrical infrastructure, and streets that are not even asphalted.

The streets are overrun with cars with yellow Israeli license plates, yet none of the strict Israeli traffic laws seem to apply in Kufr Aqab. Cars drive in the opposite direction on the high-speed road and cars and trucks are parked in every direction possible. Other Israeli laws aren’t enforced either. For example, construction is booming without building permits and sometimes without the landowners’ knowledge and consent!

Despite this dark and distorted “development,” Kufr Aqab has become the temporary living solution for more than 60,000 inhabitants. Apartments in Kufr Aqab are much cheaper than a few kilometers south, thus making the area attractive to Jerusalemites who must remain within the Jerusalem municipality borders and pay taxes to Israel in order to keep their legal status. Most importantly, Jerusalemites who live in Kufr Aqab can live under the same roof with their spouses who, because they carry a Palestinian identity card, are prohibited from living in Jerusalem and can only enter by obtaining an Israeli military permit.

Being a daily traveler on the road from Jerusalem to Ramallah, and after passing the Qalandia checkpoint, I have often entered this zone where people appear so idle and passive. How can they live in Kufr Aqab under such unacceptable conditions with no sign of either opposition or civic engagement? Do they not see Israel’s systematic push of Palestinian Jerusalemites to the periphery thus disconnecting them from their center, Al Quds, and emptying the city of its residents, weakening its Arab character?

Community Activism in No Man’s Land

In our quest for answers, we met with Abu Zakariya Al Sous, an elected representative to the Jerusalem North Committee (JNC). Looking out from the window of his home, not even two meters away, lies a construction site so big that it dwarfs the old two-story building we’re in. The Jerusalem North Committee replaced the Israeli-run community center, one of those that are inserted in every Palestinian neighborhood of East Jerusalem and which slowly but steadily impose their own ‘Israelization’ agendas on Palestinian residents, adding to their identity crisis.

Abu Zakariya has been an active resident of Kufr Aqab since long before the construction boom that infected the area one decade ago. Abu Zakariya stressed that “Jerusalem North” is symbolically and strategically important because Israel has relentlessly tried to label Kufr Aqab as an area North of Jerusalem (that is, an area that does not belong to the municipal boundaries of the city of Jerusalem)thus disconnecting it from its historical significance as a suburb of Jerusalem. By doing so, the Israeli Jerusalem Municipality tries to create new facts on the ground, implying that its responsibilities stop at the first cement section of the Annexation Wall, leaving Kufr Aqab and its 60,000 Jerusalemite residents to fend for themselves in terms of acquiring rights to proper infrastructure, education, health services, public facilities, and their own security.

The JNC is composed of 12 volunteer members and its main objectives are advocating for and reclaiming full rights for Palestinians in the North of Jerusalem from the Jerusalem Municipality to whom they pay taxes. Abu Zakariya explained the complexity of mobilizing Kufr Aqab residents to challenge the political, social, health and environmental problems that haunt them. JNC decided to use legal means to fight against the problems that most affect people’s daily lives and to build momentum for positive change. For example, in June 2011, the JNC filed a lawsuit against the waste collection department at the Jerusalem Municipality and the Ministry of Environmental Protection. They demanded a clean environment free from diseases that have emerged recently due to the continuous burning of uncollected garbage. In 2012, the court ruled that the Municipality must submit a plan to improve services in Kufr Aqab. Since then, seventy new large garbage bins have been delivered to the neighborhood with an additional 110 smaller bins distributed on the side roads and thirty additional collection trucks operate on a weekly basis.

This is a success on all levels for the Jerusalem North Committee and the Palestinian communities of Jerusalem, as it sets a precedent and encourages use of legal measures for Jerusalemites to reclaim their rights as residents of the city. The JNC is now demanding proper infrastructure from the Israeli phone company, Bezeq, and advocating for more schools and public spaces.

Abu Zakariya added: “We are not asking for charity. We have lived for generations in this city and we have rights. We will not stop demanding our rights—from the basic demand for garbage-free neighborhoods to our biggest demand: equality, stability and prosperity for Palestinian Jerusalemites in Al Quds.”

One of my close friends called today to say, “I know this is pretty bold of me, but I was wondering if you’re going to cure olives again this year.  I’ve been craving them so.  Could you give me two jars this time?”

My dear friend isn’t Arab–she’s just got a taste for olives.  She has no idea what goes through my mind while I’m picking and sorting through the bins of fresh olives at the Arabic market in my southern California neighborhood.  She couldn’t imagine what I think about while I’m hauling home 39 pounds of them, washing and cracking them on my kitchen counter, tossing away most of the leaves and twigs but keeping a few “because it’s good for them to stay together” as my grandmother used to say.

It’s olive harvest season in Palestine, but so many of the laden branches will go unpicked or be crushed under an Israeli bulldozer while farmers weep in the distance.  These trees, many of them quite ancient, stand in stately rows while their fruit develops over the course of months.  And when the moment is just right and the olives are still “hard, but not too hard, habibti,” it’s important to pick them to arrest the ripening process so that they will cure to a consistent flavor throughout the batch.

The practice of bulldozing olive groves or setting them on fire began some years ago as one of the many measures of collective punishment imposed by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF).  The first time I saw pictures of trees being crushed under military bulldozers, I wept out loud.  Knowing the decades of devoted attention given to those gnarled branches, it looked to me like a picture of babies being smashed to death.  I still feel sick whenever I hear that a grove was destroyed by soldiers on the night before harvest.  It’s so different than hearing that the trees were uprooted by a flood or succumbed to some soil-borne virus.  This is murder.

Olive trees are among a handful of sources from which Palestinians can earn a livelihood even under occupation.  If a family is lucky enough to still maintain control of their land (as opposed to simply holding title through a virtually worthless deed), they can raise crops or animals, but both require regular access to water which of course has been redirected away from Palestinian villages in many cases.  Olives, however, will grow robustly with only sun and the rain gifted by God.  Olive trees give rise not only to the olive industry but oil, soap, and, now, wood carvings lovingly fashioned from the wood of trees murdered in the night.  Praying hands, figurines of the magi, latticed stands for the Holy Qur’an reveal the knot holes from the fruit-bearing branches from which they were wrested.

These days, it’s fairly easy to find groups of Americans or Europeans traveling to Palestine to assist with the olive harvest.  Rather than exploring traditional tourist sites, these folks come prepared to work hard, sometimes even sleeping among the trees along with the farmers in order to guard the grove.

Not that they could fend off the soldiers.  Not that anyone could.

As has been proven year after agonizing year, nothing can fend off the soldiers. Or the settlers.

So yes, I tell my dear friend: I can certainly promise you two jars of olives this year.  Maybe three.  It’s a painstaking, labor-intensive process that I happily undertake each autumn, distributing dozens of jars among my family and friends at Christmastime.  I do it because I can.  And I do it for the women who can’t; the women who, along with their families, watched their trees carefully to determine just to right time for harvest, but who woke in the night to the sound of thunder.  Or so they thought.

And here’s a bonus picture of me (Nora) picking olives in Palestine: