This article was written for PeaceXPeace.

A lot of people hate going to the dentist because it hurts. I hate going to the dentist in Jerusalem because it hurts, but not in my mouth. It hurts my sense of belonging.

We go to an Israeli dental clinic.

Many Palestinians in Jerusalem go to Israeli dental clinics. Why shouldn’t they? Palestinians who have residency in Jerusalem are entitled to Israeli health insurance. It’s one of the few benefits they got when Israel illegally annexed Jerusalem.

Nearly all the approximately 300,000 Palestinians living in East Jerusalem are “residents.” They were born in Jerusalem (like their parents, and their parents’ parents) but despite Israel’s annexation, they are not citizens of Israel. They have no voice in the Israeli elections that determine their fate. Not that they necessarily want to vote in the Israeli elections. But I digress.

Last time I took my children to the Israeli dental clinic, the receptionist waved us to the x-ray room and a technician hurried my middle daughter into the big faux-leather chair.

“Wait! Why does she need an x-ray?” I intervened.

The woman had straight blond hair and a pink hair extension that matched her pinkish lipstick. She looked at me with a totally unreadable look on her face.

“She’s having her teeth cleaned. She doesn’t need an x-ray,” I repeated in English. My middle daughter was looking uncomfortable in the chair, embarrassed. The other two had backed into the waiting area and were pretending not to know me.

The technician shouted to the receptionist and there was soon a small congregation of Israeli women around me, all speaking Russian. They were trying to figure out what my problem was.

The dentist herself came out from her room in the back carrying my daughter’s dental records. I could understand her Hebrew despite her heavy Russian accent, “If you want to see the dentist, you have to have an x-ray,” she proclaimed, as if it were a law of nature.

I tried to explain in my few words of Hebrew: “Teeth cleaning. Last time we came, the hygienist wrote in the file that we needed to come back.” I tapped the file in her hand. It would all be clear if she would just read the dental record.

But she didn’t. The dentist turned on her heel and walked through the reception area talking loudly. “This lady wants me to write in the file that her daughter got an x-ray but she doesn’t want her daughter to have the x-ray!”

I was livid, frustrated, powerless.

“She doesn’t need an x-ray!” I raised my voice, following her to her office.

“I decide!” she countered.

By then, all my children were ready to crawl into the medicine cabinet with shame.

And I made it worse.

I approached a Palestinian woman sitting with her children in the waiting room. I asked her in Arabic if she knew enough Hebrew to explain to “those crazy people” (yes, I was angry) that my daughter needed her teeth cleaned, not an x-ray. She didn’t look too happy to be associated with me in any way, but she stood up to help.

Then the door to the hygienist’s room opened and she stepped out, interested in all the commotion. I ran to her. Her long bouncy curls had changed colors since our last visit.

“Do you remember me?” I asked in English.

“Of course!” She smiled at my children and I felt a wave of relief. She is the reason why we go to that clinic. She makes flossing and mouthwash and fluoride fun.

“Can you please tell them I want you to clean my daughter’s teeth? I told them you wrote it on her dental record, but they don’t understand.”

A few minutes later, my middle daughter was reclining in the hygienist’s chair having her teeth cleaned.

“Apparently the person who scheduled your appointment at your last visit thought you wanted to see the dentist,” she said as she worked. “And everyone who sees the dentist for the first time needs an x-ray.”

“You provide services in Hebrew and in Russian,” I said. “Why not in Arabic? Isn’t Arabic also an official language of Israel?”

There was a pause and the hygienist looked at me, humanity shining in her eyes. She didn’t respond to me, but she spoke to my daughter. I think she said: “Spit.”

This article was originally written for PeaceXPeace.

Neda* was in my house. In Jerusalem! A friend sneaked her in from Ramallah. It’s not easy—getting past the Israeli soldiers at the checkpoint or around the Annexation Wall. But Palestinians have their ways. If they need to get to work or want to shop at the mall or have to visit a sick relative, they get creative. And Neda had a critical mission to fulfill—exploring historic Palestine. So she used her smarts and got herself in. And there she was, in my house. In Jerusalem!

As we set out on our jaunt with our mutual friend Dina, I felt like I was Thelma from the movie “Thelma and Louise.” Neda and Dina were young and reckless and I was old and reckless, and our adventure was thrilling and dangerous and important. My friends hadn’t seen the movie so I just told them it was a feminist classic and I didn’t mention the ending.

We filled the borrowed car with gas and headed north.

Neda delighted in every village, every landscape, every hill, and every stand of trees, and I delighted in her. She is a Palestinian in love with her country, a place denied to her, and I had the honor of appreciating the land through her eyes.

As we approached Tiberias, she was giddy like a child. The GPS sent us round and round in circles before we saw the sea, and she nearly exploded with joy. We walked past the beautiful old Palestinian buildings, built lovingly with black stones, and took photos at ruins and in front of the mosque and the church. We lingered at the sparkling water—imagining the trading and the farming and the family life that once flourished there. It’s a different city now. The shop owners selling falafel are Jewish, but the Palestinian echo is melodic and enduring.

I often hike with my family through demolished Palestinian villages like Lifta and Sataf. They are museums, testimonies to the Palestinian reality before 1948, to the life that would have continued to blossom were it not for the Nakba or catastrophe. These are romantic places, especially when I visit them with Neda and Dina, not, as you might think, because of their imagination of the past. The romance is in their imagination of what will someday be.

It’s too late to prevent the occupation, colonization and dispossession of Palestinians. It happened and continues to happen with ferocious momentum. It’s critical (critical!) to learn about past and present injustices and indignities, but counterproductive to let history hold us back. We can’t build a liberation movement out of the Nakba; we need to struggle for something, for a vision of our future government, economy, educational system, gender relations, environmental goals, and more.

Neda and Dina and I talked late into the early morning hours about the Palestine that can be, that will be, and what we must do to achieve it. Young Palestinian women—inspirational, professional, creative, strategic, smart, fearless, and hardworking. It was hopeful trip.

What is your vision for the Palestine to be?

 

*Names changed for security purposes.

This article was written for Peace x Peace, a global network of peacebuilders in 128 countries.

I sat on the far side of a large, plain room in the municipality building in Zawiya village in the West Bank governorate of Salfit. On the other side of the room, six local men were introducing themselves. I was there to do research for an article about community philanthropy, and I promise I will write that article, but first I need to write about wild pigs.

Wild pigs?

“Mansour is so big,” one of the Zawiya residents teased, squeezing the bulging forearm of the man sitting next to him, “even the pigs are scared of him.”

The joke was off topic, so I let it go, but I couldn’t get it out of my mind. It is strange for Palestinians to talk about people and pigs in the same sentence. The majority of Palestinians are Muslim and they, like Jews, consider pigs the dirtiest of creatures. Why were they joking about pigs?

I was sure that I had misunderstood. My Arabic isn’t that good. I probably imagined hearing the word, khanazeer (the Arabic word for pigs). I asked one of my friends.

“There are lots of wild pigs (aka boars) in the villages in the West Bank,” my friend told me. “The Israeli settlers let them loose to destroy Palestinian crops. Sometimes the pigs even attack children.”

Wild pigs? I’ve lived in Palestine for eight years and I’ve seen a lot of inhumanity, but the thought of wild pigs being intentionally released shocked me. Is it possible that, like me, the international community doesn’t know about this?

I found an article or two online, but they didn’t report any details. (There may be more in the Hebrew press, but I can’t read it, and I’m told the Arabic press comments from time to time.) I called the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). They had never heard of the problem of wild pigs, but said it would fall under the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR). OHCHR said they were unaware of any reports of wild pigs being released by settlers in Palestinian villages. (The UN does monitor lots of other settler violence against Palestinians). I spoke with the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories (B’Tselem) who said they’ve never studied the problem and can’t comment on topics they have not studied. They did mention, though, that there was recently a fatal car accident involving a wild pig (read about it here). Yesh Din, another Israeli human rights organization, said the claim is “fantastical,” and “science fiction.” I started to wonder if the wild-pigs-being-released-by-Israeli-settlers story was an urban legend like the myth that Yasser Arafat died of AIDS.

But Rabbis for Human Rights said that while it sounded unlikely, it was not totally impossible since settlers do release attack dogs on Palestinians. “They even do it on the Sabbath,” he said with disgust. “They somehow rationalize that attacking Palestinians is holy.”

I was no closer to finding out if the story is true, but I was feeling doubtful because since wild pigs are, by definition, wild, wouldn’t the settlers have to first catch the pigs in order to release them in Palestinian villages? These pigs reach 200 pounds or more and have long, sharp tusks. Catching them seems like dangerous, specialized work. Also, pigs are unclean for Jews and most Israeli settlers are religious. Would they really touch pigs in order to harm Palestinians? And besides that, what would prevent the wild pigs from turning around to ravage the crops of the settlements once they finish eating the Palestinian produce?

I expanded my investigation and spoke with farmers, journalists, agricultural workers, and researchers, and everybody confirmed that wild pigs are a serious and growing problem. In some villages there are only occasional sightings of small numbers of animals, but in others, wild pigs are a major threat to the safety, well-being and livelihoods of thousands of people. Over and over people implored me to understand the urgency of the problem: “They move in packs of 50-60 pigs. “They live between the houses. We are scared to go out to visit neighbors at night.” “Many farmers have been forced to abandon their fields because the pigs eat their wheat, watermelons, guavas, and even the roots of olive trees.”

But how can we be sure that the wild pigs are being released by Israeli settlers? Nearly everyone I spoke with argued that wild pigs aren’t native to Palestine and the only people with the ability to import them are the Israelis; that the problem started during the first Intifada when settler violence began and when, they claim, settlers began to cultivate wild pigs; that the problem is worst in villages adjacent to settlements.

But I wasn’t convinced! I was losing sleep. I had to find the source of the wild pig problem. Yet I couldn’t find anyone who had seen settlers release pigs into villages with his/her own eyes. One farmer said his wife’s relatives reported seeing a helicopter deliver a male and female to Kursa village; and an agricultural expert had been told by a farmer from Jalameh village said that a civilian truck accompanied by a military jeep opened the gate that controls the entry and exit of laborers and released several wild pigs into Jalameh. Surely, if thousands of pigs were being transported into Palestinian villages, there would be more evidence.

Moreover, according to Birzeit professor of political science and naturist, Saleh Abdel Jawad, wild pigs ARE indigenous to Palestine. Most Palestinians don’t realize they are indigenous because the population was smaller and lived only in the wild until the last 8-10 years. It turns out that the hyena, the only other indigenous predator of the wild pig has been hunted to near extinction. This has led to a dramatic and unchecked increase in the population of wild pigs. In fact, there is apparently a dramatic increase of wild pigs in Lebanon, Jordan and Syria too.

But does not mean that the infestation of wild pigs in Palestinian villages is merely a fluke of nature? No, because if the problem were merely natural, there would be a problem in the Galilee, a similar environment adjacent to the West Bank but inside Israel. There isn’t. If the problem were natural, the Israeli settlements would also be suffering. But they aren’t.

What do I believe?

1-   Wild pigs, indigenous to Palestine, are increasing naturally. Their numbers have become a problem because its only animal predator, the hyena, is no longer keeping the population in balance.

2-   Although there isn’t a large domestic market for wild pig meat, people have in the past been able to trap, poison or shoot wild pigs when they threaten farmland or populated areas. However, harming or trapping wild pigs is now forbidden and Israelis frequently catch and prosecute people who seek to limit the population of wild pigs. Also, carrying firearms that would be needed to kill these large and dangerous animals is forbidden to Palestinians.

3-   Israel erected a 708km “barrier” (aka Annexation Wall) comprised of sections of concrete wall and fence, totally enclosing the West Bank and encircling many villages. Since we know that pigs can’t fly, the population of wild pigs will inevitably increase within the West Bank without any opportunity to disperse naturally throughout the region or even to escape from populated areas.

4-   Israeli settlers live in fenced-in settlements and are protected. Only Israelis control the gates in the Annexation Wall through which wild pigs could pass. Only Israelis have the ability to move pigs within the region.

I realize that settlers often actively organize attacks of all kinds against Palestinian children, farmers and property, with near-total impunity for harm they cause to Palestinians (even when their actions are illegal), but in this case, I think the fault lies squarely with the Israeli government. The Israeli Nature and Parks Authority of Judea and Samaria told me definitively that settlers do not cultivate or move wild pigs. They admitted that they are the only ones who move wild pigs and they do so to spread the population. They agreed that the population is growing too big, and that more are entering populated areas, but said the animals are still protected because they are part of nature. When I said that Palestinians complain about the danger of wild pigs in villages they told me that wild pigs don’t threaten people unless people threaten their offspring. “A pig might run at you and you might think he’s going to attack you, but he won’t,” they told me. “If you step aside, he’ll run right past you.”

Incredible! Wild pigs in Palestine are protected, but no one is protecting the Palestinians!

This is not a “normal” situation in which a national animal protection policy needs to be modified. Israel is an occupying power, with obligations under international humanitarian law, that intentionally acts to multiply the number of wild pigs that live in areas in which Palestinians are surrounded and enclosed. It’s a matter of human security, livelihoods, sanitation, and well-being. It’s a matter of human rights.

So here’s a call to action to the Israeli and international human rights organizations:

1-Study the problem of wild pigs in Palestinian villages, immediately;

2-Hold Israel accountable for its obligations to protect and promote the wellbeing of the people under its control;

3-Find ways to remove wild pigs from Palestinian farmland and populated areas;

4-Tell the world: Israel has locked Palestinians in villages with wild pigs!

Since the recent attacks on Gaza, and now the UN statehood vote, some folks have been asking me for resources about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Yay! Educating ourselves is the first step to taking responsible positions, and THAT will make it harder for the powers-that-be to do damage in our names.

Here’s a start of a list of resources that I think are good. Nothing’s perfect, of course, but I think these are worth your time. PLEASE add to the list by leaving a comment (teal button on the left). Include a link AND a sentence or two describing the resource. If you think I should add a “resources for further learning” tab to my website, let me know and I’ll put it on my list of things to do.

-Nora

 

This article talks about how Israel’s negotiation of a ceasefire in Gaza is essentially admission of the occupation that they have long denied.

http://972mag.com/ceasefire-tells-the-world-gaza-still-under-israeli-occupation/60669/

 

This article by the late, brilliant Edward Said back in 1988 argued against the declaration of a Palestinian state. Much of his solid, critical argument has validity even today.

http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/1998/397/op1.htm

 

Understanding the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: A Primer by Phyllis Bennis is a book that I haven’t read, but given the author’s record, it is probably excellent. Even better, the entire book is available on line!

http://endtheoccupation.org/article.php?list=type&type=52

 

The Jewish Voice for Peace made a 6-minute video explaining the basics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. They also have information under the tab Israel/Palestine 101.

http://jewishvoiceforpeace.org/campaigns/israel-and-palestine-an-animated-introduction

 

If you’re willing to read a book, anything by Jonathan Cook is excellent (and he has a great blog).

http://www.jonathan-cook.net/

 

 

 

 

The old man who lives above me on the third floor calls out for his aide, his voice muffled by the concrete that separates us. The elevator opens and closes delivering children from the fourth floor to the foggy street where they walk to school “as usual.” But nothing is usual. Not even in Jerusalem, far from rockets and bombs. Even my neighbor’s rooster crows an uneasy and foreboding sound.

Just a few weeks ago we were complaining about the calm. “Nothing is happening,” friends said. “This occupation will go on for decades if we don’t do something.” At that point, we wanted the youth to take to the street. We wanted the world to pay attention. And now they are, but what will come of it?

“What should we do?” another friend of mine asked yesterday. A palpable helplessness traversed the phone line in both directions. Most of us here know someone in Gaza. We can visualize young parents, their in-laws, aunts and uncles, children, all huddled under a dirty blanket in the corner farthest from the windows, their lips moving in prayer, even if they never prayed before, and trying, against all forces, not to cry in front of the children, because isn’t the worst thing a child can experience the look of terror on their father’s or mother’s face?

I am glued to Aljazeera just like you are. The kitchen smells faintly of the unwashed dishes that are piled on the counter, and I have trouble finding my sweater in the mess of sheets piled on the bed. There are so many, many things to do. I should write. I should read. I should demonstrate. I should shout, demand, shake some sense in the people firing on 1.5 million people in the prison that is Gaza, and I should do my best to dislodge their confusion, stop the madness, remind them of their humanity.

 

But there is no stopping a war during a war.

We must protest, and it will make a difference, but it’s not enough.

 

 

 

 

 

I’d like to get this message out: it’s important to give support and sign petitions. I’m doing the same. But it’s not enough. We must prevent the next attack, and the one after that. So many lives can be saved, and so much fear avoided if we do the much harder work of war prevention. Now.

Preventing war is not an impulsive act of compassion. Preventing war is an ongoing commitment to fighting injustice and inequality wherever it exists. It means that in those periods of calm, the times when we let our attention be diverted to deadlines at work and soccer competitions, in those months and years when Israel and Palestine seem so far away and not in need of attention – that’s exactly when your attention is most needed.

Let us be a visible part of the constituency for peace with justice, make bold claims on the public discourse, watch the powers that be and let them know that we are watching. Let us develop real relationships with people on the ground, support activists, connect the issues in our minds and in our lives. Our actions matter.

And let’s start now to prevent the next war. Yes I’m talking to you. And I’m talking to myself, too.