Living with the Palestinians, Part I
I had stayed the night with some relatives who lived in the Orthodox agricultural community of K’far Haro’eh. I told my uncle I was going to volunteer for the day on an ecological farm near the settlement of Ariel in the West Bank. This didn’t bother him; some of his children live on settlements. He gave me advice about how to get to Ariel, and drove me from his ’50s-era home and overgrown yard to a nearby bus. It seemed like every citizen of Israel was commuting with me; there were way too many cars. National problems give everyone stress in Israel, but I hadn’t expected it to happen until I reached the West Bank. Instead, I was aggravated about the lack of public transit.
I was overjoyed when my turn came to jump out of my bus as it reached the junction where I would hitchhike to the West Bank. I put down my bag and made sure I was in hitchhiking uniform, my kippa and ritual fringes showing. Religious Jews tend to pick up hitchhikers, and showing that I am both Jewish and religious made me appear trustworthy. A few minutes later, I stepped into a car emblazoned with the name of a West Bank settlement and the words “There is none but God.”
When I got out at the entrance to the large settlement of Ariel, I waited for the car to drive off and exchanged my kippah and fringes for a baseball hat – shifting from religious Jew to American tourist. A Palestinian cab took me into the village of Marda, where the roads were rough and the signs and posters were only in Arabic. I felt nervous and invigorated entering a strange and unknown place, and I was excited to see the village and the farm. I had entered a different world from the one I woke up in that morning. Though it was certainly foreign, it was not threatening and it felt more appealing in some ways than the world of commuter traffic I had come from in central Israel.
The farmer greeted me by showing me his small plot of land, which had some interesting things growing but which had suffered from the invasion of ravenous wild boars. I spent most of the day helping him build a stronger barrier that would prevent further invasions. The work was repetitive but satisfying in its intensity, and I enjoyed seeing the design of the farm and hearing about the ecological methods he used.
We spent midday walking through the town, its roads quiet and cracked, greeting the other men and boys who were hanging out on the street. The farmer would identify me as an American volunteer, which made me a welcome visitor, but I didn’t say hello to everyone. “In this village men don’t greet the women,” the farmer told me.
He served me lunch in his beautiful, well-furnished home, which he was able to afford after working a few years in a fried-chicken restaurant in the United States. He assured me, however, that he didn’t eat “any of that garbage.” The three of us–the farmer, his brother and I–had a scrumptious meal of pita bread dipped in scrambled eggs, halva, za’atar, labane cheese and olive oil. Although I observe Jewish law, I had become more lenient about eating food cooked in a non-kosher kitchen. In times like this, when eating food from a foreign culture seems like a major part of interacting and understanding it, I place a greater value on cultural understanding. This meal was worth it.
The farmer’s wife stayed in her room while we ate, presumably–for reasons of religious modesty–to avoid the strange man in the house: me. Meanwhile, the farmer and his brother watched an American horror movie on TV. I felt like I wasn’t so far from home after all.
During our afternoon work, the farmer pointed out the Jewish settlement on the hill right above the village and the fence separating the village from the settlement. He told me that his family, along with many others nearby, owns some of the settlement’s land and that he never received any compensation. He mentioned that Jewish settlers have assaulted women from the village, including his wife, right in front of Israeli soldiers. He added that since entering Israel about a year ago, he has been permanently refused another entry permit despite having no criminal record. He expressed disgust at the failure of Palestinian leadership to provide infrastructure and resources to the Palestinians or to take a strong stand against encroachment. He went on to compare life under Israeli occupation to the experience of Jews in the Holocaust. When I pointed out the slight difference between occupation and mass extermination, he conceded that while this aspect was different, the Palestinian experience was otherwise the same. I tried hard to just listen to him without talking back. It was hard for me to hear what he had to say–hard to hear his description of the situation and hard to hear his perspective. I didn’t agree, especially regarding the comparison to the Holocaust and the assessment of the Palestinian leadership, and it was difficult to discover that people felt this way.
At four, the farmer hailed a car on the road that drove me to the nearby junction. I switched back into Jewish hitchhiking garb and rode back into central Israel, back to suburban sprawl, unsatisfactory public transit and traffic. The day concluded with evening services at a large synagogue and dinner at a modern coffee shop in Hertzliya.
Three days later, I visited a friend in Jerusalem. He almost laughed when I told him the name of the village where I volunteered with the farmer. It turns out that he had spent a few months stationed in Marda, and that the village was “relatively active” in militant activity like throwing rocks and Molotov cocktails at the cars of settlers. When I mentioned the issue of the confiscated land, he told me that the army gives many of the landowners access to their lands within the area of the settlement. My friend would open the gate for these people to enter in the morning and exit in the evening, but after a few weeks he noticed that many people would come home with more animals than they had brought in the morning. He assumed they were stolen from an animal rehabilitation center in the settlement, so he started to take note of how many animals each person brought in every morning and would tell people, “Sorry, that’s not your donkey, you can’t take it with you.”
It was weird to hear the “other side” of the story of Marda. The stories did not contradict each other–they just made each other look worse. Hearing my friend’s perspective, however, made me feel a bit more comfortable with the reality of the Israeli army in Marda, and it made me understand that things are less black-and-white than I had thought. I felt pretty unique to have had lunch with a Palestinian farmer on one day and then cake with the former Israeli army commander stationed in his village. But in such a small country where so many things lie on top of each other, I was probably less unique than I thought.
