As we pulled away from the bus stop, I watched Petah Tikvah disappear through the bulletproof window. A dilapidated city just east of Tel Aviv, Petah Tikvah serves as a departure point for buses to the Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank. I’d be disembarking at a settlement called El Kana. But my actual destination was a few hundred feet further down the road—the Palestinian village of Mas’ha.
That first time, I couldn’t tell when we had left Israel. There was no green dotted line on the highway. The people we passed en route to El Kana looked just like regular Israelis—not the rabid religious zealots in tattered clothing that I had imagined. Rows of settler houses fanned out from the road as we rumbled past—ugly boxes thrown up cheaply and hastily, but much larger than most Israeli homes. Children on bicycles rode through quiet streets only a few feet away from barbed wire fences. Every so often there’ d be a construction site with laborers at work—settlements are almost always building new units.
Only if you looked closely along the way would you be able to spot the crumbling Palestinian villages. They were almost totally obscured, sealed off by cement roadblocks piled at their entrances to make sure no vehicle could ever leave. The roadblocks rose up like little hills on the landscape, the IDF’s contribution to the local terrain.
The sign at the El Kana stop was crooked, its numbers—186 —almost illegible. We shunted to a halt and a young Russian man with a gun stepped onto the bus. Most settlements employ a private security guard—almost always a Russian immigrant—to check the identification of any passenger seeking entry. At El Kana, this didn’t take long. My companions—three activists from Jerusalem—and I were the only people waiting to step off the bus.
The late-afternoon sun was slowly setting in the distance as we began to traipse down the road to the village. With heavy backpack and sleeping bag in tow, the trek seemed endless. We passed El Kana’s barbed wire perimeter fence and threaded our way around its newest extensions—El Kana Aleph, Bet, Gimel, and Dalet. We tried not to be seen, but every so often a settler’s car would speed down the highway beside us, faces in windows throwing curious glances in our direction. Finally, the road came to an abrupt stop at a cement barrier. We scaled it one by one, pulling our backpacks up behind us. Peering down into the valley beneath us, we caught our first glimpse of Mas’ha.
In the early spring of 2003, Palestinian farmers in Mas’ha received word from the IDF that their land would be taken from them in a few months. The announcement came in the form of a map, delivered to the muhtar (village leader) by the IDF’s District Coordination Office (DCO)—the wing of the Israeli army that handles daily communications with Palestinians in the occupied territories. The map simply showed the farmers which parts of their land would be confiscated. It made no mention of compensation.
Mas’ha’s farmers would be making way for the wall. Also referred to as the “security fence” or the “separation barrier,” the wall started life in June, 2002, when Ariel Sharon’s government decided to erect a physical barrier between Israel and the occupied territories. According to Sharon, the wall was meant to prevent terrorists from entering Israel. But since its planned route diverged from the Green Line—the (at present theoretical) border that separates sovereign Israel from the territories it occupied in 1967’s Six Day War—Palestinians have charged that Israel is simply trying to annex their land, in violation of international law.
In August of 2002, Sharon’s cabinet approved the construction of “Stage 1” of the separation barrier, which would stretch from Sallem in the far north of the occupied West Bank to El Kana, northeast of Tel Aviv. Its route would cut off Mas’ha’s fields and destroy the livelihoods of Mas’ha’s farmers.
By the time of my first trip to Mas’ha, the IDF had already begun uprooting trees to make room for the barrier and flattening the land where the fence would pass. They had come to Mas’ha with dynamite and a stack of legal forms. “Sign this paper,” they told the farmers of Mas’ha, “and we’ll give you back your olive trees after we dig them up, so you can plant them somewhere else.” When the farmers refused to sign their documents, the soldiers shrugged and gave the order to proceed. Bulldozers moved in and tore up the trees, followed by construction crews that blasted the ground with dynamite to create a level path.
On the other side of the concrete blockade, there seemed to be a parking lot. Later, we learned that Palestinian taxi drivers routinely park their cars on the other side of the barrier–even though here, no one has anywhere to go. Filling the “lot” were old Peugots and Subarus from the 1970’s, dilapidated and unused. The cars’ owners stood around a cement block that served as a makeshift card table, or sat on folding chairs at the entrance to the “store”—which was no more than an aluminum-sided shed selling produce. Some were dressed in the traditional Muslim garb–gray silk tunics and pants–while others wore outdated Western-style clothes—acid-washed jeans, knockoff T-shirts emblazoned with misspelled logos like “Rebok.”
We called our contact—a Palestinian activist from Mas’ha. He told us his uncle would be right down to get us. A few minutes later, the uncle pulled up in an ancient VW bus reeking of chicken droppings. We drove through the village and up into hilly terrain, the bus’s engine sputtering. As we jerked back and forth on the bumpy road, I caught glimpses of an empty construction site in the valley below. The ground there had been blasted flat and two massive yellow bulldozers sat parked side by side at the edge of what had once been a field. Beyond, among the olive groves, we could see three faded tents on a hill with a Palestinian flag waving above them.
At the entrance to the camp, we were greeted by a burly Palestinian man dressed in black jeans and a logo T-shirt. A few yards away, some Israelis were building a campfire while a group of international activists—identifiable by their expensive backpacks and fleece sweaters—looked on. The Palestinian man introduced himself in fluent Hebrew. His name was Nazee Shalabee.
Nazee was the Palestinian Marlboro Man. Big and hairy, with rough, sun-hardened hands, he would often walk around the rocky campsite barefoot. He smoked fifty hand-rolled cigarettes a day and claimed not to need sleep. Once, when a skin infection caused one of his nails to drop out, he just shrugged his furry shoulders and went on with his business.
Nazee’s home was in Mas’ha, in a sparsely furnished two-floor house with just enough room for himself, his wife, and their seven children. But since early April, he had been living almost continuously at “Camp Mas’ha”: a makeshift activist camp intended to protest the encroachment of the wall on Palestinian land. Like the other farmers, Nazee had seen the DCO maps. Intellectually, he had long understood they meant his olive groves would be confiscated. But it was only in late March, when the IDF dynamited the olive groves of a nearby village, that Nazee and his fellow farmers awoke to the physical threat the wall posed to their land and their livelihood.
Nazee, along with a few fellow members of the local communist party, began to contact Israeli and international human rights organizations in the hopes of raising awareness about their plight. The presence of Israeli and international activists would make it more difficult for the IDF to “remove” protesters. If non-Palestinian groups were
involved in protesting the wall, went the reasoning, the Palestinians would have a better chance of staying on the land.
At first, the various activist groups decided to organize a demonstration against the wall. But for Nazee and the other Palestinians, a one-time protest wasn’t enough—the planned route of the wall would cut off 97 percent of their land. To them, the wall was worth far more than an afternoon’s rage.
Nazee and fellow Palestinian activists Tayseer and Rizik Abu Nasser decided to build a campsite, which would allow them to continuously protest the building of the fence. They hoped this would help to keep them on their land for as long as possible and that they would attract media attention, raising public awareness about the wall’s effects on Palestinians. With a cell phone donated by the Israeli peace organization Gush Shalom, they set about procuring tents, digging toilets, and recruiting fellow protesters.
At the time, I was spending a post-college year in Israel on a New Israel Fund Fellowship. I lived in a commune in Jaffa and worked two days a week as a grantwriter for a Jewish-Arab youth organization called Reut Sadaka. One morning, I picked up the commune’s copy of Ha’Aretz from the breakfast table after the words “American peace activist” caught my eye. Rachel Corrie a 23-year-old volunteer for the International Solidarity Movement—a Palestinian-led organization that practices non-violent civil disobedience against the Israeli occupation—had been crushed and killed by an IDF bulldozer in Gaza.
Corrie had stood in front of the bulldozer intentionally, trying to stop it from demolishing a building in the town of Rafah that the IDF claims was being used by Palestinian snipers. Her fellow activists said the driver had run her down on purpose, even backing up over her as she lay on the ground. The IDF said it was an accident.
I couldn’t wrap my head around the events. Why did a peace activist have to die in the occupied territories? It made me wonder whether Corrie was the crazy one, or whether the occupation was so insane that desperate measures were needed to fight it. Like me, Corrie was a left-wing American woman who had attended a progressive liberal arts college. And like her, I had done activism in the West Bank with Ta’ayush—an organization which brings Israelis to Palestinian villages to help the farmers harvest their olives free of harassment from settlers. Her death made me question whether I was doing enough.
I heard about the protest camp at Mas’ha soon after. When some of my activist friends asked whether I wanted to go with them, I still knew very little about the wall. Curious, and eager to prove my mettle as an activist, I packed up my backpack and sleeping bag and got on the bus.
At the camp, we stowed our belongings in tents and gathered for Nazee’s tour. Mas’ha is surrounded on both sides by settlements—El Kana to the eest, and Etz Ephraim to the north. According to Nazee, the IDF planned to accommodate the settlements’ expansion by dividing Mas’ha’s agricultural lands between the two. As he led us around the campsite, Nazee pointed out what land would be confiscated and which settlement it would go to.
By the end of the tour, the sky was growing dark. “Go make dinner,” Nazee said to a teenage Palestinian with slicked-back hair. The boy scurried off without a word. Nazee had a commanding presence—he would always be doing three things at once, while at the same time ordering others to do another three. With their gelled hair, the Palestinian teenagers looked like little James Deans—fine young punks. But they snapped to attention whenever Nazee started talking.
The Palestinians put out hummus and falafel—brought in from the village—on plastic plates, and motioned for everyone to join them. A group of fifteen, we gathered around a gas lamp, passing round a bag of pitas and scrounging for our share of olive oil and zatar. Afterwards, we sat around the campfire for hours, cracking sunflower seeds and drinking black coffee. A few of the activists told jokes in broken English and Hebrew.
As the evening wore on, people started to set up mattresses around the fire. But there would be no sleeping under the starts that night. A sudden downpour sent us scurrying back to the little tents, though out of respect for the villagers, we divided up by gender before settling in.
I nestled into my sleeping bag and rested my head on one of the pillows the villagers had brought for us. Then the mosquitoes came. Every hour, I awoke to the sound of buzzing in my ear. I slapped the side of my head on impulse and went back to sleep, assuming the mosquito was dead, only to wake up moments later with another one buzzing around me. By morning I had been so badly bitten my left eye was swollen shut.
Over the next four months, I went to Camp Mas’ha at least once a week. Each time we headed towards the campsite, I could see the trenches in the valley had been filled with more concrete. A skeletal barbed-wire fence had already been erected. Cement would soon follow.
Nazee’s relatives had a monopoly on rides to the camp, for which they charged five shekels. All the other drivers at the entrance to Mas’ha would yell at the activists: “Why do you give all your money to Nazee?” they said. “Why don’t you share it with other people?” But I stayed loyal to Yasser, Nazee’s uncle, who would drive down in that hacking and coughing VW bus. It was falling apart, ready to die, but we always got to the camp in one piece.
Each time I arrived, Nazee would insist that I take the tour again. For the Palestinians, it was all about the process. Any activity, no matter how redundant or trivial it might seem, was activism to them—even fetching a cup of water meant you were engaging in the struggle. Needling Nazee, I would tell him one tour had been plenty.
The camp consisted of three faded tents arranged in a semicircle, a massive campfire where we ate dinner, and a makeshift volleyball court constructed from a piece of string tied between two trees. Once a day, someone from the village would come with four giant jerry cans of water. There were no showers. The toilet was a hole dug in the ground covered by a plank. On most days, there was toilet paper—but the environmental rights activists that came to the camp wouldn’t use it.
Camp Mas’ha’s purpose wasn’t to obstruct the building of the fence. It was to allow the Palestinian farmers to reside directly on the land that was being confiscated from them, in defiance of the IDF and in the hope of drawing media attention to their plight. Instead of pitching camp directly in the path of the fence’s construction, the organizers had decided to place the site on the same fields that had appeared on the DCO’s maps. With its cement foundation already built, we were, in theory, already on the “Israeli side” of the wall.
At any one time there would be at least ten people at the camp—half a dozen Palestinians, two or three Israelis, and the same number of internationals. The idea was to have at least two Israelis there at all times. If the IDF came to arrest the protesters, the presence of Israelis would force the army to follow protocol more strictly. Should the camp be raided, at least one Israeli would accompany the arrested Palestinians, while the other contacted lawyers, government officials and the media.
Gush Shalom had donated a cell phone to the camp, to be passed among the protesters. Whoever had the cell phone was responsible for making sure Israelis were at the camp at all times. That at least was the theory. The only problem was the anarchists.
Proclaiming themselves to be primarily animal rights activists, members of the Israeli anarchist gro
up Ma’avak Echad (One Struggle) refuse to define their organization as an organization, or a movement, or anything else for that matter. Their mission is vague: to fight the institutionalized forces of oppression in Israeli society. But they do have guts. Members of Ma’avak Echad can be consistently relied upon to show up at protests in parts of the occupied territories where more respectable lefties fear to tread. It’s just that when they get there, they tend to infuriate everyone else.
At the camp, the anarchists were reluctant to take the cell phone when it was their turn because they didn’t want to tell people what to do. The concept of an obligation ran counter to their ideology. Since they wouldn’t tell anyone to come, there would be times when no one came, forcing the Palestinians to drag sulky activists into the occupied territories at 11 o’clock at night, just so they could stand watch for a few hours and then go to work in the morning.
Problems like this were meant to be addressed at our biweekly organizational meetings. At around 2pm we would gather under one of the larger olive trees. We sat on mattresses on the ground, and took turns serving as the meeting’s designated facilitator. Each group of activists—Israelis, the Palestinians, and the internationals—elected two representatives to speak on their behalf. Decisions were to be made by consensus.
Despite the best of intentions, the meetings would invariably spiral out of control. The anarchists, of course, rejected all attempts to structure and coordinate our activities. But it was the personalities of all the organizations and their members, and their deep differences over what the camp should be and do, that were the real source of chaos.
Should we simply try and get more activists to come to the camp and work together? Was building alliances and mutual understanding our ultimate goal? Or should we be raising hell and attracting media attention? Were we trying to stop the wall or just help the farmers of Mas’ha? Should we confront the IDF and the construction crews directly, stand in front of bulldozers like Rachel Corrie, try to get arrested? Or would that just hurt our cause?
The first fights would usually break out between the Israelis. The mostly middle-aged, upper-middle-class immigrants from Europe and North America who made up the ranks of Ta’ayush and Gush Shalom would clash with the younger, more radical activists of Kvisa Sh’hora (Black Laundry)—a queer anti-occupation organization that protests mostly within Israel, linking the issues of queer rights and military occupation through outrageous street theater and provocative slogans like “Transgender not transfer” and “Limor Livnat [a right-wing Israeli politician], go down on me.” Then the members of each Israeli group would start bickering with each other.
Next, the international activists—Europeans and Americans from the International Solidarity Movement and the International Women’s Peace Service—would antagonize all the Israelis by scolding them for not deferring to the Palestinians. Israel, the internationals insisted, drummed the idea that Palestinians were inferior into all its children’s heads. It was the responsibility of the Israeli activists then to reverse those years of immoral socialization by letting the Palestinians speak first, yielding to their arguments, and never, under any circumstances, raising their voices.
Naturally, this led to the Israelis to start shouting at the internationals, who couldn’t seem to grasp the fact that raised voices are simply an indispensable part of Israeli communication—a cultural imperative and certainly nothing personal. Truly angry now, the Israelis would scream at the internationals for being so sanctimonious and self-righteous, and the internationals would scream right back, denouncing the Hebrew language as inherently oppressive. Finally, the Israelis would give up and go back to fighting with each other.
By 3 o’clock or so, most meetings would break down altogether, with the Israelis arguing among themselves, the internationals wringing their hands, and the Palestinians sitting together under the olive tree, solemnly declaring policy and handing down orders to which no one was listening. Finally, everyone would get hungry. Someone would fetch food and we would sit quietly together, trading jokes and shoveling falafel into our mouths.
Night watch shifts were two hours long. Two at a time, we would sit by the campfire, flashlight in hand, watching for IDF soldiers, who we feared might come at night to try and shut the camp down. The army had the power to come at any time and declare the area a “closed military zone,” meaning they could arrest and detain everyone in the camp.
For the Israelis, who would at most suffer a fine and a few hours’ detention, this was mainly an inconvenience. But if Palestinians were arrested, they could be held in “administrative detention” for indefinite periods of time without formally being charged with a crime. Occasionally, Israeli activists will refuse to be released until their Palestinian colleagues are also let go—a tactic that rarely, if ever, works.
To protect ourselves from religious settlers—whom we feared might simply come to attack us—we hit on a system of placing non-virgin female Jews closest to the camp’s perimeter. Religious Jews would stay away from “impure” Jewish women, went our thinking, and so who better to guard us?
As it turned out, we rarely encountered either settlers or the IDF during the night watch. Once, a soldier drove his jeep up to the camp. I approached and asked if there was a problem. “We just want to be sure you know exactly were you are right now,” he said. “Of course I do,” I said. “I know exactly where I am.” Bleary-eyed, I crawled back into my sleeping bag.
Each night, as I lay down with the others on one of the dusty mattresses set around the campfire, I watched Nazee prepare for sleep. After drinking several cups of thick coffee, and complaining loudly that he would be the only one left awake, Nazee would drift off, his breathing turning to a steady rumble. The next morning he’d gripe that he was the only one of us who stayed up at all hours. “How’s that possible?” I’d ask. “You snored in my ear the whole night.”
