Ahed Tamimi was just released from Israeli prison in the latest prison swap for hostages held in Gaza. I have been following the stories of her and her family from the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh since she first gained celebrity (or infamy depending on one’s perspective) as an 11 year-old for raising her fist in a very close encounter with a heavily armed Israeli soldier. Since well before that incident, her family and village have been protesting the appropriation of their land and the water by an illegal settlement that encroaches by holding weekly demonstrations.
Here is the indigenous town of Nabi Salih which is near the largest Palestinian City of Ramallah.
And this is the illegal settlement of Halamish which is the local source of the problems giving rise to the Tamimis’ protests.
As with most of the multitude of illegal settlements that have cropped up in the West Bank, they threaten the existence of the indigenous Palestinians living there and have killed the hopes for a Palestinian state. This is all being done with the support of the Israel army. As these illegal settlements swell, so do the numbers of heavily armed soldiers posted to “protect” the settlers yet not a finger is ever lifted by them when violence is perpetrated against Palestinians by the settlers. Read about the death of Ahed’s 2 1/2 year old cousin who was “accidentially” shot by an Israeli soldier. Youngest Tamimi killed summer 2023 The trigger happy soldier purportedly thought he was firing at a car purportedly driven by two man who purportedly fired a gun toward the settlement. Of course there will never be a meaningful investigation. This is what the Tamimi family have been protesting for decades.
In 2015, another photo and video went viral when Ahed was assisting in wrestling down an Israeli soldier to try to free her 12 year old brother whose healing broken arm was in was in a cast .
I look at this photo and I can only laugh at comments I’ve read from indignant Zionists at how Ehad Tamimi doesn’t properly respect their valiant Israeli soldiers .
The incident that landed Ahed in Israeli prison for 8 months was in 2017. It was after she had learned that her cousin, Mohammed was shot in the head with a rubber bullet. These are no nerf balls, rather they are steel with a thin rubber coating, and they can kill. This one took out a large section of Mohammed’s skull which left him with a grotesquely misshapen head. If that isn’t bad enough, while he was still suffering from this grievous injury, he was detained and interrogated by the Israeli army where he signed a forced confession that his injury was a result of falling off his bike.
It is now well documented that a rubber bullet was extracted from Mohammed’s head. He ultimately had to undergo cranial reconstruction surgery.
This obnoxious woman/repeat offender (and I encountered some of these people in Hebron who defy the term fantatics, when I spent a month in the West Bank) and others in her enclave have made it their life’s mission harassing the Palestinians whose lives they’ve displaced and disrupted. You can read about some of my experiences with such oppression in Hebron in earlier posts here.
There is admittedly some inherent reverse racism in the wide publicity Ahed has garnered because of her atypically blonde locks and blue eyes. There is something a little too close to home for many westerners in seeing this blue-eyed girl going mano-to-mano with heavily armed soldiers. The Zionist propaganda machine detests her. She is a fly in their hasbara ointment. On the mild side, she’s been tagged as “Shirley Temper” and on the other end of the spectrum is the likes of a Twitter post from Knesset member, Bayit Yehudi MK Bezalel Smotrich saying that Ahed should have been crippled by being shot in the knee after slapping an IDF soldier. Thankfully, at least Twitter had the sense to suspend his account.
Ahed’s most recent jailing stemmed for a claim that she incited terrorism from a Twitter account that didn’t even belong to her. Apparently there have been numerous fake Aheds on Twitter and I have no doubt that some of these were created to land her in more hot water. For this latest allegation, she was held in prison for 50 days until she was recently released in one of the swaps of Palestinian prisoners for for hostages held by Hamas in Gaza. Contrast her treatment for a post from a fake Twitter account with the statement from the Knesset member urging someone to shoot her in the knees.
Ahed with her mother upon her latest release from Israeli prison.
She told her story a few years ago in Ahed’s Open Letter in Vogue Arabia, describing how her first awareness of the increasing peril her family was facing was when she was 3 years old and her father, Bassem was arrested.
I met her father, Bassem in Portland, Maine a few years ago when he doing a tour in the U.S. trying to raise awareness of the plight of Palestinians under occupation. He was a kind and articulate man doing everything in his power to awaken the world to the daily injustices he and all Palestinians in the West Bank suffer under Israeli occupation. He has been labeled a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International for his many terms of imprisonment by Israel for his protests. He has paid dearly for his activism as has Ahed and all of her family.
I knew that Hillary Clinton totally lacked a) integrity, b) a moral compass c) honesty or all of the above, when as the US Senator from New York she voted to start a war in Iraq in 2003. Then in 2011, as Secretary of State she was instrumental in convincing Obama to bomb Libya and take out Muammar el-Qadaffi. She obviously didn’t learn anything from the debacle in Iraq and the result in Libya was no better, leaving a power vacuum. She was warned that this would happen and it did.
It’s been nearly a decade since the U.S.-backed ousting of Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, and conditions in the country have gotten worse and more complicated.
And now, with the US financing the 2 ton bombs that are being dropped in Gaza, causing a death toll to date of in excess of 14,000 people, largely women and children, and destroying a huge part of the infrastructure in the tiny enclave.
More women and children have been reported killed in Gaza in less than two months than the roughly 7,700 civilians documented as killed by U.S. forces and their international allies in the entire first year of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, according to estimates from Iraq Body Count, an independent British research group.
But, it doesn’t faze Hillary. Here’s what she has to say.
A cease fire now that restored the pre-October 7th status quo would leave the people of Gaza living in a besieged enclave under the domination of terrorists and leave Israelis vulnerable to continued terrorist attacks. It would consign 100s of hostages to continue captivity.
That link is an interview with Norman Finkelstein, a stalwart defender of Palestinians rights, anti-Zionist, and I might add, son of Holocaust survivors. How I would love to see him in a face to face debate with Hillary. The interview also touches on my previous post about the failure of the Oslo Accords and tears apart her argument that it was the fault of the Palestinians, a fallacy that Bill Clinton also continues to perpetrate. Please circulate it among anyone who is willing to listen. It is people like Hillary Clinton in our government that continue to support and finance this massive blood shed and are doing nothing to actually address this decades old conflict.
There has been a lot of debate over the years about who was at fault for the failure of the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords. I will posit here that they were never meant to succeed. Here are excerpts from an article that appeared in Sept. 2023 in the Guardian by Avi Shlaim which puts it squarely on Netanyahu’s shoulders (link below). I remember reflecting on how he was behind the burgeoning land grabbing and building of massive settlements in the West Bank in the early 2000s and thinking, back then, what a travesty and act of defiance that was. A couple salient quotes from the article and link below.
Controversy surrounded Oslo from the moment it saw the light of day. The 21 October 1993 issue of the London Review of Books ran two articles; Edward Said put the case against in the first. He called the agreement “an instrument of Palestinian surrender, a Palestinian Versailles”, arguing that it set aside international legality and compromised the fundamental national rights of the Palestinian people. It could not advance genuine Palestinian self-determination because that meant freedom, sovereignty, and equality, rather than perpetual subservience to Israel.
Yet the PLO went along with it anyway.
Particularly destructive of the peace project was the [Israeli, not part of the Accords – my words] policy of expanding Israeli settlements on occupied Palestinian territory. These settlements are illegal under international law and constitute a huge obstacle to peace.
The so-called security barrier that Israel has been building on the West Bank since 2002 further encroaches on Palestinian land. Land-grabbing and peace-making do not go together.
The rate of settlement growth in the West Bank and Israeli-annexed East Jerusalem is staggering. At the end of 1993 there were 115,700 Israeli settlers in the occupied territories. Their number doubled during the following decade.
Today the number of Israeli settlers on the West Bank exceeds 350,000. There are an additional 300,000 Jews living in settlements across the pre-1967 border in East Jerusalem. Thousands more settlement homes are planned or under construction.
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If anyone advocating for the Palestinians during the Oslo Accords (if there even was any advocacy) had read the Likud Party platform, they could have foreseen this. This is taken directly from the first paragraph of their platform.
Between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.
In essence, not only as Edward Saed so ominously lamented that the Oslo Accords were an instrument of Palestinian surrender, in the eyes of Israel, it was a farce never intended to give an inch to the millions of Palestinians under its iron fist
I’ve been advocating for Palestinian rights for around 15 years now. In the process of delving into the issue, I’ve grown weary and frustrated about the pernicious effect of Zionist propaganda that has served to shut down discourse on the issue for so many years. Now finally, it took a horrible, bloody attack by an extremist Palestinian group to serve as a wake up call to the world that perhaps there is more than one side here, and perhaps we should be listening to the grievances of the other side. I was Googling the term “Zionist propaganda” and I came across the article, from of all places, the CIA, below written by a man I had never heard of before, James Abourezk, a Lebanonese-American.
The Relentless Israeli Propaganda Machine, James Abourezk, from Penthouse (Feb. 1978)
James Abourezk served one term each as a US senator and a Congressman in South Dakota, but left politics because he felt like a fish swimming upstream and thought he could better put his intellect to service in the private sector. He fought for Indian rights, as well as for normalizing relations with Cuba and Iran – a tried and true leftist and good person. How interesting that this meticulously detailed article about how US/Zionist propaganda has clouded the truth of Israel’s bloody formation and continued occupation was published in Penthouse magazine. I’ve got to wonder if that’s because he couldn’t find a more mainstream, reputable venue. In any event, I’ve posted it here for myself as much as anyone else as a go-to resource when I get my dates and facts about this non-ending struggle muddled.
Here’s the definition of genocide from the US Holocaust museum memorial.
Killing members of the group
Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group
Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part
Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group
Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group
All of the bullet points except possibly No. 5 apply to what Israel is doing and has been doing to the Palestinians under its control. It is tragically ironic that the group famous for “never again” have become the genociders. When I visited Vad Yashem several years ago, I was struck by the same thing – how many of the stories could be read as if they came from Palestinian victims rather than Jewish ones. Here are a few quotes from the exhibits there that I had jotted down at the time.
“In Western Europe the Nazis did not establish ghettos for the Jews, but rathe reinforced racist legislation and a policy of Arayanization and discrimination. The anti-Jewish policy was applied gradually taking into account the attitudes of the local population.”
“I decided I would be a predator in order to survive.” Testimony from the film, Culture without walls
“They wanted to make the lives of the Jews so unbearable that they simply would want to leave.” Narration from an exhibit
“In eastern Europe, the Germans incarcerated the Jews in severely overcorowded ghettos behind fences and wall. They cut the Jews off from their surroundings and their sources of livelihood and condemned them to a life of humiliation, degeneration, poverty and death.” From a placard on an exhibit
The only way that anyone who considers themselves left leaning or liberal can condone Israel’s Zionist structure, and particularly what Israel is doing in Gaza now requires turning an absolutely blind eye to the plight of Palestinians. Otherwise, the cognitive dissonance is just too overwhelming.
Animals of Vieques. Oil on stretched canvas – 16″ x 20″
More Vieques art. Musicians of Vieques, 12 x 12 oil on stretched canvas, sold at the Vieques 12 x 12 auction to benefit island animals; seascape on found corrugated scrap metal with various house paints; clay mask from Lulu’s ceramics studio class
Imagine – 14 x 18 oil on bristol
I started attending a Wednesday evening open session for drawing live nudes. I’m loving it so far. I turned this sketch into a water color .
Family in ago – oil in antique frame; Noeline as little Tudor – 14 x 18 oil
Quick jottings: my boys with babes – watercolor on cardstock; baby Jura on wooden cigar box top
Food studies top row – oils on various sized stretched canvases; blueberries, oil on Bristol
Self-portraits from ago invented spaces, both oils on bristol
Motherhood with Sophie – oil on bristol and pastel on paper
Parker’s old home, Peter lost in motion and Christmas Eve Day hangover – oils on stretched canvas
Tributes to my father – oils on Bristol from old black and white photos
Northern Michigan snaps – both oils on bristol
Birds: crows in the moon, water color on paper; cedar waxwings, oil on stretched canvas
Quick water colors: girls in cemetery and bumble bee
Some of my first attempts in paint – acrylic (which I discovered is not my favorite medium). My Beau and Sophie and me
Portraits: charcoal on paper and three water colors
Doodlings on my smudge pads from other works
Two original crewel works, wool yarn on linen: Hey Diddle Diddle and the Owl and the Pusscat; hotwater bottle cozies from old cashmere sweaters with applique; pillow with crow on linen
Oils on stretched canvas: escaped hobby horses and old bug and bunny
My biggest fan
Musicians. The first is Mitsuko Uchida from a newpaper photo. The second is a young Cypriot cellist at Apple Hill Center for Chamber Music; the third is probably my inspiration for taking up painting. She is a great-aunt of my ex, and it was a B&W photo that I co-opted because no one else wanted it. I had tried to get an artist friend to do a commission of it, but he never got around to it. One of the many DIY moments in my life where I decided to do it myself. These are all early and flawed, but I put them up as a way to track my own progress and growth as a painter.
Water color sketchbook. Some of my first water colors, all from Vieques just a couple months after the devastating hurricane Maria had hit the island.
The violence in the West Bank drones on barely noticed by the world. Palestinians are almost always the victims. That changed on January 9, 2018 when an Israeli man, Raziel Shevach was killed as he was driving, presumptively by a Palestinian shooter. Suddenly the news is big. Shevach, 34 years old, was a Rabbi and a settler in an illegal outpost near Nablus, the 3rd largest Palestinian urban area in the West Bank. The tragedy is undeniable. He was a young father of 6 and by all accounts a decent man. But, he was a radical man. He had formerly lived in Gush Katif, an illegal settlement in the Gaza Strip. This was just prior to the entire settlement being dismantled (to the outrage of many Israelis) by the Israeli government when they sealed off the Gaza strip, effectively turning it into an open air prison for the nearly 3 million Palestinians crammed into this tiny strip of land.
So Shevach went from one illegal settlement to establish another, this time in the West Bank. He was a resident not of one of the monolithic, concrete suburbs sitting atop hills in the West Bank, but rather at an “outpost.” This is an important distinction, because all of the illegal settlements in the West Bank began as “outposts.” These are essentially encampments of radical, religious Jews. Many of these settlers stem from places like New York City and Russia. For people like Shevach, they are doing God’s work, and in his case, settling the land of Judea and Samaria, aka the West Bank which under international law belongs to the Palestinians. In their minds, Jews have a God-given right to every speck of land from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River, and even beyond. They pay no mind to the fact that this is in defiance not only of international law and even Israeli law, but of of reality – ignoring the existence of over 6 million Palestinians who legally occupy the region. But what has Israel done to stop this activity? Almost nothing. They turn a blind eye to the initial outposts, and once concrete starts to be poured, it becomes a fete accompli.
In reading the outraged accounts of his death, I am struck not so much by the rage and indignation. It was a murder, after all, which by any account is a huge moral wrong and made particularly tragic by the fact that Shevach leaves 6 small children behind, but rather by the lack of understanding with statements like, “how could this happen?” How could this happen? When Palestinians witness the brutality of occupation every day of their lives, see the tiny amount of land left to them being slowly, but surely gobbled up, having their freedom of movement and their right to the water that sits underneath them denied, what are they expected to do? To be compliant and willing victims?
Shevach’s widow is already calling not only to have her husband buried at the illegal outpost, but now, to have it finally legalized. Pressure on Netanyahu to legalize Havat Gilad.
The outpost of Havat Gilad
And in the meantime, nearby Jewish settlers are taking matters into their own hands, rampaging on nearby farms, destroying the olive trees belonging to hapless Palestinian farmers who had nothing to do with the murder while Israeli soldiers look on, doing nothing to stop then. Masked settlers destroying olive trees
The whole country of Israel is outraged and a huge manhunt is underway for the murderer. But where is the outrage for what is happening to Palestinians? Where is the reflection that leads to the obvious conclusion that stealing land and rights from Palestinians can not have a good outcome and that plopping settlements in their midst is throwing gas on the fire?
What will be next? Perhaps another gruesome kidnapping and murder of a Palestinian youth as happened to Abu Khdeir, an innocent who was burnt alive by Jewish thugs in retribution for the murder of three Israeli youth three and a half years ago.Murder of Abu Kdheir I can guarantee you that many, many Palestinian homes are being raided in the middle of the night and young men and boys are being detained without any warrants or semblance of due process to quell the collective Israel outrage. Will one wrong be undone by visiting a hundred fold more wrongs?
“Who are we that we should bewail their mighty hatred of us? For eight years they have been sitting in refugee camps in Gaza and before their eyes we have been transforming the lands and villages where their fathers dwelt, into our estate.”
I think I’ve overused the word irony in these pages, but it abounds like kudzu in modern day Israel. The most obvious and glaring is the abuse and subjugation of Palestinians by Jews, who themselves have historically been abused and subjugated. Is it not doubly ironic that the founders of Israel recognized this? The quote above is from Moshe Dayan, words he spoke at a funeral of an Israeli man in 1956 who was killed by a Palestinian in Gaza.
This photo is from my recent trip. The house was recently destroyed by Israeli forces, ostensibly because the Palestinian family lacked a building permit. Virtually the only places that Palestinians are allowed to build are in the already very cramped, urbanized centers in the West Bank. The majority of the West Bank is off limits to new building. This makes it extremely difficult for Palestinians to obtain new housing. To add poisonous salt to festering wounds, these demolitions are often undertaken at the point that a new home is almost completed.
Speaking once again of irony, this particular house was in the vicinity of an Israeli settlement in the West Bank. These Jewish only settlements defy international law and multiple UN resolutions condemning them. The West Bank is an occupied territory, and the law is very clear that the occupied population (the Palestinians) are not to be displaced by the occupying power. Yet after 50 years of occupation, there are now over 500,000 Jewish settlers in the West Bank, huge swaths of land have been confiscated and thousands of Palestinian homes destroyed leaving only a fraction of the West Bank in Palestinian hands. Even during the Oslo accords, new settlements were being planned and erected. And what remains in Palestinian hands is still fully under Israeli military control as well as all of the resources (see earlier posts about water rights and movement). Is it any wonder that the rage festers?
There is a great little Thanksgiving Diddy that my children used to sing, recognizing that Columbus wasn’t the first person to “discover” America. Rather, people had been living there for thousands of years. One verse goes as such:
Now it isn’t like it was empty space
The Caribs met him face to face
Could anyone discover a place
When someone was already there
Followed by the chorus reciting a list of many of the American Indian tribes. If you want to hear the whole song, it’s here
It has only been in recent years that Americans have started reckoning with the historic whitewashing of how the Indians were decimated by the hordes of explorers and colonizers that followed Columbus. One would hope that mankind had evolved enough over the past few centuries to recognize that the destruction and subjugation of an entire population in the interest of colonization is immoral. But, that is exactly how the state of Israel came into being and continues to expand.
Just as we Americans were raised with the notion that America was built by heroes and that the only bloodshed of the native population was because their own savagery, so goes the narrative about Palestinians who predated the modern State of Israel. Contrary to oft repeated Zionist equivocation that Israel was a land without people for a people without land, the Zionist narrative has whitewashed the tragedy of the expulsion of 100s of millions of Palestinians from their generational homes, the destruction of hundreds of villages and the appropriation of Palestinian culture.
Another oft heard justification for the creation of Israel relies on the the pride of the the accomplishment of the creation of modern day Israel with its booming economy and mighty military. It is true that Israel is a beautiful and thriving country. It’s hard to travel there and not appreciate this. It’s ironic, however, that much of the culture that Israel celebrates including music and art, has been misappropriated from Palestinian culture. When one acknowledges how the Palestinians have suffered and continue to suffer as a consequence of the creation and expansion of Israel, it greatly tarnishes Israel’s image. Most people on both sides of the issue acknowledge today that there will never be a two state solution. Gaza and the West Bank are no longer connected, and what remains of the West Bank for Palestinians are the Swiss cheese holes in what had been designated as Palestinian land by the original UN mandate. So, it is with mixed feelings of nostalgia and deep sadness that I share these last pictures from the olive picking trip of Fall of 2017.
These two pictures were taken during our tour of the Palestinian quarter of the old city of Jerusalem. The second graphically demonstrates how Zionist Jews are attempting to claim the whole city as their own. Even though the buildings from which the Israeli flags are hanging are unoccupied, somehow the rights to the buildings are owned now by Jews and the message is clear. We belong here – not you. Of course, Donald Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel will only further serve to bolster these claims.
We parted from the group in Jerusalem where we spent the night and then left the next morning for Jaffa. Jaffa is the ancient city that eventually was swallowed up by modern day Tel Aviv, the largest city in Israel, and the logical location of its capital. We stayed in the old city where there remains many vestiges of the old Palestinian presence as well as some remnants of New Testament Biblical times.
The historical site of the house of Simon, the fisher.
Spectacular view from old Jaffa to the Mediterranean Sea – something that many Palestinians living in the West Bank, only some 30 miles or so away, will never in their lifetimes see.
My third time eating on the edge of the port of Jaffa at the Old Man and the Sea. No matter what one orders, the meal starts out with this huge display of salads and a large pitcher of fresh lemonade. It’s an extremely popular restaurant staffed primarily by Palestinians and serving traditional Palestinian foods, but many travel sites tout it as Israeli. The fact is, the cultures are both Semitic and very similar, but this is something that Zionists wish to erase from consciousness. Of the 48,000 residents of Jaffa, around 1/4 are Palestinian.
During this picking venture, I had the chance to meet up with some friends from my past two visits. After one morning of work, our group toured the old city of Hebron, where I had spent a month working in 2015. I had written about Leila, a lady in the market. She had become my friend after she kindly guided me through the confusing narrow streets my first week there. https://kksjournal.com/2015/04/19/dont-you-know-its-dangerous-there-said-the-fox-to-the-chicken/ We initially visited the al Abrahimi Mosque, which was infamously partitioned to create a temple for the 500 or so squatting settlers who had turned this ancient Palestinian city upside after one of their minions, an American, Baruch Goldstein machine gunned down 30 or so worshippers. Mind you, this had been exclusively an Islamic place of worship for over 800 years.
To the right is the newly erected division creating in this ages old Mosque a new Jewish temple. Jews were never barred from visiting here, which supposedly sits atop the tombs of Abraham and Sarah, but now, as with the rest of Israel, Jewish rights supersede the rights of the indigenous peoples.
A little Hand Maidens Tale-ish
In one of the more bizarre twists of the stilted history of the occupation, this flagrant act of violence of a crazy Zionist against the indigineuos inhabitants, rather than drawing protection from Israel, the occupying force for the native inhabitants, did the exact opposite. Shuheida Street, the Main Street of commerce in the old city was closed down, Palestinian businesses were shuttered, Israeli forces were called in, not to protect the Palestinians, but rather the squatters, outnumbering them by four soldiers to every squatter, and erecting check points severely restricting movement of the inhabitants of the old city. The injustice of this is so profound, it pains me to recount it. But yet I’m compelled to, because the pain resides daily in the lives of those Hebronites who remain, struggling to maintain subsistence and a semblance of dignity in the face of such oppression.
I ran ahead of the group afraid that I’d miss the opportunity before our bus was to leave. As I ran through the narrow street, a couple venders shouted out to me to stop and look at their wares. One shouted, “I remember you!” Others cried out to stop at their shops. I replied, “Leila, I’m looking for Leila.” I heard one scoff, “Leila, always Leila.” Finally, there she was, pretty much at the end of all the venders. Such a sweet reunion. It’s strange how certain interpersonal connections are made. Is it cosmic, in the DNA, the stars? All I know is that it was instantly and mutually felt. Leila looked much the same, but life had not become any easier. She told me that her son had been arrested two days earlier for having “illegally” sought work in Israel. This, of course could mean six months in jail with no outside contact with the world, abuse/torture, and imposition of impossible fines. it’s hard, so very hard to feel so useless and impotent. A very bitter sweet and shirt reunion.
I was also very interested to know what become of Feryal Abu Haikal. FOLLOW THE TEL RUMEIDA ROAD. When I enquired, all I learned was that she had taken ill. Hardly a surprise given the immense pressure she faces on a daily basis. In Googling I further learned that she had lost her case against the continued destruction and confiscation of her land in the Israel Supreme Court. Losses continue to mount The pillage of the ancestral land of the Abu Haikal family continues under the auspices of archeology, but as one Israeli archeologist pointed out in disgust, who ever heard of an archeological dig being conducted with backhoes? Moreover, ancient finds from the Roman times are found and destroyed only to dig deeper. The only thing of interest in this farcical Zionist venture is to find artifacts dating to the time of King David’s mythical reign to bolster the claim that this is the rightfully seized land of Israel.
On a more positive note, I was able to meet up with my friend and hiking guide Hijazi Eid who joined us for dinner at the hotel. He also does his part and teaching of the beauty and history of the ancient land of Palestine and its deep shared culture among Jewish, Christian and Islamic peoples.
We also were able to spent one night with Mirvate Anwar in Beit Sahour. I stayed with them during my first trip, and have kept contact with her ever since. They have a beautiful house which keeps getting taller to accommodate their growing family. Palestinians are very rarely allowed building permits by the Israeli government so their only option to expand is upwards. This is why one often sees rebar sticking out from the top of Palestinian houses.
Payne and I also had a chance meeting with her lovely daughter, Natalie as we were wandering the streets of Beit Sahour on our one free day. She was working in a tourist center when we were looking for an ATM. Unfortunately, I didn’t get photos.
The struggle continues, but more and more people are becoming aware and adding to the force for change. Israel has become Goliath and the Palestinians David. Justice will prevail.
Spectacular view from old Jaffa to the Mediterranean Sea – something that many Palestinians living in the West Bank, only some 30 miles or so away, will never in their lifetimes see.
My third time eating on the edge of the port of Jaffa at the Old Man and the Sea. No matter what one orders, the meal starts out with this huge display of salads and a large pitcher of fresh lemonade. It’s an extremely popular restaurant staffed primarily by Palestinians and serving traditional Palestinian foods, but many travel sites tout it as Israeli. The fact is, the cultures are both Semitic and very similar, but this is something that Zionists wish to erase from consciousness. Of the 48,000 residents of Jaffa, around 1/4 are Palestinian.
kksjournal 