a story, a scar and an opinion.

June 2007

My friend Alice writes after a month in Palestine:

Every time I open my journal I sink into anxiety. How am I ever going to be able to write about this? For every story I tell there are a million more that I am leaving behind. But this is what drew me here in the first place: everyone here has a story to tell, a story, a scar, and an opinion.

I am here because I still want to believe things can be changed. They have to.

In the space of a month, I have argued endlessly over one or two state solutions, I have met a man that was jailed when he was fourteen and released ten years later, for throwing rocks at soldiers, I have walked around the walls, driven up to an Israeli settlement in the middle of the West Bank, I have rallied with a soldier friend at Israel’s gay pride parade, I have seen people shoot in the air at Ramallah’s manar, I have danced at a kibbutz and gotten into an argument even then, and I have listened to the radio as Abu Mazen sacked the government. Every day I have woken up to count the dead in Gaza. Everyday I have been held up at checkpoints, and I have been asked what am I doing here? Why?

In the space of a month, the language I had only distantly grasped from newspapers and academic articles started to make visible, painful sense, and I begun to talk of right to return, and occupation, settlements, illegal detentions, green lines, ‘67 borders, and Oslo mistakes, checkpoints, walls, martyrdom and terrorism, with a physical understanding of what they mean.

I also had my idealism disillusioned in a way I never thought possible. As of today, I do not know if I believe in peace. But I need to believe in something, and I still do not know any better.

My four days in Palestine stirred up so much and gave me so much. But it is not even one tenth of what Alice saw and felt during her stay there. I just wish that someday I am able to do the things she did and experience Palestine the way she did.

p.s.Alice is an Italian Harvard student who interned with the Faculty For Israeli and Palestinian Peace, in the West Bank. I know her from IYVS in Chicago.
Unfortunately she left Ramallah the day I got there, so I couldn't see her. Though my trip couldn't have been organised without her input and help and our wonderful message exchanges on facebook that always ended with 'we shall meet in Palestine. Inshallah.'