trouble in paradise

Things are still going well for me here in palestine. my host parents are great, they always make us good food, and its obvious they are so in love. Julia likes to sing and dance around to make them laugh, and at night we all smoke argilah together. Ive been working at the SOS children's village with another guy in the program named chris. This is basically a village of children who have no family capable of taking care of them, and so they raise them in houses with a little family structure. I suppose having no parents creates a lack of discipline, and so we learned our lesson and have started taking them in smaller groups every day so that things dont get to chaotic. I dont know what it is, but palestinian children seem to be the cutest in the world.


I went to my first protest. Bethlehem is surrounded by the wall on two sides now, but they have plans that it should be surrounded on all four soon, creating a sort of isolated ghetto incapable or sustaining any kind of economy. This is why, every friday, people go down to the villages in the south that holy land trust has been trining in non violence and show our international support for their cause. The wall splits up homes from farmland, and families from each other and its effects to the local infrastructure are devistating. It was pretty intense to see soldiers lined up across a makeshift barbed wire fence with all their tanks and guns, holding flash bomb grenades (they make a loud sound that leaves you temporarily deaf) and tear gas canisters, just waiting for someone to say the word. I couldnt help but think that many of those soldiers had probably come from the united states, and think about the fact that when it came down to it, some of them were americans ready to throw tear gas at other americans, and all of a sudden it seemed so silly. We were the same people, from the same place and we had come to a spot of land, divided by our support of opposing groups and there they were with their guns ready and here we were with our cameras. I am glad that i got this first real taste when i did.


On sunday, our group went to hebron, which ended up as a disasterous incident that everyone is still dealing with. The situation there is very tense between the settlers and the palestinians. In fact if you just type 'hebron' and 'settlers' into youtube, you will find numerous videos of them throwing stones, and beating people, while the military watches and does nothing. The palestinians have to keep mesh all over their streets, just because of the ammount of junk the settlers throw at them. We were with a palestinian woman leaving her house and we almost immediately encountered a group of settlers that began harrasing her, and trying to take pictures of everyone in my group. The settlers in hebron can best be described as crazy, and as their irrationality gathered speed, the situation escalated very quickly. Soon enough i had an israeli woman screaming in my face that "if you want to kill jews, go to germany". Now her husband was the one with the assault rifle in my face, we were all obviously unarmed, it seemed that it was much more likely that they were out to kill americans that day, and this is when some people decided they couldnt handle it. The group split into two, which was the one thing we had been instructed not to do. Some people left, and others stayed. The soldiers there seemed to be trying to calm us down, but at the same time it was clear that they had no real power. One of them started asking me about texas and telling me how much he loved the dallas mavericks until one of he settlers said something to him in hebrew and he informed us that he was no longer allowed to speak to us. We asked if she had the authority to do that, and he just shrugged yes. Eventually we made it out alright, but it was still very tense because the division had caused the group and the group leaders not to trust each other, and everyone felt like someone else had put them in more danger. When we went back to the woman's house and onto the roof, i could see clearly that through a mess of green mesh on the next rooftop, there was a sniper pointing his gun down into the street below, exacitally where we had been walking before we had encountered all the madness. I had a very strange feeling realizing that we had all at some point been in his sights only moments before without ever knowing it, and it was an even stranger feeling when we left having to go back that way with the new knowledge that he was there. I think that many people had had a clear shot of me that day, and it is a very strange feeling that i lived only because they all made choices not to shoot me.