A Last Story

A last story, about Palestine, about Nablus, about my life here. Six months later, time to go home. After six months I still have no clue where to begin telling about Palestine. It seems the more I’ve lived here, the harder it becomes to explain what Palestine is all about. Palestine is no story, it’s an experience, it’s life. Maybe that can explain my recent absence on this blog.

Reflecting on the past six months, it has been more than worth it. My life in Nablus and especially my work as an English teacher have allowed me to comprehend Palestine even more than before. Nablus is a city where hardly any internationals come to visit and my work gave me the opportunity to interact with ordinary Palestinians. Not just to observe the Palestinian society, its culture and its problems, but to participate in it, to be part of it to a certain extent.

In my classes I didn’t deal with high-roller Palestinians, civil-society leaders. I was given the opportunity to get to know hundreds of common people. To hear about their lives, their goals and dreams. These are the people that are always talked about when you hear the term 'the Palestinian people'. These are the ones that are always discussed in the news and in the so-called 'peace' negotiations between Israel and Palestine. They are more than mere numbers or cases. They are more than an abstract concept or a political label (be it either terrorists or freedom fighters). They are more than lost souls that need our 'benevolent' western help and advice. They are not lost, even though they have suffered so much in the past century and continue to be put through unthinkable misery. They are not lost at all. In fact we are the ones that are being lost and the Israeli people is a people that is being lost.

They know what they are suffering and that they are suffering. They know what they are suffering for. They know who they are and they know their enemy and their struggle. They know exactly what is happening. And after all what has happened to them they still stand for what they believe in, firm and determined, because they know and they feel what they stand for is ultimately right.

I came to Palestine as an English teacher. But the people here have taught me. They taught me about perseverance, resilience, sumud as it is called. I felt how strong their roots are and I became aware that with strong roots nothing can uproot you. Nothing can deviate you from your goal. A tree in a storm is put under a lot of pressure, it will crack and moan, branches might break off, but if the roots of the tree are strong and healthy the tree will live through it, even though you might see it pushed to all sides by the heavy winds.

In Holland I feel we are like a tree that has forgotten about it roots and only wants to grow in the sky, bigger and bigger. But if then a small wind comes along we begin to groan as if the entire universe is coming down on us. We are unaware of our roots and unaware of our struggle, but in fact everyone has a struggle, as life itself is a struggle. We hardly stand for anything, as we’re not really sure what could be worth standing for.

And even though it’s a common tendency to either blame the Palestinians or to feel sorry for them, I can not do either one of them. I can not even feel sorry for them wholeheartedly. As controversial as it may sound, the general feeling I have is one of admiration (with of course some exceptions in individual stories). I admire the strong sense of belonging in Palestinian people, I admire that they are so well-aware of their identity, as the absence of these feelings inside of me gives me the feeling that I’m just wandering around, floating in a huge void. I’m the one that is being lost. I’m the one without a homeland, not them. Even though for the Palestinians the physical homeland has been and is being destroyed and denied to them, they have a homeland that still exists in the Palestinian mind. Far beyond the reach of the Israeli attempts to take it, control it and abuse it. The Palestinian roots can never be destroyed. I felt this here.

With strong roots you don’t need, or depend on, protection mechanisms, or external support. You will be able to endure the storm by yourself. The power comes from within and no can external mechanism can ever equal its power.
The Palestinians are fighting their fight largely without weapons, but still they manage to withstand the Israeli state that is armed to its teeth. Why and how? Because they rely upon real power: the power from within. Their roots and minds have shown to be strong enough to endure all the violence Israeli weapons and wars have inflicted upon them.

Israel on the other hand can not maintain is existence without violence, without weapons and without war and they are well aware of this. They know that they are weak. Everything they are, everything they stand for, everything they believe in: it’s all an illusion. A myth. There’s no such thing as an Israeli people or even a Jewish people. The Israeli bestseller from historian Shlomo Sand, based on extensive research, states that the idea of a Jewish people is an invention, created around a century ago for political purposes: the establishment of a colonial Zionist state in the land of Palestine. The Jewish inhabitants of the state of Israel mostly have no historical connections to the land and don’t have much more in common with each other than that they believe in the same myth.

I met Israelis and I talked to them. They give me the impression of a scared people. Traumatized, slightly paranoid that the entire world is against them. At the same time when I look at them they make me feel like they know that they are wrong. I’m convinced that deep deep down inside them, they are completely aware of the illusion they are and the lie they are living. In my eyes this is their ultimate fear: to come to accept that they are without roots, that they are lost. They continuously try to rationalize and argue this fear away, as well as externalize the fear on anyone that is not Jewish, with of course the Palestinians and other Arabs as the perfect scary monsters.

Israel has built all the available protection mechanisms around its dying tree. But no windshield is strong enough to keep up a tree that is without roots: a state that has been built on stolen land. You can not build a house without a foundation. You might be living in it comfortably for many years, under the impression that you have it made, but in the end it will collapse when even the slightest amount of pressure is put on it. The story of the three little piglets all of a sudden has come to show me great philosophical meaning.

But for the time being the windshield offers a little protection. Without that kind of protection the Israeli tree will collapse sooner than we hold possible. And not because the oppression and killing of Palestinians is effectively preventing Palestinians from murdering the Israeli people (the Palestinian have never shown any sign of blind hatred or anti-Semitic feelings towards Jewish people), no… without any protection the tree will collapse from its own weak roots. Without the ability to externalize the Israeli feelings of fear, without a common enemy that is out there ‘to hunt them down to the end’ it is almost inevitable that the Israeli people will have to look inward and see that in fact they are their own enemy.

This is why Israel attacked Gaza, this is why Israel can not allow itself to make peace with the Palestinians. And by peace I of course don’t mean the joke of the Oslo peace process, as this peace was only established to continue the occupation of Palestine by different means, to crush the Palestinian resistance by dividing them amongst themselves, and to ‘restore’ the Israeli image in the world, that was severely damaged when the world was observing the true face of Israel in the first Intifada. I mean peace without the upsetting taste of racism and Apartheid. Peace would mean that Israel can not maintain its existence, as Israel can not maintain its existence without their Apartheid ‘windshield’ and without considering the Palestinians as their ultimate enemy.

Let me end with expressing my eternal gratefulness for the past six months and for all the amazing people and life lessons I bumped into. I was given the experience to feel what all the academic concepts I’ve been taught in Conflict Studies really entail. Freedom, peace, violence, fear, anger, resistance and power were more or less abstract notions to me. I understood them from a distance (some more than others), but by being here I encountered them… I invited them inside. I know their faces now and I consider it one of the best experiences that has ever crossed my path.