[ A heated argument is taking place about the morality, benefit,
and value of traveling to Palestine to witness firsthand what
Palestinians are facing in the context of prolonged Israeli military
occupation.]
[[link removed]]

VISITING THE PALESTINIAN NARRATIVE REQUIRES MORE THAN A VISIT  
[[link removed]]


 

Sam Bahour
September 20, 2022
Medium
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ A heated argument is taking place about the morality, benefit, and
value of traveling to Palestine to witness firsthand what Palestinians
are facing in the context of prolonged Israeli military occupation. _

Artist Franz Krausz (Publisher — Tourist Development Association of
Palestine, 1936) — Source: Library of Congress — Prints and
Photographs Division., (A 2015 article on this poster by Rochelle
Davis and Dan Walsh was published by the Institute for Palestine
Studies)

 

Assuming these travelers are well-intentioned and want to see
Israel’s military occupation for what it is, what they get in the
best case is a brief glimpse of the Palestinians’ current reality.
They will not come close to learning in any depth about the full lived
experience of Palestinians, let alone acquiring a comprehensive
understanding of the Palestinian narrative.

By force or otherwise and over several generations, Israel has
succeeded beyond its founders’ wildest dreams and in broad daylight
to fragment the Palestinian community geographically, socially,
economically, and politically. For an authentic engagement with the
Palestinian narrative, one would need to also visit Israel, Lebanon,
Jordan, Syria, Iraq, Kuwait, Denmark, Germany, the US, the UK, Canada,
Chile, Brazil, and Venezuela, to name just a few. Visitors would also
need to spend some time visiting Israeli prisons to meet a growing
number of Palestinian political prisoners being detained, hundreds
without charge, and some for 10, 20, 30 years or more.

A full understanding of what Palestinians have been put through since
the founding of Israel and what they are facing today in each of their
fragmented places of existence would be unbearable for the average
person, mentally and emotionally. Indeed, a full comprehension of what
they face is also more than what most of today’s traumatized
generation of Palestinians are willing to consciously entertain as
they endeavor somehow to carve a meaningful life in a cruel and
demeaning reality.

“ETHICAL TOURISM” TO APARTHEID

This debate on “ethical tourism” to Palestine/Israel is most
apparent in Jewish communities around the world and, in particular, in
the American Jewish world. American columnist, journalist, and
political commentator Peter Beinart recently hosted me on a panel
about this very topic, _The Ethics of Organized Travel between the
River and the Sea_ [[link removed]].

Middle East trips by Jewish community groups and many others,
including a steady stream of US lawmakers, have been on the increase
in recent years. The itineraries now routinely include a stop in
Palestine, usually in the city of Bethlehem or Ramallah where I
reside. Ramallah is often said to have a 5-star occupation as one of
the Palestinian cities least battered by the Israeli occupation —
which is not to say that Ramallah is occupation-free. Scratch the
surface of any Palestinian city, including this one, and what may
initially seem like a hustling and bustling Middle East bazaar will
quickly reveal itself to be a structurally damaged society. This is
absolutely the case for all Palestinian locales across the occupied
territory.

Over the last 15 years, I’ve been asked to speak to hundreds of
these visiting groups. As I watch this debate about the “ethical”
way to visit Palestine, I can’t help but wonder about the value of
engaging in this fleeting way with people who are passing through in
quest of a Palestinian narrative.

The overwhelming majority of people with whom I’ve engaged are
genuinely seeking to broaden their horizon on Palestine/Israel. And in
fact, the education they receive in talking with Palestinians from
different walks of life and briefly seeing a sliver of reality on the
ground, be it the sprawling settlements, the separation wall, or
intrusive military checkpoints, will surely add to their knowledge.
Some few are also moved to act, and it is these visitors who make
speaking to groups worth the effort.

At the other end of the spectrum are those coming just to add examples
and cred to their pre-determined beliefs that whatever Israel does
must be for good reason: No matter how ugly the reality, there must be
some justification even for crimes of Apartheid and mass persecution.
For such visitors, the underlying racist premise is that Palestinians
are violent, and Israel is justified in protecting itself at any cost.
To hell with international law and human rights.

The English edition of the Israeli newspaper _Haaretz_ recently
published a piece titled, “Why a pro-Israel Campus Organization Is
Bringing Jewish Students to Ramallah
[[link removed]],”
by Judy Maltz (Aug 25, 2022). Two of the student visitors she
interviewed expressed the opinion that their single trip enlightened
them:

Jordan Robinson, a 21-year-old participant who recently began his
graduate studies at Wayne State University in Detroit, said the
experience had not really changed his views on Israel and the
conflict. “But I now feel more comfortable being an activist on
campus,” he said. “I now have more information and experiences I
can draw from so that I can go into conversations feeling confident
because I witnessed things firsthand,” he added.

Or as Rachel Cusnir, a 19-year-old sophomore at the University of
Michigan, put it: “It’s given me the legitimacy to say, ‘Yeah,
I’ve seen what goes on there.’”

These students believe that after one trip, after maybe engaging with
a few Palestinians for a few hours, they have witnessed “what goes
on” here. Sadly, their exposure has been so fractional and
inadequate that for all intents and purposes they remain clueless,
although I certainly applaud them for crossing the chasm and making an
attempt to understand.

Wherever this debate on the ethical way to visit Palestine may end up,
some context would considerably improve the level of the discussion.
No visitor coming to Palestine, on a single trip, should be allowed to
fool themselves into thinking they experienced the Palestinian
narrative in full — or even obtained a complete sense of the lived
experience of those Palestinians living under Israeli occupation.

WHAT YOU MISS WHEN YOU VISIT

DISPOSSESSION. In this limited space, I can’t even begin to
adequately convey a sense of the deep wounds that remain unhealed
across all Palestinian communities, regardless of where they reside,
resulting from the experience of dispossession from their home and
homeland. Although the number of Palestinians alive today who
witnessed this dispossession firsthand are dwindling, the collective
consciousness of dispossession lives on. It has been carried from
generation to generation by oral histories, some documented
[[link removed]] but most not, and
by younger generations who are questioning their current living
conditions. It is difficult to forget when the dispossession
continues. Imagine being uprooted from your home and never being
permitted to return. Imagine your home being demolished. It is both
that simple to understand and too complicated to explain in all its
ramifications. When a Palestinian child answers your question of
“Where are you from?” by saying Haifa, although she has never set
foot into Haifa and was born and lives in a West Bank refugee camp,
you can start to see the depth of these wounds and the power of
collective memory — trauma, lived and inherited
[[link removed]].
Science has a name for this, it is transgenerational trauma.

GAZA. The overwhelming majority of visitors from abroad, like most
Palestinians living in the West Bank, will never make it into the Gaza
Strip — because Israel controls entry and exit. Internal Palestinian
politics aside, the Gaza Strip is a hellhole
[[link removed]]. Imagine being a
15-year-old Palestinian and never once having experienced an entire
day and night with uninterrupted electricity service, not to mention
having lived through four Israeli military onslaughts by your
mid-teens. With over 2.1 million Palestinians residing on some 365
square kilometers (141 square miles), Gaza is one of the most densely
populated areas in the world; half the population is under the age of
18; 67% are refugees; and more than 70% of Gaza’s population relies
on humanitarian aid to meet basic needs. All these numbers aside, the
invisible element in Gaza is the individual human being. Imagine being
born into this reality with no way out and being continually under
bombardment and sniper fire by Israel. Gaza’s continuing trauma is
something most Israelis should actively be worried about but work very
hard to forget.

REFUGEES. If visitors are lucky their itinerary will include visits to
refugee camps. Such visits usually happen in the most accessible
camps, such as the Dheisheh Refugee Camp located off the main road
just south of Bethlehem in the West Bank. However informative the
visit, West Bank refugee camps have gradually become built-up areas
and the uninformed may view them as mere neighborhoods — shanty
towns — of the cities where they exist. Nonetheless, these camps are
squalid and downtrodden, and speaking to its refugee residents will
inaugurate a long journey of understanding about what it means to be a
refugee in the long term. And no matter how intense the experience,
nothing can be compared to refugee camp life in Lebanon, where life
and death grimly equated themselves long ago. As if the original
dispossession was not bad enough, being denied other options and
forced to live as a refugee for decades on end, or being born into
refugeedom, is a fate that will remain essentially opaque to most
outsiders, even after a lifetime of observation and study. It should
not come as a surprise that many camp residents have turned to
substance abuse to cope and to human traffickers as a way out.

LOSS. For Palestinians, the emotional weight of losing their home and
land is matched only by the loss of loved ones. Dealing with such
bereavement, especially the loss of children, levies a formidable toll
on all those left behind to pick up the pieces of their lives. Imagine
being a teenager and returning to your classroom to find the empty
chairs of your classmates
[[link removed]] who will
never return. Israel has increasingly taken the infliction of loss to
a new level: Israeli authorities retain possession of the dead bodies
of Palestinians they have killed, as bargaining chips: over 270 as of
the last count. Yes, necropolitics and necroviolence are being
practiced
[[link removed]] by
the “only democracy in the Middle East”. Imagine losing a mother
or a father in the prime of their lives. Imagine the corpse of your
loved one confiscated by those who killed them. Imagine such losses in
your own family, not once during your lifetime, but over and over
again, all the while daily fearing for your own life. Visitors to
Palestine will see cheerful and smiling Palestinians wherever they
visit: people who do not wear their losses on their sleeves, but
surely carry it with them in other ways, mostly invisible to a
visitor. Nevertheless, they grapple with permanent damage during each
hour of every day, while attempting to carry on. More and more are
unable to carry on and we see the results in terms of mental health
issues, drug addiction, alcohol abuse, domestic violence, and so much
more.

TRAVEL RESTRICTIONS. Foreign visitors must enter today’s Palestine
through Israeli-controlled points of entry, usually Ben Gurion Airport
near Tel Aviv. For many, especially for most Jews, entry is
uneventful. For many others, however, especially if they are profiled
as “non-white” and, God forbid, in solidarity with Palestinians,
entry can be a challenge. Not infrequently such people are denied
entry and sent back to where they came from. Visitors admitted to
Israel/Palestine generally travel between the river and the sea —
Gaza excluded — with few complications. They freely visit
Palestinians who can only dream of traveling freely in their own
homeland. Visitors will generally not see, or glimpse only partially,
what it means to live in an open-air cage, being under 24/7 military
surveillance, needing to pass machine guns pointing at you to travel
from one point in the occupied territory to another; being unable to
travel to and from Gaza or Jerusalem; having to experience the
humiliation of leaving the country only via Jordan, across the
infamous Allenby Bridge. A nearly perfected Orwellian maze of Israeli
population control infrastructure is not easy to photograph: it
encompasses IDs, permits, checkpoints, drones, and a host of draconian
restrictions. Seeing how all this affects those living it day after
day is hard to put into words, even assuming you have seen it in
action while visiting and understood fully how it operates. To get an
inkling of a small taste of what life is like for Palestinians,
tourists should cross through the Qalandiya/Ramallah Checkpoint,
Checkpoint 300/Bethlehem, and between areas H1 and H2 in Hebron.

 

Palestinian-American businessman Jamal Niser currently imprisoned
under administrative detention
ADMINISTRATIVE DETENTION. This is a practice that Israel engages in to
stifle activism against the occupation and strike fear into the hearts
of an entire population. On both accounts, it is a losing strategy.
Case in point: Last year my Palestinian-American cousin Jamal Niser, a
senior citizen approaching 80 years of age, was arrested and detained
by Israel for four months. Numerous Israeli jeeps were on scene as
more than a dozen soldiers woke him up in the middle of the night and
hauled him away. No consideration was given to his being a diabetic
and having lost more than half his eyesight. No charges were ever
brought forward. We recently celebrated his release. Then, about a
month ago, he received a call from the occupation authorities. He was
offered a choice_: Come to the Israeli prison so we can interrogate
you or Israeli soldiers will return and arrest you from your home in
Al-Bireh_, yet again. Jamal told them that there was no need to scare
the neighbors again in the middle of the night. He voluntarily went to
the Ofer Detention Center on the outskirts of Ramallah and was
interrogated for an hour or so before returning home. A few days ago,
the nighttime raid on his home was reprised. At around 4 AM, Israeli
soldiers broke down the front door to his home and came upstairs to
find him and his wife in bed. Jamal was hauled away in a jeep and 3
days later given another four months of administrative detention.
Again, no charges. The man is almost 80 years old, don’t forget. Add
to this Kafkaesque reality these other facts: after spending more than
forty years in Ohio, Jamal attempted to return to his home in
Palestine in 1995, after the Oslo Accords were signed. He was denied
entry by Israel and returned to the US. He tried to return home again
a few years later and was able to enter and subsequently gained West
Bank residency. Then in 2012 when he attempted to make one of his
frequent visits back to Ohio to oversee his businesses, he was denied
exit from the West Bank. Multiple lawyers were unable to help. Then
came these arrests and administrative detentions. Now take this case
and multiply it by 1,000 if you want to start to get a feel of what
Palestinians face every single night. Reflect on the spouses that must
pick up the pieces the following morning. Imagine being a child and
living through a dozen heavily armed soldiers barging into your home
at night and forcefully removing your father, mother, brother, sister,
or even grandfather.

I could go on and on, but the point has been made. The Palestinian
narrative includes all of the above and so much more. Even if a person
visiting Palestine is exposed to these issues, feeling them and
comprehending them as a lived experience requires much more than a few
trips to a single location, let alone a single trip.

WELCOME TO PALESTINE

And yet, all this and much more, we still welcome you to Palestine.

We will do our utmost to let you experience our generosity, see the
beautiful land which is at the center of the attack on us, and taste
our traditional foods which Israel is gradually appropriating as its
own, a massive cultural heist if ever there was one. You will
encounter amazing individuals who keep smiling and hoping that the
living hell in which they wake up every morning will one day give way
to something more normal.

While here, you will meet at most a handful of Palestinians. Some will
put what you are seeing in its historical context which will make you
feel uneasy. Others will pretend that there is normalcy under
occupation and speak about business, sports, or cross-border
cooperation as if “willing it” was enough to make it true.

Whatever you witness on your trip will be valuable in its own right.
Just please do not think for a minute that you have comprehended what
it means to be Palestinian after 74 years of dispossession, 55 years
of military occupation, and daily humiliation and economic
strangulation designed by Israel with US backing.

This full frontal assault on an entire people leaves the individual
Palestinian with three paths forward: 1) leave Palestine, Israel’s
preferred option; 2) resign yourself to the fact that you are a lesser
human being and worthy of nothing more than marginal enhancements to
your quality of life under occupation (this means that you will accept
working in Israel as a cheap laborer for the benefit of Israel’s
economy); or 3) turn violent, in response to Israel’s ongoing and
unbridled violence. This last path appears to be tempting more
Palestinians lately, although still relative few, among the multitudes
who have lost all hope that the international community — if such a
thing exists — can muster the political will to hold Israel
accountable and end this human nightmare that they brought into
existence.

As for Palestinians outside of Palestine, Israel does not even see
them or offer them any way forward. These invisible Palestinians are
the ones that Israelis should be seeing in their nightmares and
ignoring them en masse is likely to prove to have been Israel’s
Achilles’ heel.

It is fortunate indeed that people need not personally experience
cruelty and pain in order to be motivated to act to change things
before it is too late. A judge need not have been raped herself in
order that a rapist standing before her bench be convicted and
punished. We do not all need to be victims of domestic violence to
take a stand to bring such violence to an end. Sometimes, even a
little comprehension can go a long way. No one who is reading this
needs to fully comprehend the trauma and never-ending pain of
Palestinians, individual or collective, in order to decide to take
action to finally hold accountable those who are battering
Palestinians into oblivion.

_[SAM BAHOUR is a Palestinian-American business consultant and
frequent independent political commentator from Ramallah/Al-Bireh in
Occupied Palestine. He blogs at ePalestine.ps
[[link removed]]. @SamBahour [[link removed]]
@SamBahour]_

_Thanks to the author for sending this to xxxxxx_

* Palestine
[[link removed]]
* Palestinians
[[link removed]]
* Israel
[[link removed]]
* apartheid
[[link removed]]
* Occupied Territories
[[link removed]]
* West Bank
[[link removed]]
* tourism
[[link removed]]
* Israeli tourism
[[link removed]]
* ethical tourism
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]

Manage subscription
[[link removed]]

Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]