We spent three weeks volunteering with the Jordan Valley Solidarity group jordanvalleysolidarity.org. We were mostly working with local farm families, picking cucumbers and zucchini, twisting vines onto the trellis lines, planting corn and thyme, and clearing squash fields after harvest. We delighted in visiting with the families, chatting through Google translate, and enjoying their generous and enthusiastic hospitality. The local food is delicious!
We also got to know volunteers with the International Solidarity Movement palsolidarity.org . ISM partners international volunteers with Palestinian families—mostly Bedouin sheep and goat herders in the mountains of north Palestine—to provide overnight protective presence and rapid response to families experiencing Israeli settler violence and harassment. We met volunteers from the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Italy, Spain, the UK, Mexico and the United States. All of them are dedicated individuals who are working toward a positive change in Palestine and the world and putting their own health and wellbeing on the line. I interviewed a few of them and would like to share their stories. (I am not using their real names for security reasons.) I hope their stories will inspire you join the cause by whatever means, whether volunteering with ISM or another organization, donating, protesting, lobbying the US government to recognize and support the sovereign state of Palestine (as 157 countries have already done), calling for divestment in Israeli companies, or boycotting Israeli goods.
Marni has a background doing direct action, organizing and frontline work with people seeking asylum. When a friend told her about their experience with ISM, it sounded like something she’d be good at and she was interested.
Volunteers are assigned to work under the direction of Palestinian families in the West Bank, mostly Bedouin families who are shepherds living in areas that are surrounded by Israeli settlers and the army. Typically, the volunteers do night watches to keep an eye out for settler attacks or destruction of property or the army approaching so that the family can rest. If anything happens, they don’t intervene, but document it through video and write a report so there is a record of what's happening to the families under the occupation.
Marni told me about her first experience in the field. She was staying with a family and doing night watch. She had just finished the night’s watch and gone to sleep. “We woke suddenly to the sound of screaming and the animals bellowing, making loads of noise. We started running down the hill: the youngest son told us to come quickly because of settlers. When we got there the settlers had already left, but the eldest son had been attacked with pepper spray and had been hit in the leg with a sharp object, so was bleeding. He also had a chain wrapped around his neck.” The family told them that nine or ten settlers, all masked and carrying sticks, had come by foot from the back of the family's house where they didn't usually come, so no one was watching.
A few days after that the family decided to leave their home. This was a shepherd who had been attacked a couple of times before while out shepherding, but once something happened to one of his children, that for him was the last straw. He was very, very, anxious and stressed because there had been daily settler harassment. Also, a settler outpost had been built just above his house, so the harassment was escalating and he was being targeted. When that family moved away, the remaining families were left even more vulnerable to settler violence.
“That’s one experience that has really stayed with me. I think the youngest son was about eight or nine. The son who was attacked was about 21 and he was a medical student in Jenin. It was really, really sad and so lucky that it wasn't worse, but still such a horrific thing to have happened.”
The Palestinians are dealing with the occupation in every single aspect of their lives, even the basics of food, water and rest. “What’s most insidious about it all is that the Jordan Valley is so beautiful and everything is very pastoral and centered around agriculture, while the Israeli settlers are weaponizing that and using it to threaten, harass and terrorize the Palestinian families. The families are really happy for us to be with them. I think they find it really important to have outside witnesses to what's happening and feel a level of safety having internationals with them. It’s important that we keep talking about it and sharing about what's happening and answering any calls for action.”
Charlie is from Italy. It’s his first time in Palestine. He went last June to Cairo to join the Global March to Gaza. There he met an older Sicilian who had been working with ISM for 15 years. “He told me about it and was quite enthusiastic, so it made me curious. I searched on the internet and realized it would be something meaningful in my eyes, so decided to try it myself.”
Charlie marveled at all he discovered. “The Jordan Valley is a super beautiful area. I was amazed every day where we woke up. The views you have, the places you discover. We are sent to very vulnerable families, the ones that are getting most attacked at the moment. It’s mostly Bedouin families that used to live a nomadic lifestyle and are now almost settled. They live very simply, which is also beautiful because you discover another lifestyle [and culture]. It's a completely different world. And the kindness of the Palestinian people, the tons of smiles you see every day, the children, all the people, there's a very, very welcoming, warm-hearted presence. But then, on the other side, the frustration and sadness of the ongoing situation. We are with families, mostly children, where you just know that they're facing a very fragile future. One can imagine that in a few years they will be in refugee camps and the land stolen.”
The first event he witnessed was a group of settlers approaching very close, about five meters away. “There were five of them, pretty young but very aggressive in their eyes. It was threatening, even though they didn't do anything. It was like like slow violence; they stayed for four hours. And they came with animals that were eating the olive trees of the family, which were just in front of us. That’s one of the tactics: they just bring cows or sheep to basically destroy the garden and everything that the family has.”
The strategy works like this: The militaries cannot legally harass the residents or destroy property and don’t want to get filmed doing so. But the settlers can act with impunity, knowing they are backed by the military. The settlers do the harassment; if the targeted family reacts or contests it, at the slightest escalation the settlers call the military. Sometimes the invading settlers mix their animals with the family’s, then try to steal the family’s animals. If the families try to defend their property, the settlers call the military and have them arrested and imprisoned.
“If, for example, they bring cows over and a Palestinian even just shouts at a cow saying, ‘get away from my land,’ it’s enough to call the army and say, ‘someone aggressed my cow.’ So the families are not kicked out, but they are they are basically mentally stressed. Every morning we have drones, settlers with animals, or on motorbikes who just make noise, or drones at night that make loud music.”
It’s not just the violence on families that is stressful, but also the need for the volunteers to avoid getting arrested and deported. While foreigners don't risk jail as a Palestinian would, getting deported would put an end to the whole purpose of the training and being there. “There’s a mental weight to constantly protecting yourself and your colleagues. There’s a lot of different police and militaries protecting the settlers. It’s definitely a very, very controlled military occupation. It's not what we know from home where you just have police control. We see militaries and police everywhere here. I got detained once. It was short, it was nonviolent, but it's always stressful. They photograph your passport and you know that you're identified. The military told me if we see you again, we will deport you.”
One of the strategies of the occupation is to choose lands which Israelis want to take over and declare them closed military zones, and any presence in the zone becomes illegal. As of 2017, 45% of the Jordan Valley was controlled by the Israeli military and 50% by Israeli settlers, leaving only 5% under Palestinian control for Palestinian settlement and agriculture. Charlie was working with a family that was still living remotely in a military zone. The night before, the truck had gotten stuck in the mud and it took several hours to get another vehicle and pull it out. That activity likely caught the attention of settler security. In the morning the police came. “They saw us and controlled us and shortly the the border police arrived and told us we had to leave. The military zones just come like a new name. It’s very rural, there's nothing military there. It just an argument to take power, which is completely Illegal.”
“The chance to come here is a privilege. On an existential level it’s very intense and beautiful and empowering and humbling. The people you meet are stimulating. It’s moving to see younger people coming here, giving their time, doing something with a belief in resistance for change. It’s also beautiful to see that more than half of us here are women. I will definitely come again for longer.”
Mouse is from Maine. He first got involved in solidarity work when he was 19 working with different indigenous tribes in Ecuador where there was a huge dumping of oil. He continued doing solidarity work and experiments and collective liberation. He was doing a lot of Palestinian solidarity in the U.S. “But my heart just kept calling me to be here as of all this genocide is happening, because it's on America's payroll. I felt like I really needed to show up.”
Mouse’s first homestay, he was told about what had just happened to that family. Settlers had been harassing them for weeks. When the settlers came again, the two teenage boys were on their tractor, just trying to maintain; they didn't run and hide when the settlers showed up. They were pepper sprayed by the settlers, and then when the settler security came, the boys were arrested. They were in jail for 3 days. They were beaten with sticks until they broke. The family had to pay the equivalent of $1,000 USD to get them out. “So that was my first introduction, just sitting with these two teenage boys and hearing the story and realizing that story is a very normal story for every Palestinian family, that level of manipulation, harm and violence. It was a lot of heartbreak and also a lot of inspiration from the resiliency of the Palestinian people.”
“Many of the families we're living with have sheep. They plant wheat. They’re connected to the land, their ancestor's land. They've been here for thousands of years. My second time I went out was with a family that wanted to plant 20 kilos of wheat. Their traditional area of planting had just been turned into a firing zone. The Israeli government can just say, ‘This is a firing zone now.’ It's illegal to go, but we went up there, and luckily got the 20 kilos of wheat planted. Then settler’s security came, interrogated us, held us, and detained us for an hour. Luckily, the Palestinians were able to get out of the firing zone. A couple days later, the settlers brought cows to those locations to try to eat the wheat. It’s constant.”
In his first two and a half weeks, two of the families he’d worked with were leaving their land. “Wow. All these families have children, and there's no accountability.”
The Jordan Valley is designated as Zone C, under full Israeli military and administrative control, including land management, planning and construction. The zone contains most of the region’s agricultural grazing land and natural resources. Israel heavily restricts Palestinian construction and development. The 1948 Nakbah moved 750,000 Palestinians off their land into refugee camps. An estimated 200,000 have been displaced since 1967.
“In the last month 700 Palestinians have been displaced. You can't get building permits, you can't rebuild. There's nowhere to go. And then they're expanding the military zones, the no firing zones, all those areas are expanding at such a rate. It’s heartbreaking to see. Folks who came even six months ago are shocked at the rate of the genocide happening here. It’s a very insidious, slow, and steady ethnic cleansing. Every family we stay with has a similar story of physical violence and intimidation. There’s no law. The international law has been being broken for decades and decades. The West is really having to face the fact that we have been supporting genocide for all this time.”
“There’s so much strength and beauty mixed with the heartbreak and oppression and violence. I have just been amazed at the courage and resiliency of Palestinian families to stay with the land and stay with their sheep and stay with this life that has been passed down. I'm learning what it looks like to be holding on to community in the face of empire, colonization, violence and white supremacy. It is expanding what I think is possible. While it is very important to focus on the harm and the deaths and the murders, it's also important to realize the amazing organizing, the amazing leadership, the amazing courage, the amazing community that is resisting. It is an invitation for all of us in the world to really take that same risk for collective liberation, for all of us to be free from all this violence, all this destruction.”
“I really like ISM. That said, there's an infinite number of ways to support the Palestinian people. It’s our responsibility to be fully active, whether you're getting arrested at home, or doing presentations or fundraising to help all these international solidarity groups. We need hundreds and hundreds of thousands of Americans to be fully active to transform this. We are responsible because it's our tax money [that is supporting] genocide. I know we're beautiful people in a broken system, but it's really time to flex the heart and risk muscle, or else we're gonna lose not just Palestine, but lose everything. “
