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News from the Region
Legacies of 1948 Delegation

Legacies of 1948 Delegation
Report #4: Bethlehem – Reconciliation & Return

Brief Moments of Entire Lifetimes

By Yotam Amit

Our final stop of today was the Dheisheh refugee camp. This was a truly powerful experience. We were met with a tight-knit community that receives what few services it does from the UN and provides the rest itself on a volunteer basis. The community leaders we met are secular, political, socialist, and can easily navigate between anger at their constant state of dispossession to humbling warmth and hospitality. We were given harrowing firsthand accounts of Israeli occupation, brutality and insensitivity. We even heard from a survivor of the Nakba.

In fact, we were talked to so much that I felt brief moments of panic, as though the Occupation had descended upon me as some sort of immaterial weight, and I felt something like claustrophobia. I needed to get up and leave, see a different room from the one in which we spent a total of some three hours being lectured about refugees' suffering. I needed a different message, any message. I resisted this feeling, and these moments passed quickly when I focused on the speaker's humanity and individuality even within this massive stream of experiences of the occupied. On some level, perhaps, I saw a glimpse of what life under the Occupation is like. I cannot imagine what it means for my brief moments to stretch out across entire lifetimes. On the other hand, I felt more like I was in a world where problems can be solved instead of normalized into constant fatalistic struggle when I was able to access the human behind the refugee. I do not think they would claim to be anything more than human, they just want to make sure we Americans know their stories since we never hear about them in the US.

The real tragedy of the Occupation is less the suffering alone and more that this suffering is imposed on human beings - who smile warmly, yell at their sons, tease their spouses and mothers, weep discreetly about the frustrations of the day. In other words, the Occupation and the Refugee crisis as political issues are something I can engage upon on an intellectual level and for which I can try to think of solutions and imagine my role in them. But when I see a human refugee, suffering in his or her own unique way from the Occupation, but also maintaining a humanity independent of the Occupation, then I can relate to and identify with the problem, and use this as my motivation for any role I might play in a solution.

We heard from no less than six speakers today, and to some degree it is difficult to differentiate between them. As I already mentioned, the constant and often repetitive discourse of suffering under the Occupation merged into a sometimes overwhelming stream but a few common themes emerged. First of all, every single person we talked to insisted that their vision for the region would be a single democratic state for all its people. All at some point or another emphasized that Jews would be welcome in this state, and some went on to say that the enemy was Zionism and colonialism, not Judaism. They all assured us that the resistance would end if the Occupation were to end and these other conditions met. Maybe this is true, or maybe, as I'm sure some might say, they were just telling us what we wanted to hear. But at some point, after hearing this from Palestinian after Palestinian, it becomes increasingly difficult to declare them all liars in order to justify a paranoid xenophobic conviction that everyone's out to kill us, to which we seem to have become all too attached.

It's hard for me to think of us in this delegation as a resource to these disenfranchised Palestinians, and I feel extremely self conscious about using any of their resources. But they host us so well.  Our stay at the Phoenix Center in Dheisheh was evidence that they have accommodations specifically for this kind of delegation. Hopefully we can live up to the hospitality we receive from the destitute, and give back to them by giving them a voice in a world that is not listening.

A longer version of this piece was originally posted here: http://www.arabjewishpartnership.org/blog/?p=127

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