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Flat Stanley visits Palestine (december 2007)
06/03/2008
Hi! My name is Flat Stanley! I come from a book about a kid named Stanley whose bulletin board fell on him during the night and made him two-dimensional.
My seven-year old friend Alex drew me as part of his second grade class project and then sent me to his Aunt Jen to take care of for two months. Aunt Jen took me with her to Palestine and Israel and boy did I have an adventure unlike any other Flat Stanley in Alex’s class—in the whole world,I bet!
Hope you enjoy seeing my pictures and hearing my stories!
Your friend,
Flat Stanley
More photos and stories from Flat Stanley on his travel blog : Flat Stanley visits Palestine
My first demonstration!
Aunt Jen and I went to a village near Ramallah today called Bi’lin. In Bi’lin there have been non violent demonstrations going on for three years now against the wall that’s being built, deep in the West Bank, separating the villagers from many dunams of their land.
We marched on the road towards where the Separation Fence is, chanting "la la, l’jidar!" (meaning "no, no to the wall!") and "la la ihtillal! (no, no to occupation!)
You know, I was drawn in a home where I was told that when Palestinians demonstrate they want to destroy all of Israel or throw the Jews into the sea, but the chants that I heard were against this wall taking the village’s land, and against occupation, and even a chant against apartheid. I never heard any chant like "no no to the Jews" or "no no to Israelis."
Actually, I wonder if the people in the house where I was drawn know that lots of Israeli human rights activists are also demonstrating against this wall and against apartheid, side by side with the Palestinians, some internationals, and, of course, the occasional two-dimensional boy!
We started to march down the hill with our signs and our flags towards the soldiers who were blocking the way to the wall. Suddenly, the soldiers started to shoot tear gas and rubber bullets at us. I was so surprised! I had assumed that soldiers only shot people in self defense, but here we were being totally non-violent and got shot at first! After the soldiers started to shoot, then a bunch of young men started to throw rocks at them—but the cause and effect seemed pretty obvious to me. The tear gas and rubber bullets came first, and the stone-throwing after.
With the tear gas being shot, everyone dispersed into the olive groves on the sides of the road. Aunt Jen and I were crouched behind a tree with two other Americans, a young college student and an old lady over 70 years old. Suddenly, a tear gas canister was shot directly at us—not lobbed in the air like it’s supposed to. The young man got hit in the head—I’m not sure if the canister hit him directly or there was also a sound bomb that exploded on us at the same moment—and the tear gas exploded right in our faces. The old woman couldn’t open her eyes at all, and Aunt Jen and I helped lead her through the olive grove back onto the road. We didn’t want to turn our backs on the soldiers to walk up the hill, because we heard about activists that have gotten shot at close range (and had rubber bullets lodged in their skulls) as they were retreating, but Aunt Jen and I needed to get this old woman up the hill and out of the range of fire. Aunt Jen could barely open her eyes herself but somehow we all managed to get up the hill. We heard later that the college student who was with us was taken to the hospital because his head was bleeding pretty badly, but we were told that he was okay.
After we were up the road, we thought we were out of the line of fire, but the soldiers moved up the road towards the village itself. Aunt Jen heard a rubber bullet whiz past her ear and we saw that the soldier who shot it was crouched behind a wall just a few meters in front of us.
Once it looked like the demonstration had dissolved into a dance between rubber-bullet-shooting soldiers and stone-throwing boys, and once Aunt Jen could see again, we left Bi’lin for Ramallah and then from Ramallah to Jerusalem.
Aunt Jen is a good guardian—she took me to an eye doctor in Jerusalem. She said I’m not used to tear gas and wanted to make sure my eyes were okay.
Aunt Jen was pretty proud of me—she said that most paper dolls, after having a tear gas cannister shot directly in their face and a rubber bullet whiz past their ear, may be scared or upset—but I just kept on smiling like I always do!
She emailed some of the pictures of the demonstration to a friend of hers, and this friend wrote an email back saying, "Do any of these people fighting for their nation think it’s odd that you have a paper doll? Just wondering." Aunt Jen laughed and laughed but I was pretty insulted. I mean, can I help it if I’m two-dimensional??
My political education continues
Aunt Jen was checking her email in the Old City one day when she saw something about her new friends in Bil’in. Two of the villagers who are organizers of the Bil’in Popular Committee Against the Wall had gotten beaten up by settlers.
Aunt Jen skimmed through the facts of the email quickly: Bi’lin’s land, the part beyond the current route of the wall, juts up to the largest Israeli settlement in the West Bank, called Modiin Illit. Modiin Illit itself, actually, is built partially on Bil’in’s land, and partly on other villages’ lands. New neighborhoods of Modiin Illit are constantly being built, encroaching on more and more of Bil’in’s lands. Often these neighborhoods start, Aunt Jen explained to me, in much the same way that the hilltop settler youth were trying to establish a presence in "E1" near the settlement of Maale Adumim—by placing an illegal caravan on the land and starting the process of settling there. These caravans are supposed to be illegal, but law in the country is unequally enforced.
As a way to establish a presence on their own land and as a tactic in creative resistance, villagers in Bil’in brought in their own caravan and established it on their own land, right in plain view of Modiin Illit. It was removed by police by force within hours. Even though it was on their own land, apparently there’s a law about transporting caravans without a permit—so since the caravan had been illegally transported, it was removed.
So the people of Bi’lin got more creative, and one cold, rainy night, starting after midnight and finishing before sunrise, they built a one-room structure from cement, which they call the Center for Joint Struggle. The laws about building a permanent structure are more complicated than the laws about transporting a caravan, and so the case is still undecided in Israeli court, whether the Center will be allowed to remain standing or be destroyed. In the meantime, villagers from Bil’in, especially this one guy named Ashraf, maintain a 24 hour presence there.
I tried to process all that information, not easy with my two-dimensional brain, as Aunt Jen explained to me what she just learned in her email:
settlers from Modiin Illit were placing a caravan on Bil’in’s lands, calling it a synagogue. Because of the presence at the Bil’in outpost, their activity was detected immediately by the villagers. Three villagers from Bil’in, Mohamed, Abdulla and Emad, ran right away to where the caravan was being placed and sat underneath it, in a nonviolent attempt to stop the caravan from being placed on their land. They were attacked and beaten by the settler. Emad’s video camera was smashed, and he left so that his film wouldn’t be destroyed. Abdulla was lightly injured and Mohamed was beaten seriously enough to be hospitalized.
Israeli police had promised to remove the illegal caravan but it had not yet been done. And no one knew if there would be more violence from the settlers. The email was asking Israelis and internationals to come to the caravan and Bil’in outpost both in solidarity, and as a form of protection, since Israeli settler and police may be less violent against internationals and Israelis than against Palestinians.
Aunt Jen called some of the Israelis she knew from Anarchists Against the Wall and some of the villagers from Bil’in to ask if she should come and when and how to get there. They told her that it would be good if she could come the next day and stay for several hours. So, in the morning, she told me we were going to the outpost.
"How are we going to get there?" I asked. If we went to the village of Bil’in and tried to cross through the separation fence, we would be stopped by soldiers. This was how the villagers themselves got to the outpost (there was a court case that Bil’in won in the Israeli Supreme Court in September judging that the route of the wall through their land is illegal, and, though the wall has yet to be dismantled, Bil’in residents are supposed to, in theory at least, have free access to pass through the gate to their lands beyond the wall), but internationals were prevented from passing through the gate.
"We have to go to the settlement of Modiin Illit, and we get there from the settlement."
"Are we going to drive there?" I asked. Aunt Jen had a friend’s car she was borrowing.
"No. Sometimes the settlers have slashed the tires of activists’ cars there."
"So how are we going to get there then?"
Aunt Jen smiled. "We’ll take a settler bus!"
So, about an hour later, Aunt Jen and I climbed on a bus in Jerusalem called "Superbus" that took us directly to the settlement of Modiin Illit, which, I learned, is a Haredi settlement. We kind of stood out on the bus, as neither of us were wearing ultra-orthodox attire. Aside from the bus driver, we were the only ones who weren’t.
We got off where Nir, an Israeli activist who was at the outpost also that day, told us to disembark and followed his instructions down to the main road and to the traffic circle, where he told us to wait for him. We sat on a block of cement near the traffic circle, watching the construction workers continue to build new neighborhoods for the settlement. Aunt Jen’s cell phone rang. It was Nir, telling us he was there.
"Where?" Aunt Jen asked, looking around in each direction.
"On the other side of the fence!" There was a chain link fence on the other side of the road, separating the settlement, we soon understood, from Bi’lin’s land (at least the part of the land not yet taken by the settlement.)
Aunt Jen walked towards the gate, which was padlocked, but Nir showed us how we could slip through a gap in the gate. Aunt Jen let me go first, seeing as I have experience slipping through and under doors, and she followed my lead.
Aunt Jen, Nir, Emad, and two other villagers from Bil’in and I walked on a dirt path through the dry, rocky hills, looking at billboards advertising new neighborhoods of the settlement yet to be built or currently under construction. We got to the place where the settlers had placed the caravan. The police had removed it at 7am, a few hours before we got there. Emad found a piece of his video camera that had been smashed.
We continued to where the Bil’in Center for Joint Struggle was located—just a bit up the hill from where the caravan had been placed—a one room cement structure, an area covered with sheet metal, a cleared out place for the kids to play soccer… this was the shape of Bil’in’s resistance. Nir and Aunt Jen talked and I checked out some of the grafitti art on the Center and the covered area. "Enough with the occupation" was written in Hebrew on a side panel of iron sheeting, and Ashraf’s name (Ashraf sleeps each and every night at the outpost to maintain a 24 hour presence there) was spray-painted on the cement room.
They made a barbeque and we sat and eat and played with the kids and watched the afternoon light change and smoked an argilla and, generally, had a very nice and pleasant afternoon.
"Hard to remember that the reason we’re here today is that the villagers here got attacked yesterday for trying to nonviolently protect their land. It’s kind of surreal," Aunt Jen said to me. I nodded wisely, making a mental note to look up "surreal" in my two-diimensional dictionary.
We left the outpost a bit before sunset, walking back down the dirt road between the rocky hills and slipping once again through the dented gate back into Modiin Illit, and caught the Haredi settler bus back to Jerusalem.
We sat behind the bus driver. Aunt Jen nudged me after the bus driver driving the bus for the settler bus company answered his cell phone. "You hear that? He’s talking in Arabic. He’s Palestinian!"
This bus driver could very well be from the village whose lands are being encroached by the settlement whose residents he shuttles back and forth every day from Jerusalem.
I think I’m beginning to understand more about that word "irony".
