By late afternoon Saturday May 21st it became clear that most of more than half a hundred Israeli anti-occupation activist intent on visiting several beleaguered Palestinian families in Tel Rumeida were not going to make it. The plan was for CPT, other Internationals, and our gutsy Palestinian activist colleagues to -- in defiance of Israeli regulations -try to sneak them in. But the Israeli army and police having gotten wind of the plan were successful in stopping most of them before reaching their destination. They had wanted to visit several of the Palestinian homes closest to the virulent Israeli settlement in order to call attention to the recent upsurge in dangerous attacks by marauding settlers on Palestinian property and people: children, women and men.
However, even though the Israeli military and police were successful in stopping most of the Israelis short of their goal, several CPTers, other internationals and their Palestinian colleagues along with an Al Jazeera television news crew did make it all the way to the home of one of the most perpetually imperiled families. Not long after arriving, a couple of us were dispatched to fetch three Swedish journalists who had made it past Israeli checkpoints but were stuck a couple of hundred yards short of their goal and uncertain how to proceed from there. But as we were on our way out we encountered an Israeli army patrol on its way in. Its leader peremptorily ordered us, despite our protests, back to the house. The soldiers made sure we got there by following us all the way up a flight of stone steps to a porch where we had been waiting in vain for our Israeli friends to get through. Those Swedish journalists, by the way, never did make it.
It was then that the soldiers first saw the Al Jazeera crew intently filming us being herded back up to the porch. The patrol leader promptly ordered Al Jazeera specifically and the rest of us generally to leave. The young Palestinian whose home it is stood in the doorway refusing to let the soldiers in, insisting firmly that none of us had to leave. "This is a private home," he said repeatedly. Then gesturing first to his family and then to us he said firmly, "You cannot tell my friends to leave. They are our guests."
"I can tell you and I can tell them what to do! And you must do it!" the soldier shouted.
"That is not your right in my house," said our host.
"Then you tell them to leave!" the soldier again yelled.
But the Palestinian stood his ground in the doorway. After several futile attempts to be obeyed the fuming patrol leader called his commanding officer for orders. The orders, the soldiers said, were "O.K. your friends can stay. But the Al-Jazeera people must leave." There was further argument about that, but finally Al-Jazeera did pack up and depart. After all, they already had plenty of interviews on tape about the terrible repressed life being led by the Palestinians of Tel Rumeida. And they also had that bonus footage of the military's attempt to frustrate our effort to bring in the Swedish journalists and have the story told in full by them too. So all in all, Al-Jazeera had a good story. But not the much bigger one that began a few minutes later.
Phase one began this way. The Palestinian house is just over a garden wall from another former Palestinian home whose inhabitants awhile back were spooked by Tel Rumeida settlers into moving out. They were abetted by diffident hear no evil see no evil soldiers stationed in an outpost a few yards away. The commandeered Palestinian house and garden is next to the settlement's new apartment building which in turn is next door to the settlement's original dwellings: seven stacked mobile homelike caravans -- some dating back twenty years.
The noisy standoff between the soldiers and our Palestinian host inevitably drew a crowd of jeering settlement onlookers. Dressed in their clean freshly ironed pure white Shabbat clothing and watching from the closest vantage point available to them - from the windows of the former Palestinian home and from behind its garden wall -they began cheering the soldiers on. However, while the Al Jazeera crew was around the gradually swelling crowd of mostly young settler toughs in their dazzlingly clean white dress shirts and black trousers as well as a few settler women in their equally spotless white holy day dresses were content to shout epithets at us and encouragement to the soldiers. But that lasted only until the Al-Jazeera crew was finally out of sight and the soldiers had withdrawn through a tall heavy metal gate guarding the way to the Palestinian's grape arbor, house and garden. The gate's protective role, however, has been reversed. These days it is always locked from the outside by the soldiers so that they can access the Palestinian's property at will while preventing the Palestinians from getting out that way.
Remember that gate!
End of phase one.
Phase two began with a bam!!! A sudden furious fusillade of stones and rocks aimed at all of us on the porch.
Who said, only the Palestinians throw stones?
As the blizzard of rocks and empty wine bottles started banging, clattering and shattering against the house, the porch and its roof I suddenly realized why, instead of flimsy insect prohibiting screening, the porch was protected by study metal see through gratings. They let in plenty of breeze and daylight but stop anything larger from bursting dangerously through.
The children of the house were instantly alarmed, the youngest pressing nervously and warily against the wall furthest away from the source of the stone throwing. Our Palestinian host's young teen age daughter wild eyed and moaning ran uncertainly about the porch while her mother also pressing against the back wall clutched the youngest child in her arms. Many of us on the porch began yelling at the settlers to stop, which of course added to the commotion and only egged the settlers on. Others of us increased the din by yelling for the just departed soldiers to come back, hoping they could hear us. The settlers by this time were also yelling, chanting, and jeering more loudly than before, while also keeping up the furious barrage of missiles.
End of phase two
Phase three began suddenly when settlers started poring over the wall and running toward the house, picking up rocks and throwing them our way as they came. However, a couple of settlers ran unaccountably the other way toward the gate. Why? In seconds it became frighteningly clear. The soldiers couldn't get in! Hearing the commotion, they had been seen by the settlers as they loped back determinedly toward the gate with the obvious intent of stopping the onslaught. But the settler intruders had gotten there first and blocked the gate from the inside. The thwarted soldiers started angrily pushing from the outside while others starting climbing up and over in order to get back in.
Then a new peril.
Screams of fear could be heard coming from the ground floor of the house. Earlier in the afternoon our host's two young preadolescent sons had gone there to study for their end of the school year exams. But the fusillade of stones, rocks, and bottles hitting the house was unnerving. They screamed up to their father asking what they should do. He yelled back to stay there until the stoning stopped. But then there was the crash of a breaking window in the room where the boys were crouching. So now the kids -- scared even more than before -- screamed for help.
That was too much for their father. At about the same moment that the soldiers were finally making it through the gate and began pushing their way past milling settlers, the father grabbed a stick, yanked the door to the porch open, and in a frightened yet angry fury ran down the stairs toward the house in order to try to lead his sons up to the porch. Which he quickly did.
But that was all the settlers needed. Although the father never went after anyone with the stick, the settlers seeing him with it started screaming at the soldiers to see it too. Some soldiers surrounding him forced him back up the steps to the porch, admonishing him as they went. And as that was happening, his daughter now weeping inconsolably and fearfully continued to pace the porch helplessly.
The settlers began screaming that the soldiers should arrest the father because of the stick. Some of the soldiers, however, yelled back at the settlers to stop the stone throwing and leave. Other soldiers, however, were trying to convince the irate father, who was giving them a piece of his mind that it was in his best interest to calm down.
End of phase three
Very often soldiers to placate offending settlers whom they can't control will arrest blameless Palestinians in an attempt to restore order and calm. So phase four began with the patrol leader ordering the father to come away with the soldiers. But the father refused, insisting that he was not the aggressor. Naturally many of us on the porch in defense of our host were also trying to get in our two cents worth, while outside the settlers who had finally stopped assaulting the house kept loudly trying to egg the soldiers on. The confusion and noise level increased. Our host's aged father looked clearly alarmed. His wife red eyed and ashen faced still holding the baby stood by helplessly, and his increasingly distraught young teen age daughter cried even louder.
The patrol leader struggling to be heard but not by the settlers tried to convince the father and the family members crowding around that he would not be held long, and that he would be returned safely without charges. Finally something in the soldier's tone and words convinced the father that the Israeli could be trusted. Relenting he allowed himself to be led away out the gate and out of sight to the triumphant cheers of the white clad settlers.
End of phase four.
Phase five. The "arrest" was assurance enough for the settlers that their vigilante justice had prevailed and they began to drift away by ones, twos and threes. Everyone on the porch waited anxiously for the promised other shoe to drop and the father to be returned safely to his family. About forty five minutes later the gate opened and the smiling father walked through. His relieved family rushed up, his teen age daughter smiling and sniffling in relief as she hugged him tightly.
Once back on the porch he told us what happened after he had disappeared through the gate. The patrol leader, he said, told him that he would have to be blindfolded and handcuffed from behind as he was led away; but that as soon as all the settlers left he would have him brought back home. Our host said that the soldier said to him apologetically, "We know you are a man of nonviolence and that you want to live in peace. We want that too. But some of the settlers are criminals and we must protect all of them."
A little later at about six o'clock the internationals and their Palestinian activist colleagues began leaving. A CPTer, at the family's request, stayed the night. As a group of us were making our way back to the CPT apartment, my visiting friend Darryl Meyers, founder of the Middle East Fellowship of Southern California, said this was the worst incident of violent harassment he had ever experienced in Palestine. And he and the Fellowship have been intimately connected with that larger story for more than thirty years.
Although the tension was for the most part over, there was a final gauntlet that some of us had to run. Phase six.
As we neared the Ibrahimi Mosque on settler only Shuhada Street we encountered a group of about twenty also white garbed settler youth walking in our direction. Suddenly the stones started flying. As our group rushed away, I thought I would try something novel to try to get them to stop. I turned around facing them squarely with my arms flung wide open: the arms making a kind of signal that clearly meant "so go ahead, do it, if you must." Of course, I was hoping that the gesture might shame them into stopping.
No such luck. As the brats slowly closed the gap between me and them, the stones kept coming. So I turned around quickly and high tailed it away from there as fast as I could.