Bullets rang through Bil’in today. Rubber coated steel bullets. We were not sure if any of it was live ammunition. The sound of a gunshot is different from the sound of a tear gas rocket. It is crisper, shorter, and contains a piercing fury I have never experienced. I went to the demonstration again today with the intention of getting up close and personal with my camera. But it didn’t happen the way I wished. When people start running, your instincts take over and you run too. I tried to stay stationary for the sake of my footage but documenting something so universally repressive as the crushing of these protests is a tricky and risky business. The soldiers traverse the entire area of demonstrators with their tanks and fire teargas and torrents of chemical skunk spray from different places so it is hard to film from a close yet relatively safe point when you are surrounded from multiple angles.

But I did interview demonstrators. A Palestinian woman, and three Israeli activists as well. I asked them to speak in their own languages so I didn’t understand a word but I plan on translating and using subtitles when I edit. The Israeli activists used the word “fascist” at one point.

Afterwards, a demonstrator invited me and a few other internationals into his home to look at his artwork. He collects tear gas canisters and bullets and creates sculptures from them. Out of these vessels of destruction, this man creates doves and hearts and people and trees. Steel bullets that create the geographic shape of Palestine become surrogates of a forced marriage between beauty and destruction. This man has been shot over 30 times. In his home, we watch a video of him being shot and bloodied. And he creates art. It may seem small but it is sure as hell resourceful. When nothing is left for the people, the empty shells of tear gas canisters and fallen bullets become a source of inspiration. He shows me a wooden board that is stained with the blood of Bassem, the Palestinian demonstrator who was killed in April. He has made a sculpture out of that too.

I am not sure that I understand what I am experiencing daily here. I have been bombarded with more stimuli in these past three weeks than entire months of my life in the states. I don’t know how much more I can take of meeting people who make resistance from absolutely nothing. It is an enigma that eats at me.

I have been looking over some photos from our trip to Jenin last Saturday. In the early months of the second intifada, the Jenin Refugee Camp proved to be a major battleground between the Israeli army and the inhabitants of the camp. It is a little known fact that in 2001, Sharon marched 2000-3000 soldiers to Al-Aqsa Mosque during Friday prayers and sealed off the area. It was this incident that sparked the second intifada (Palestinian Uprising), when demonstrations flared in the city and turned violent. Keep in mind that according to the Oslo Accords (the peace agreements drawn up between Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization in the 90s), a Palestinian state should have been established in the West Bank by May of 2000. When the deadline came, however, Israel told Fatah that a condition of statehood was that Fatah must declare war on Hamas. This combined with Sharon's siege of Al-Aqsa Mosque sealed the death of Oslo and the ignition of the Second Intifada. When Israel invaded the West Bank again during the intifada, it met the most resistance to its offensive from the people of the Refugee Camp in Jenin. Camp inhabitants took up arms to fight the soldiers and in the end around 300 camp residents were killed. After the virtual destruction of whole sections of the Jenin camp, Israel gave one condition to the UN for rebuilding: that the roads must be wide enough to fit Israeli military tanks and bulldozers. Although it is just one square kilometer with fifteen thousand people, the Jenin camp seems more expansive than the teeming camps of Bethlehem and other cities because of its newly widened streets. As a punishment for the defiance of the Jenin refugees', their camp was rebuilt to better facilitate another invasion.

When I visited the camp, we watched an excerpt of the film "Jenin Jenin" where an old man in a hospital describes an attack from an Israeli soldier. He is weeping as he describes a soldier shooting him in the hand, asking him to get up, and then shooting him in the foot. A guide gave us a copy of the film. It seems devastating. I have yet to watch it. It is also important to note that after the Oslo Accords, Israel expanded settlements in the West Bank and continues to do so.

Jenin is also home to the Freedom Theater. I met a young instructor and filmmaker at the theater who described to me the coming of the Third Intifada. He envisions this cycle of the uprising to consist of an "army of artists", as he put it, with smarter media outreach than the Israel PR machine. Imagining a new generation of Palestinian youth as an organized, cohesive, and unyielding "army of artists" exemplifies a type of undying hope that I have encountered since I've been here..

Front line demonstrators.

Hatred tastes like tear gas. I got my first spoonful on Friday at the demonstration in Bil’in. It has taken me some time to formulate my thoughts. This is a neighborhood. A village where land has been confiscated for the building of a wall to link Jewish settlements.

The struggle in Palestine has become a children’s uprising. Boys, some as young as five, most not older than fourteen or fifteen, chant at the top of their lungs. They brave the march down to the wall and shout at armed soldiers on the other side. A weekly tear gas shower, and often live rounds, is commonplace for the people in Bil’in and many other villages that have chosen to demonstrate against the confiscation of their land. The tear gas used here is especially strong and toxic and heavily carcinogenic if you experience it once a week like the people of Bil'in. For me, my first encounter with tear gas and the suppression of unarmed protesters resulted in fury and anguish. For them, their anguish is no longer empowering, it is a nuisance and they just want their land back. I saw six year old boys running from the tear gas volleys, their eyes red from the burn, older protesters with scarves wrapped around their faces, carrying onions and lemons to break up the gas. Every few seconds after the smoke clears, clusters of people were visible taking shelter under trees and resting for a few minutes before they march right back to the wall only to be dispersed again by another volley.

And it is the Palestinians, not unseasoned internationals like me, that stay in the front lines, no longer afraid of the volleys. Boys throw rocks at the tanks on the other side. When the first canister ripped through the air, my surprise turned into cowardice and I ran as far away as I could. I do not know how to describe the feeling. THIS IS NOT AN ACCEPTABLE RESPONSE TO UNARMED DEMONSTRATORS. The smoke goes into your lungs and it feels like you can’t breathe but you have to, and the toxic fumes go into your chest and lungs, your face burns and your eyes water. You start salivating and spitting, and many people were vomiting. The sensation that you cannot breathe, combined with the sensation that you are burning, at the same time being engulfed by white smoke and unable to see anything, truly feels like death. I am not exaggerating. In my rush to get away, I had to actively convince myself that these sensations were going to pass. An international was screaming next to me, “I can’t breathe, oh god, help me, help me”. Hearing this kind of panic amplifies the terror you feel from the gas. Slobber hangs from people’s mouths as they recover, keeled over, bracing a tree. It is as dehumanizing as it is physically painful.

Every week. Imagine your neighborhood braving tear gas, skunk bombs, rubber and live bullets every week. Afterward, walking back, I felt an overwhelming sense of camaraderie with the protesters. I hugged the Head of the Popular Committee. However worn out everyone was, it was a happy feeling to have defied this machine for an hour or so. In a funny way, adversity can bring us closer together. We need to hold on to that because that is the only weapon that is stronger than heavily organized machine warfare.

A child in DiHeisha refugee camp, Bethlehem.

A shepherd in proposed Shdema. Though the base is inactive, soldiers watch us and this shepherd from the watchtower.

Shdema is the name of a future jewish settlement charted for the area surrounding an abandoned Israeli military base in Bethlehem. Yesterday, I visited the base and took plenty of photographs. The city center of Bethlehem and the surrounding homes are visible and were often shelled from the base, my guide tells me. The base was active up until three years ago. Now, the Israelis want to make this area a settlement. When it comes to settling the West Bank, the rule of thumb is maximum geography for minimum demography. The most land for the least dense population of Palestinians. Water resources and topography also factor in.

The cement walls are spraypainted with blue stars of David. Here, it becomes clear that Israel is suspended in a perpetual state of jingoism. "Israel belongs to the Jews" and "Your parents lied, Shdema is Jewish" are words of jewish individuals badly wanting to maintain a fledgling construct of national identity at the expense of this land's non-jewish inhabitants. Nationhood and war have thus become synonymous in this region of the world.

Jews should be able to live in Palestine. They should be able to enjoy their spiritual ties to this land. But their claim of nationhood at the expense of an Arab population who has lived here for generations makes Israel a tainted ideal, because it is a nation fated perpetually for iron-fisted militarism.

So what about Palestinian nationhood? Is it possible for us to view the Israel-Palestine conflict through a post-national lens? National identity after all is a figment of our imaginations. Can we forgo it? In Occupied Palestine, forgoing Palestinian self-determination for a state in the era of indigenous independence movements feels unjust. But maybe Palestinians will show us a way out of an obsolete and divisive system of organizing the world.

Taxpayer Guilt.

The Israeli flag in Bil'in. My friend and I are planning to go to the demonstration this Friday.

Bil'in is a village on the outskirts of Ramalla. It is one of many construction sites for the Wall. Ever since building began, the inhabitants of Bil'in have been transformed into an energetic, highly political, cohesive community to demand that the land confiscated from them be returned and the wall completely torn down. So far 2300 dunums have been confiscated and the people of Bil'in have been successful in winning back 800. Every Friday, The Popular Committee Against the Wall along with international activists from ISM and other groups organize peaceful demonstrations at the wall in the presence of tanks, snipers, and armed Israeli soldiers. Only a few months ago, Bassem, a Palestinian activist was shot and killed by one of these soldiers.

On Saturday, we met the head of the Popular Committee, Iyyad Burnat. He was soft-spoken and tired. He informs me that some Fridays, as many as 3000 people come together to demonstrate while other times only a couple hundred. He shows me a rubber-coated steel bullet and an old tear gas canister, trinkets from earlier protests. Earlier this year in Nil'in, a village with a similar story to that of Bil'in, ISM activist Tristan Henderson was struck in the head and put in critical condition by one of these tear gas canisters. He is still recovering.

Iyyad and his wife have four small children. One shows me to the bathroom. One plays on his cell phone. Their daughter sings for my video camera. Their father has been arrested several times. Resistance is a bitter pill. 

Graffiti on walls all over. ALL OVER. There is a lot more where that came from. Today, I went to  a bakery and the guy behind the counter had this tatttoo on his arm: 

Why do you ask me not be a communist when the blood in my veins is red?

I dig it. 

Today when I visited Aida camp, I got my first pang of guilt since having arrived in Palestine. Inside the camp, children are dirty and playing with each other with rocks and rubble and they brandish little baby chickens at me that they pick up off the street. Seeing that they make do with what they have makes me happy. It is when I leave the camp, and get into my service (shared taxi) that I get a strange feeling. Actually come to think of it I can't quite pinpoint if it was guilt or something less tangible. Inside the car, a four- or five-year-old child sits with his mother, clean and well-dressed. It was the disparity between this child brought up under relatively better conditions than the children I had witnessed in the camp, that hit me. I don't know why. 

Children are all subject to varying levels of luckiness or unluckiness when it comes to being born. This gives me a headache.

Palestinians definitely have their own version of nightlife, at least in Bethlehem. People just walk in the streets and seem to be enjoying themselves. I think I will go explore tonight.

Even though it is in the West Bank, Bethlehem is a tourist attraction for many people who visit Israel. Paradise Hotel, for example, overlooks the Azza refugee camp. It is an unlikely marriage between a fetishized exoticism and its corresponding third-world reality. Here is a photo of all of Bethlehem.

Going over some early video I got when I first got here: 

“Here is my father-in-law’s restaurant and here is the wall.” 

My taxi driver makes a detour to show me the section of the separation wall in Bethlehem. He shows me his father-in-law's restaurant which is right behind the wall. He makes it clear that the wall is inside the city. Israelis call this a separation barrier while Palestinians see it as an annexation wall.

In the afternoon, I visited the Al Harrah Theater in Beit Jala. This is a famous theater here and I was fortunate enough to watch a rehearsal of a movement piece which will be performing in Liverpool next week. The piece is an abstract psycho-history of the Palestinian struggle and it definitely engaged me. Afterwards, I struck up immediate conversations with the actors and director, and laughed with them, and exchanged numbers. The artistic director and Said, one of the actors, helped me find my way back to Beit Sahour. It may be a cliché but I feel like I’ve known them all for years. I used to think that I was just awkward when it came to meeting people, but I guess people were just awkward when it came to meeting me. Here, I am on a below-the-belt joking level with people I have just known for a day or two. I am going back to Al-Harrah next week.

Also, it has been great to have a fellow participant with me at Siraj, Lila, who is Palestinian-American and speaks fluent English. We talk for hours and share experiences, debate politics as though we are going to resolve the Palestine problem tomorrow along with all of the world’s injustices in one fell swoop, and just laugh about very surface-things too. She is wonderful.

There are three refugee camps in Bethlehem: Aida, Azza, and Di’heisha. Wednesday morning, I volunteered at the Al Rawad Center inside the Aida refugee camp which is home to 5000 refugees. Rawad is the camp’s recreation facility with a theater unit, photography/video unit, drawing unit, and women’s center. I toured the area and interviewed the head of Al-Rawwad Center who is an incredibly articulate Muslim woman. Being here in Falastin where hijab is not mandatory, I have realized that a woman who chooses to wear a headscarf can be just as “liberated” (whatever that word means) or integrated into her community as any “western” woman. The head of Rawaad seemed arguably moreso, in fact, than a certain type of idealized western woman. All cultures produce their own idealized barriers and the people who decide to break them, regardless of how they choose to dress. Social constructs about “west” and “east” start to become laughable when you travel away from home.

Sunday July 12, 7pm. Questioned at the airport for about half an hour, telling them I am a tourist backpacking through the country. A taxi driver, Palestinian, picks me up to take me from the airport in Tel Aviv to my host family in Beit Sahour which is a small town near Bethlehem. At first he is wary to talk politics, but once we pass by Jerusalem, he points out a number of Israeli settlements on the way between Jerusalem and Bethlehem. Two of these are Ramot and Gilo C. He keeps emphasizing how large they are, some with as many as 50,000 people, and how removal of them seems nearly impossible now. Since the settlements are inside the West Bank east of the 1967 border, the wall is also inside the West Bank, dividing these settlements from Palestinian villages. Its route is tediously circuitous and combined with the checkpoints makes movement even inside the West Bank difficult for Palestinians. I took a lot of footage but it is difficult to upload video to this blog because of the shaky internet service.