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Civil Disobedience Is a Bus Ride
The Youth of Palestine

by Juliana Keen

he bus ride to the Golan Heights reminded me in many ways of all the school field trips I ever took in New Jersey. Most of the young people were shouting out cheers, chants and songs at top volume, while a few couples were scrunched down in their seats, discreetly holding hands.

Graffiti at Dheheisha Refugee Camp, Bethlehem, West Bank. Photo: Juliana Keen

But the words of the songs reminded me that I was not traveling with my peers in New Jersey, but with Palestinians through Israel and the West Bank. The songs that rang through the bus were not about taking bottles of beer off a wall. Their words echoed the bitter struggle for freedom and justice that has shaped the travelers’ youth.

And the sudden silences that overcame the noisy bus each time we came to a military checkpoint were more startling reminders that I was not in United States. As we left the riders’ home villages and cities around the Bethlehem area, as we entered and left Jerusalem, and at other checkpoints, the air tightened in a collective inhale that would only be released when we passed through without incident. Palestinians in the Palestinian-controlled areas need special permission from the Israeli government to travel out of those areas; permission is difficult to get, and most of the people on the bus did not have it. For them, the youth group’s trip from the West Bank to the Golan Heights to learn about the political situation there was an act of civil disobedience.

Memories of Struggle
I had been invited on the trip by a member of the youth group, which was sponsored by an Israeli-Palestine peace organization. I was in the Middle East for the semester with a group of students on a Peace and Conflict Studies program through the School for International Training. We spent one month each in Amman in Jordan, in West Jerusalem in Israel and in Ramallah in the Palestinian Territory, studying the political, social and economic situation of each country. We lived with host families in each area, which helped us to see how the conflict affected them and their culture.

Student elections at Beirzeit University, West Bank. Photo: Juliana Keen

The fourth month we dedicated to working on an independent project. I was interested in grassroots peace-building efforts, Israel’s nuclear weapons and the environment, but most of all I found myself drawn to the young Palestinians and their struggles. I liked speaking with people my own age with whom I connected and who will shape the future of an emerging country. Their spirit captured me. They grew up during the seven-year Palestinian liberation struggle, the Intifada or Uprising. I was interested in learning about how the Intifada and the disappointments that followed it have shaped the current political activities and hopes of this generation. That was how I found myself on the bus with a diverse youth group composed of college-aged people whose lives had been shaped by their experiences growing up during the Intifada.

Although the Intifada is remembered mainly for face-offs between stone- throwing Palestinian youths and Israeli soldiers, the movement also included many nonviolent facets such as strikes, boycotts of Israeli goods, peaceful protests and underground leaflets, to name a few. The people I spoke with were active in different ways. Many participated in the boycotts, demonstrations and protests. One student told me how his neighborhood set up a communal garden that helped the neighborhood become more self-sufficient. The forced closing of Palestinian schools and universities by the Israeli government during the seven-year period, meant to discourage political activity, left the Palestinian youth even more frustrated—and with more time for activism. Many of the people I spoke with spent years of their childhood in Israeli prisons serving time for political activities—throwing rocks at soldiers could lead to arrest and imprisonment, but so could participating in home schooling during the school closings.

Nadal Abu Aker was threatened—along with his family—when he was caught reading political books and literature. He spent a total of eight years in prison for political activity. His experiences being tortured in Israeli prisons were all too common among those I interviewed. I eventually stopped flinching when a boy would lift a pants leg or a shirt sleeve to show where a bullet had entered his body or where his wrist was still marked from being tied to a wall for 72 hours in back-wrenching positions. (Nadal’s brother was fatally shot in one confrontation.)

Yet despite the pain, the Intifada is remembered with nostalgia as a time of togetherness and shared goals. During the Intifada these young people were prepared to sacrifice for their common vision of a free country in which they would have rights like citizens of any other country. That vision of the future kept them united.

But after seven years, the Intifada came to an end in negotiations and a series of agreements, specifically the Oslo Accords. At the beginning the youths remember feeling skeptical yet hopeful: “We believed that after we suffered so much in prisons and hospitals the Palestinian leadership would give us our dream,” they told me.

Seven years later, that dream has not become a reality; what they got was not what they were fighting for. Though it may not be what we read in the papers, the economic, social and political situation for Palestinians is in many ways worse now than before.

Frustration and Anger
The shock the Palestinians initially felt has fizzled into frustration and anger at both the Israeli government and their own new governing body, the Palestinian Authority. Two days after the field trip, a student named Mohammed arrived distraught at a meeting. His family had been evicted from their house on the outskirts of Jerusalem, where they had lived since he was a child. His house was one of the last in his village to receive a demolition order from the Israeli authorities. Before I left Jerusalem I could already see the beginning of construction for the new settlement where Mohammed’s village used to be, almost completing a ring of Israeli settlements that surround the city. Mohammed was angry at both the Israeli government and his own Palestinian representatives, who had offered no solution.”What do you expect us to do? We are able to do nothing,” they had told him.

The former prisoners tell me they feel they are still living in a prison. Refugee camps overflow with people, and though they remain hopeful that they will one day leave the camps, this seems all but impossible. Travel between the West Bank into Israel or Gaza is for most people closed. For most of the Palestinians it is illegal and punishable to travel to visit their holy sites, attend school or visit friends or family outside the Palestinian Authority-controlled areas, while I, with no similar connections to cities like Jerusalem, am free to pass in and out because I am not Palestinian. One student told me, “Since 1995 I have not left the PA-controlled areas. I live in a big prison. I can only go to Bethlehem to the university, to work and home.”

Still Hopeful
How have the youth responded to these overwhelming disappointments and frustrations? There are those who say the young Palestinians of today are apathetic. Though it is true that some, especially in the upper classes, have turned inward to focus on individual aspirations, the vast majority of people I met at Birzeit University and other schools in the West Bank were far from passive. There is so much frustration—and so many hopes for something better—that inactivity is not an option. And their history is one of struggle, not acquiescence.

An interviewee named Akef told me he is no longer politically active because there are no rewards for it, only a high price to pay. But one day at Bethlehem University I witnessed a gathering being organized, and in the center of it on a ledge stood Akef, the apolitical, with a megaphone announcing a march in support of political prisoners held in Israeli jails.

“So you are not political?” I asked him.

“This is not political activity,” he told me, “this is social activity, this is life.” To live there—or, rather, to survive—is to participate in the struggle, whether it means passing through a checkpoint, or trying to visit a relative or friend who is not allowed visitors and is still held in an Israel jail with no charge.

It was frightening for me to witness the anger—even hatred—of the Palestinians I met, which could turn in either a productive or destructive direction. There is a consensus among all I spoke with that the situation will reach a boiling point again soon. The question is what this will look like: How will this energy and this anger be channeled?

The challenge the society faces is to transform that energy into a strong, nonviolent movement. Non-governmental organizations like the Bethlehem-based Wi’am Palestinian Conflict Resolution Center and the Panorama Center for the Dissemination of Democracy and Community Development in Ramallah run workshops helping youth learn and teach about leadership and nonviolence in hopes of helping to shape a strong nonviolent movement. But the results of the nonviolent struggle are discouraging. Most nonviolent leaders like Mubarak Awad were deported or in other ways removed. The international community and the media, who are quiet about the real situation for Palestinians in general, are almost completely silent regardring incidents that do not include stones, bullets or bombs. Years of struggle have brought few tangible changes.

Though the situation seems grim, the people I met left me with hope. There are those who told me their experiences have left them not discouraged, hate-filled or violent, but with a greater sense of humanity as they continue their struggle. Nonviolent resistance is part of their daily existence, including that very bus trip to the Golan. Somehow these actions need support and recognition from others who believe in nonviolence. They need support so that a future Palestine can be a home its youth want and deserve, one that can peacefully coexist with its neighbors.

Peace activist Juliana Keen is a student at Oberlin College in Ohio.