April 2003
On the eve of Passover, after a month I spent in the occupied
territories of Palestine working with the International Solidarity
movement, a month that saw one of our people deliberately run over by
a bulldozer driven by an Israeli soldier, and two young men
deliberately shot, one in the face, one in the head, I found myself
unable to face the prospect of a Seder, even with my friends in the
Israeli peace movement. I couldn't sit and bewail our ancient
slavery or celebrate our journey to the promised land. I was afraid
that I might spew bitterness and salt all over any Seder table I
graced, and smash something.
So I went to the peace encampment at Mas'Ha. Mas'Ha needed
people, and the moon was full, and I thought I could just lay down on
the land under the moonlight and let some of the bitterness drain
away. Mas'Ha is a village on the line of the new so-called "security
wall," where a peace camp has been set up at the request of the local
people, mostly farmers who are faced with the confiscation of
ninety-eight per cent of their land.
Mas'Ha, on one of the main roads into Israel proper, once had a
thriving trade, until the Israelis closed the road. The farmers grow
olives and figs and grapes and wheat--but now the land has been
confiscated for the building of the wall, with no compensation
offered. In places the wall is a thirty-foot high concrete barrier,
complete with guard towers.
Elsewhere it is an electrified fence in deep ditch surrounded by a
swathe of bare, scraped ground, flanked by roads to be continually
patrolled by soldiers. It will soon separate the village from the
neighboring settlement of Elcanah, with which it has always had
peaceful relations. No armed resistance, no suicide bombers, have
ever come from Mas'Ha.
Faced with this prospect, given only a few short weeks notice, the
village council came to an amazing conclusion. With every reason to
hate Israelis, they decided to invite Israelis in, in company with
internationals from the International Women's Peace Service and the
International Solidarity Movement. We set up an encampment on the
edge of the bulldozers' route, to witness and document the
destruction.
To be at Mas'Ha is to be on the absolute edge of the conflict.
The road block that separates the village from the settlement is the
divide between two realities. I got to Elcanah from Tel Aviv on the
settlers' bus, full of elderly women who could have been my aunts and
old men that could have been my uncles and a few young people,
everyone wishing each other Hag Sameach--"happy holiday," for
Passover or, in Hebrew, Pesach.
We drove through one settlement to let people
off and I got a tour of what looks like a transplanted
Southern California suburb, complete with lush
gardens and new houses, all with an aura of prosperity
and complacent security--provided by armed guards
and razor wire and the Israeli military. The landscaping
featured olive trees in the street dividers--
I suspected they had been transplanted from some
farmer's stolen fields--the Palestinians' livelihood
turned into a decorative element of the settlements.
From Elcanah, I walked down the road a few hundred
yards and climbed over the road block bulldozed
to keep Palestinians out of Israel. I was in a
dusty village of old stone and new cement houses
and shuttered shops, backing onto open hillsides
of ancient olives.
The camp at Mas'Ha is on a knoll, two pink tents set up in an
olive grove on stony ground studded with wildflowers, yellow broom,
and prickly pear. The olives give shade and sometimes a backrest.
If you look in one direction, the groves are spread out below the
hilltop for miles of a soft gray-green with blue hills in the back
ground and small villages beyond, But encircling the hill, and
cutting a gray swath across the hillsides, is the zone of
destruction, a wide band of uprooted trees and bare subsoil, where a
giant back hoe is wallowing like some giant, prehistoric beast,
grabbing and crushing stones, gouging the earth, filling the air with
dust and the mechanical bellowing of its engines.
A young man is sitting under a tree as I arrive, writing on stones
with a black marker. He's a farmer, he tells me. In Arabic, he
writes, "Don't cut the trees." He thinks for a moment, and adds
another graceful line. I ask him to translate. He gives me a sweet
smile, and points to the ground. "What is this?"
"Earth?" I ask, not meaning if he means earth
or land or soil.
"The earth speaks Arabic," he tells me.
All the Israelis but one have gone, to celebrate Pesach with their
families. There are only two of us from the ISM and one woman from
IWPS who stay over, along with two of the Palestinians, to guard the
camp.
As the full moon rises, I lie on the stones and meditate. I am
hoping to find some peace or healing, but the earth is tortured here
and all I can feel is her anguish. Down and down, through layers and
centuries and epochs, I hear the ancestors weeping. The land is
soaked in blood, and generations have faced ruthless powers and been
cut down, and why should we be any different?
I am woken up at three AM to take my shift on watch. I sit by the
fire, exhausted, and finally drift back into sleep, waking again in
the morning feeling sick at heart.
But people begin to arrive, for a midday meeting. The women from
the IWPS, and the men from the village, and dozens of Israelis. We
sit under the tent with its sides raised, talking about building an
international campaign against the wall. One of the men, a
stonemason, makes miniature buildings out of the stones at our feet
as we talk. "Maybe we can't stop it here," one man from the village
says, "but maybe we can stop it other places."
The Israelis who come are mostly young. They are anarchists and
punks and lesbians and wild-haired students, and it strikes me that
the mayor of Mas'Ha and the village leaders in a very socially
conservative society might actually have more in common with the
Orthodox Jews who hate them than with these wild, social rebels. But
the village accepts them all with good grace and a warm-hearted
Palestinian welcome. One woman is from the group "Black Laundry",
which requires a somewhat complicated three-way translation of a
Hebrew play on words. She explains that it is a lesbian direct
action group, and asks our translator if that's a problem. "Not for
me," he says with a slightly quizzical shrug, and the meeting goes on.
Later we meet with the village women, who want to know if we can
help them in any way. They are about to lose their source of
livelihood--is there anything we can do? We have a long discussion
about what we do in the ISM, and promise to research organizations
that do community development work. They are excited to learn that
we watch checkpoints and help people get through them. Students from
the village who go to the university often get stopped at the
checkpoints, or have to walk round through the mountains. Maybe we
can help them.
Back at the camp, all the young shabob--the term for young,
unmarried men--have come out for the evening. We sit around the fire
while two of the men prepare us dinner, laughing and talking. And
suddenly I realize something wonderful is happening. The Israelis
and the Palestinians can talk to each other, because most of the
young men speak Hebrew. They are hanging out around the fire and
talking and telling stories, laughing and relaxing together. They
are hanging out just like any group of young people around a fire at
night, as if they weren't bitter enemies, as if it could really be
this simple to live together in peace.
So it was a strange Seder this year, pita instead of matzoh, the
eggs scrambled with tomato, hummus instead of chicken soup, water
instead of wine, and instead of the maror, the bitter herbs which I
have already tasted, a slight sweet hint of hope.
I can't ever again say "next year in Jerusalem." I can no longer
believe in the promise of a land which requires the building of
concrete walls and guard towers and ongoing murder to defend it. Far
better that we should abandon the old stones of Jerusalem than to
practice torture in older to claim it.
But I would like to believe in the promise of Mas'Ha, in the
example of a people who, faced with utter destruction of everything
they need and hold dear, opened their hearts to the children of the
enemy and asked for help.
I would like to believe in the Israel reflected in the eyes of those
who answer that call. That somehow, on this chasm between the
conquerors and those who resist being finally conquered, the bridges
and connections and meetings are happening that can tear down the
walls of separation.
By next year, the camp at Mas'Ha will most likely be gone.
Already the contractors who work for the Israeli military have begun
blasting a chasm that will soon cut the olive groves off from the
village. An international campaign to stop the building of the wall
has begun--but the reality is that they have the capacity to build it
faster than we can organize to stop it.
And yet I say it again, as an act of pure faith:
Next year in Mas’Ha.
Copyright (c) 2003 by Starhawk. All rights reserved. This copyright protects Starhawk's right to future publication of her work. Nonprofit, activist, and educational groups may circulate this essay (forward it, reprint it, translate it, post it, or reproduce it) for nonprofit uses. Please do not change any part of it without permission. Readers are invited to visit the web site: www.starhawk.org.