The Noose Has Tightened in Palestine

With a fragile ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in place, it is tempting for many in the West to ignore the broader issues that Palestinians still face: Namely, increased settler violence and the state of Israel annexing more Palestinian land. I went to Palestine in August, while the war that was not a war still raged, and I saw firsthand the dire reality of Palestinians in the West Bank.

My father was determined to accompany me to the Holy Land. His reasoning was simple: “I don’t want you going by yourself.” After my plans to convene an interfaith trip of Japanese Americans had fallen through, I arranged to travel alone to offer mental health training to a group therapy and community center in the West Bank.

I had spent a life-changing five weeks in Palestine in 2018 and felt convicted to return. My own family was shaped by U.S. concentration camps, and I wanted to be in conversation with local clinicians and faith communities grappling with the lasting impacts of racial and settler violence—especially to consider what we can do to treat intergenerational trauma and to care for ourselves amidst ongoing horror. The trip was set to last 14 days.

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Relieved at arriving without detention or delay, we download the requisite taxi app and fall into our cab outside of Tel Aviv’s airport. It is not Hebrew, English, or Arabic that our taxi driver, Max, chats with us in, but Russian. Through a translation app, we consider how different this land is from his native Ukraine.

Max moved with his family to Israel six years ago. The positives: education and after-school programs, including sports for his son. The negatives: the heat, the sand everywhere. But above all, he insists into my phone mic, “There is a future for the children here.”

I ask him if he is Jewish. No, atheist. Later, I press: “I thought you needed to be Jewish to move here?” He responds with two words I recognize: “Babushka Hebraica.”

“Your grandmother was Jewish?” He nods.

Max shows us video footage of his son sparring, training in mixed martial arts. He’s been taking these classes for five years and has a real future in it, room to grow, win recognition, and maybe even scholarships. My dad peers passively at his own phone in the back seat, holding its glow inches from his failing eyes. A retired police officer, he once trained in many combat arts but never pressured me to take a similar path.

“Isn’t it true that your son will have to serve in the military one day?” I ask.

Max offers another nod and a shrug. Then silence.

“So, he’ll be fighting for a long time then,” I respond.

The noose has tightened

“Muslim? Muslim?” The guard with furrowed brows repeats at the entrance to the Western Wall. No, we declare. We pass. Our first sunrise here, and the plaza burns with energy. The open square, created by razing a Moroccan neighborhood after the Naksa, hums with the sounds of the faithful. Men jostle and rock, tourists amble and jig, liturgies convulse in holy fear and trembling. Sharp glances sent our way make us feel like trespassers.

Shoeless settlers breathe down our necks in the crush of bodies waiting to be swept and screened on the ascent to al-Haram al-Sharif. Soldiers who look like children to me glance up impassively from glowing screens, minding the videos on their phones more than the guns dangling from their hips. A civilian on a stroll, draped in religious garb, squares off against us, seemingly issuing a dare with a wild look. “Shalom,” I say back, peace. I dream fitfully about him that night.

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I feel my father and I are walking across fields of broken glass, wincing at each protracted crunch underfoot. You can just tell that the armed soldiers and settlers are ready to pop off at the slightest thing. You begin to unconsciously calibrate eye contact, posture, and appearance to avoid inadvertently igniting the powder in the air. The settlers claim more and more land with flags and guns; the military comes to back them up, sanctifying their violence with the power of the state. An analogy that offers me clarity is the symbiotic relationship between the police and white supremacist groups in the U.S.: The two are often so joined as to be indistinguishable.

Throughout our first day in Jerusalem and Ramallah, we witness the constant scenes of desecration and abjection that Palestinians are subjected to. I feel a rising pressure to find the right way and words to convey this unceasing horror to my loved ones back home. I fantasize about shouting it from atop a milk crate opposite The Art Institute of Chicago, where my homiletics professor trained us to preach, or whispering it to everyone through tears: The situation here is far worse than I had allowed myself to imagine or understand from afar.

I keep hearing myself say aloud, “The noose has tightened here,” a phrase which I associate with the American history of racial terrorism. My father and I recall the lynching carried out in his hometown on Hawaii island, a tale that haunts our family. I think about how the Roman Empire lynched Christ, subjecting him to a punishment reserved for slaves and insurrectionists, a tool of occupation used to remind its subjects just who held the power.

The apartheid wall snaking through the land is a kind of noose that chokes off Palestinians’ access to life and land; it stifles dignity and strains familial bonds; its purpose is to leave a rope burn in the psyche that is passed from generation to generation.

The apartheid wall snaking through the land is a kind of noose that chokes off Palestinians’ access to life and land; it stifles dignity and strains familial bonds; its purpose is to leave a rope burn in the psyche that is passed from generation to generation.

Visiting Yad Vashem during the genocide in Gaza

Naturally, I find it difficult to sleep. Late one night in Jerusalem, while waiting to conduct a virtual interview with genocide scholar Omer Bartov, I doze off. I cycle through undreamt dreams, nightmares about settlers breaking into my house and living in half of my basement. Oops—how long has Bartov been stuck in the Zoom waiting room? I let him in.

I first heard Bartov speak last April at the Grappling With Genocide roundtable. At the time, he was the one member of the panel not to use the term “genocide” to describe Israel’s actions in Gaza, instead preferring to use the language of “war crimes.” In July, writing for The New York Times, he publicly changed course, arguing that he had come to the “inescapable” conclusion that “Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people.”

I wanted to talk to Bartov for several reasons: I hoped to understand the forces that pushed him to change his mind, to explore the often-severed links between colonial genocides and the Nazi Holocaust, and to chart our points of disagreement so that I could better clarify my own convictions.

“So, I’m the same age as your father,” Bartov noted with warmth as we began. Clinicians often talk about transference as the feelings from past people and places that we unconsciously apply to the present; we inevitably see the here-and-now through the film of the there-and-then. I’m not sure if Bartov figured me for his son, but to my sleepless brain, he felt, emotionally, a mimeograph of my father: an edifying, sincere, moral man.

READ MORE: As a Palestinian Pastor, I Can’t Call This ‘Peace’ Plan Justice

We considered postcolonial theorist Aimé Césaire’s argument that the Holocaust saw Europe’s colonization turned inward on itself. Bartov agreed that one could read “the Nazi empire as a colonial empire … emulating and repeating and radicalizing aspects of European colonialism.” He spoke about the “boomerang effect” that genocidal colonial violence invites, reminding me of Palestinian scholar Noura Erakat connecting U.S. imperial violence abroad with fascism at home.

As with my father, we charted areas of disagreement—namely, whether the settler-colonial analysis fully captured the multifaceted dynamics at play in this land. “Israel as a society has become so much more deeply embedded within the cultures that it came to colonize than it ever imagined,” he challenged. From Bartov’s perspective, the European founders of Zionism, like the late 19th-century Austro-Hungarian Theodor Herzl, “would not have recognized [Israel today] and would not have wanted to live in it.” He argued that Zionism initially carried a humanitarian impulse that was not bound to descend into supremacy, and that focusing on its racist and lethal nature was to tell only half the story. “The half that won,” I quipped.

In parting, he offered a genuine note of parental concern: “Take care there. Don’t get too involved with the border guards, they’re not nice people.”

“I’ll use your name if I get in trouble, no worries,” I smiled back.

I think of Bartov as we walk through Yad Vashem, the state museum to commemorate the Holocaust, whose academic journal he had just resigned from in protest over its silence on Gaza. One placard at the museum reads: “In most cases, the local population reacted with apathy … most Europeans [came to] consciously deny the obvious crimes against their Jewish neighbors who had lived in their midst for centuries.”

We eat steak that night as people starve less than an hour away. “I don’t want to be like those neighbors, dad. That’s why I wanted to come back here, why I’m staying up so late to write.” My dad tries to reassure me: “You wouldn’t have been like them, handsome son. Don’t worry.” But I do worry, I tell him, that I, too, look away. I worry that I’m being too careful with how I write this little essay. Maybe I’m fretting too much about what experts would think of my use of various terms, all while ribcages jut unnaturally and trenches pile high with flesh—as death stalks children whose poems and photos will one day be memorialized in exhibits. I tell my dad that I need to be able to tell my children that I did everything I could, even though I failed.

South Hebron Hills

Hebron and its rolling desert hills to the south expose all the brutal contradictions of life under occupation.

At Umm al-Khair, a besieged Palestinian village in Masafer Yatta that recently received a demolition notice, a resident named Alaa gives us a walking tour of his encircled home, charting this frontier’s shifting geographies: This fence has moved closer in; that home has been demolished; these new settler dwellings were erected yesterday. Alaa shows me the place where his uncle was martyred a few years ago—a death followed by a flurry of attacks and restrictions on any public mourning. 

Recently, on July 28, Awdah Hathaleen, a Palestinian activist and consultant for the award-winning documentary No Other Land, was murdered in the village by a settler who the U.S. had recently removed from its sanctions list. An Israeli court upheld the claim that the settler was acting in self-defense, despite eyewitness testimony and video evidence documenting that he was the instigator. The 31-year-old Hathaleen was a husband, father of three, and Alaa’s cousin.

Alaa’s face is hard as he gestures toward his loved one’s dried blood, dribbled out and staining the pavement, turning the ground into an unction stone. A solitary hoop stands sentry overhead, and I realize that this memorial was once a basketball court.

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As we sit with coffee and tears welling, the giggles of children come to us. I smile instinctually. I soon realize it is a group of about fifteen settler kids, aged somewhere between 6 and 13. They storm down from the settlement, edging up as close as they dare to the fences, taunting all of us inside on the playground. They curl their fingers into the shape of guns and take aim at us. My stomach turns cold. It’s the first time I truly feel afraid, wondering if the smallest spark will bring a blaze of soldiers down on top of us. How is my 71-year-old father going to handle military detention?

I think of the snarling signs that white people held up as they protested school integration, lifting their kids on their shoulders. No one can be born with that hate, I tell myself. I think of what our taxi driver, Max, said. What kind of future do children have here?

What is to be done with this body of death?

If I had St. Paul’s plea to the Romans in my head at the beginning of our trip (“Who can save me from this body of death?”), I now hear Vladimir Lenin posing his old question: What Is To Be Done?

It’s the end of our trip. I’m back at the Tel Aviv Airport, staring at the kiosk of a quintessentially American fast-food chain. Colorful ads promise efficient, delicious use of my remaining shekels. I am once again relieved that we made it through security without apparent notice. I wonder if my clergy collar helped. I think about what writer Mohammed El-Kurd said when he explained that he had an existential crisis the first time he passed through here. From El-Kurd’s perspective, Palestinians in East Jerusalem try to think of the occupation as a nuisance. But the first time he went to the Tel Aviv Airport, he was confronted with the monstrous reality that Israel intended to make this occupation permanent: “They have an airport, they have a state! This isn’t just a bit they’re doing.”

Historian Rashid Khalidi argues similarly that the pro-Palestine movement has often failed to reckon with the utter success of Zionist statecraft. What is our answer to the fact that human lives are unfolding on the “right side” of the separation wall? The question isn’t really whether Israel has the right to exist. It does exist. It insists.

“What is to be done” about this cruel fact? Or to frame this question in a theological register, emphasizing group agency: What are we going to do with God’s help?

As I was standing there, awaiting my food and pondering this question while trying to keep myself awake, I suddenly felt a sort of mystical sensation come over me. I observed the young workers in their molasses-like flow: pimply teenager, gym-bro with traps the size of mangoes wearing a shirt two sizes too small, unrushed and glum cashier who bloomed into laughter when seeing her nervous friend try to wheel in a stack of trays bigger than his body. I remembered what the monk and writer Thomas Merton journaled about his experience watching shoppers in the bustle of downtown Louisville: “I was suddenly overwhelmed by the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers.” 

Merton said this felt like “waking from a dream of separateness.”

“And if only everybody could realize this!” he continued. “But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.”

Hungry and tired, I felt a smile grow on my face. I was happy to see these beautiful humans interacting with each other. I wanted to laugh, but instead tears welled, and I knew that I wanted fullness of life for these children: for them to both love and hate their first job here hawking grease, for them to later laugh about it with their own children. I wanted them to stay up too late and smoke cigarettes by the sea, to sneak the leftovers while their stodgy manager wasn’t looking. I did not want them to go into the military in a couple of years, to harass my friends at checkpoints, to become part of a machinery of genocide poured out upon their neighbors across the border.

I wanted them, too, to wake from the dream of separateness. Do they not know that the people walking around on the other side of this wall that their parents built also have big dreams? Don’t they know that Palestinians possess full personhood, deserve to dance and play and endure dull first jobs, to see beautiful things grow on their land? That they, too, are walking around shining like the sun.