notes of a non-combatant

the violence resumes

She called me from her grandmother’s house while I was in her parents’ apartment. I had been standing on their balcony, looking out over the city like the mother and her daughter next door, the former wearing her hijab. The neighbors to my other side had strung small Israeli flags on their balcony banister along with laundry left to dry. I had heard Akko was a model town of coexistence, and I was witnessing it now.

“One hundred and forty people are dead in Gaza. We’re protesting today,” Maram told me on the phone.

I got cleaned up and was ready when they got back. The plan was to go demonstrate in the Old City of Akko before going on to Nazareth. Maram’s parents arrived shortly after her and Miar got back to the apartment, and they asked what I was going to do during the day. “You’re bringing him with? Okay…” they said with a skeptical yet accepting tone, and we left.

Driving through Akko, a calm town full of palm trees and wide streets, we came to the Old City. We walked past the walls that had repelled Napoleon’s forces and into the center of town. We held up signs. It was quiet- silent, in fact. Maram’s mother said that she hated these types of protests because it makes her hold her screams inside. It’s hard when you just want to yell, having watched two-hundred bodies hit the floor in the news report.

Photos of the protest in the Old City of Akko can be found at panet.co.il

After demonstrating, we returned back to the apartment to gather our things before heading to Nazareth. For the half hour that we were there, I couldn’t take my eyes off the news report playing on Al-Jazeera. It was extremely potent and vivid, unlike many of the news reports that get watered down before they reach America. The reporter was geared for war in a flak jacket and a helmet with a full face shield, not to mention clothes colored to clearly distinguish him as a reporter.

The camera panned across scenes of horror from a city that, barring the occupation and current siege, is much like any other city across the world. High-rise apartments and office buildings surrounded city blocks made of rubble and corpses. Dead bodies lay strewn about, partially covered with blankets. Men sat about, bleeding from various areas of their body. Some people stood around the dead bodies, arguing and discussing things before turning to flee as a building collapsed. Corpses lay on the ground, body parts missing. One man’s face was only distinguishable by his gaping mouth and the attached torso, as the top half of his head was blown off with his brain matter still leaking on the ground. The footage switched to a scene of a man picking up body parts, placing a foot and a hand into a metal bowl that was much like the ones we used to hold popcorn at my old house in America.

Upon tearing my eyes away from the carnage, I was informed that it was time to head to Nazareth. A majority-Arab town, Nazareth is made up of Muslim and Christian Arabs, Israeli citizens but Arab in their culture and in their hearts. The car ride wasn’t very long, maybe half an hour, not including picking up people along the way.

We drove up an extremely steep mountainside and parked the car, then walked back down the hill towards the main street, where we met up with the crowd. Standing for a while and yelling slogans in Arabic, the crowd was still for maybe ten minutes as it formed. Organized by her political party, Hadash, Maram’s mother and family were there, and we all began marching along with the crowd. In the middle of a sea of angry Palestinian slogans and demonstrators, I walked. Maram occasionally translated the slogans while were all pretty much asking general questions such as “how many children must die?” There were slogans directed at Israel and the occupation, as well as a few about America, but it didn’t matter to anybody that an American Jew was marching with them; I was only treated with respect and grace, despite probably being the only non-Arab in the entire crowd.

We marched down the street for a while, maybe half an hour or more, until we all congregated in the main square of downtown Nazareth. Flags waved amidst the crowd; the flag of Palestine signifying solidarity, red flags representing the Hadash party, and black flags were flying in mourning. Maram informed me that the speakers standing atop an embankment were all Arab politicians. The mayor of the city as well as representatives of parliament and the Hadash party were all lined up, and the leaders of a Muslim movement- which also had a large demonstration taking place simultaneously down another street- joined with our demonstration. The speeches went on in Arabic for maybe fifteen minutes, and despite not understanding a single word spoken, the pain, frustration, and anguish was clearly decipherable in their voices.

Once the protest ended, we walked back up to the car and went to dinner at a restaurant in Akko, eating kabob and watching news updated playing on television. Upon seeing me on the news report about the protests in Nazareth, the cook generously gave me the dinner plate, on the house.

After eating, we drove home to return to our daily lives; here in Israel and Palestine, this is daily life. On any given day, a certain faction may become an aggressor, the most powerful- by far- being the Israeli Defense Forces. Their unilateral aggression against the people of Gaza City today left two-hundred people dead, as of the last news report. Qassam rockets have been launched into Israeli territory for the past week, killing less than a half dozen people, several of which were Palestinian children. However, the air strikes today may be the first day of a war that is, in the loosely translated words of my Israeli friends, “against the general Israeli vote.”

Tonight is a somber night for both Israelis and Arabs; unsure of whether this may escalate into warfare or extreme aggression. We return to our lives but make it a point to stay abreast of the news. Palestinians and Arabs alike mourn the dead today, as do many Jews and Israelis who are ashamed of the attack which was of an unjustifiable scale. Tonight, we are all sitting, watching, and waiting.