Vocabulary Words

by Lucia Wilkes Smith, WAMM

I admire people who can clearly envision locations and situations described in news reports. I sometimes get stuck in the language, and I simply have to see a place for myself. I went to Gaza, the West Bank, and Israel during the first intifada and was astonished by the vast chasm between my Minnesota imagination and the realities I observed. I now suspect that many readers and listeners make inaccurate assumptions. So I want to go back to basics and simultaneously confess some misconceptions I held before I was eyewitness to a different reality.

Settlements

Is it any surprise that my mind's eye conjured up little sod huts and log cabins? Even a term like "stockade" would not have prepared me for that first-time view of the elaborate and modern apartment complex crowning a beautiful West Bank hillside. It is bigger than shiny new developments in Eden Prairie, more grand than townhouse networks along the Mississippi River.

According to a current 2002 report by the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem, Israel has "'stolen' tens of thousands of acres of Palestinian land to establish the settlements--considered illegal under international law." B'Tselem released detailed maps "showing how Arab towns and villages were hemmed in by Jewish settlements and a network of roads leading to them. The carved-up territories present a major roadblock in the search of a lasting Israeli-Palestinian peace. Settlers . . . now control 42 percent of West Bank land" (Davan Majaraj, Los Angeles Times, May 13, 2002).

Curfew

It is not your dad telling you, when you are 16, to be home by midnight. While my 87-year-old mother and I visit my sister's family in Denver for nine days this spring (in a house with three bathrooms!), I try to imagine an extended Palestinian family confined night and day for a month in a tiny concrete home in Jenin refugee camp--not allowed to pick ripe tomatoes in the garden, not allowed to go to the workplace--while Israeli tanks thunder outside.

Rule of Law

Within the territories occupied by Israel, the rules that govern day-to-day life are military orders. In Ramallah, Fatah Azam, the administrative director of the human rights group Al-Haq (Law in the Service of Man), tells us that 1,250 military orders circumscribing matters of education, culture, and the arts were passed in the West Bank during the prior year. Richard Shifter (U.S. State Department Assistant for Human Rights) tells us, "Basically, the soldier in the street sets the law."

So, when I think about Israeli military occupation over 35 years, I picture an individual soldier making it up as he goes along. In the Gaza Centre for Rights and Law, Tawfig Abu Ghazala tells our group that an Israeli soldier could do "anything" inside a Palestinian's house. Sometimes that soldier mixes a family's sugar together with the salt or breaks their television. Restrictions under military occupation control every Palestinian's right to pump water, to plant trees, to move to another home, to say "Palestinian."

The Forbidden Word

Palestinians who live in Israel are citizens and are called "Arabs." The word "Palestinian" is rarely uttered and cannot be used in an ordinary way, as in the name of a shop or restaurant. The colors of the Palestinian flag--red, green, black, white--also are taboo in combination, and some young people risk arrest by defiantly stitching the colors into their clothing.

The Draft

Israeli Arabs are not allowed to participate in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Israeli Jews, male and female, are conscripted for active duty and ongoing annual reserve service. In Israel there is an elaborate system of "veterans' preference." Therefore, throughout their lives, Arab citizens lose out while Jewish citizens are offered jobs, promoted, and given an extra boost within the civilian society.

House Demolitions

I saw the rubble of a fourplex exploded by the Israeli military after a one-hour warning to the four extended families inside--47 people aged 92 years to 10 days old. The excuse for demolition: A young boy living in the building was caught throwing stones at a military vehicle. This is called "collective punishment."

Houses on land owned by Palestinian families for generations also can be demolished by bulldozer or explosive if the homeowner builds an addition without a permit. Permits are not available to rebuild demolished houses. Palestinian families can live in tents, indefinitely, next to the ruins on their own property. If a family leaves the property to find a different, solid home, Israel can confiscate the "abandoned" land and, combined with neighboring properties taken over time, can build a settlement for the exclusive housing of Jewish Israelis in the West Bank or Gaza.

A Jewish State

I grew up thinking of Israel as an earned place, a homeland to which Jews were entitled because they had suffered enormously. I assumed that Jews would be extra sensitive in their dealings with minorities in the land where they held majority power. Placing a group upon a pedestal--isn't this just a variation of stereotyping?

Olives, Olive Groves, Olive Trees

They appear repeatedly in my travel journal. In the Middle East I eat olives for breakfast. I learn the age of the olive trees: four hundred years, a thousand years and still bearing. I'm told that, in the West Bank, olives represent a $50 million per year business. I begin to understand the elemental importance of olive trees and why a tactic of the Israeli military is to uproot Palestinians' olive groves.

A woman in my group points to the gnarled trunk of a tree outside Bethlehem and asks the Palestinian bus driver, "What kind of tree is that?" He answers, "That is what we are fighting about." Then I know that I am in a land of metaphor, where story and myth are incredibly powerful.

Myths, Rumors and Lies

For some Palestinians, the flag of Israel--two parallel blue stripes with a blue Star of David centered between them--is a symbolic representation of Israel's goal from its inception: to claim all land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River. For other Palestinians, the blue stripes suggest a "Greater Israel," stretching between the Nile and the Euphrates Rivers. When I ask Israeli Jews about their flag, they deny expansionism. Yet, if Palestinians perceive the determined destruction of their culture and people (just as many Israeli Jews believe that the Arabs' goal is to drive them into the sea), what does it take to dismantle justified fear? When and how can the killing and retaliation stop and the spirited debate--the language--begin in earnest?

U.S. and Israel = Israel and U.S.

On a Sunday morning, just before we visit a Christian church in Ramallah ("Why are Americans surprised to learn that some Palestinians are Christians? It was us at the first Pentecost!"), we hear that the U.S. has denied an entrance visa to Yasser Arafat, who was invited to speak before the United Nations in New York. Later, in Gaza, a dozen young Palestinian boys surround us, taunting in Arabic: "Shame, shame, Americans!" When we question Philip Wilcox, the American consul general in Jerusalem, he reminds us, "Foreign policy is not shaped by diplomats and Foreign Service experts. It is shaped by politicians."
I linger for a long time with vocabulary words because I do appreciate language. But I become sad when I remember those hopeful, eloquent Israeli Jews (representing a wonderfully and amazingly broad spectrum of political thought and action) and Palestinians who anticipated a separate Palestinian state by 1995.

I believe I'm capable of sitting around indefinitely, weeping over frustrated dreams. Or I can go, this very evening, to hear a reserve captain in the IDF speak at the Minneapolis Jewish Community Center. There, I can ask a clarifying question that might raise additional questions in the hearts and minds of audience members around me. When I think about doing this, I feel a tingling apprehension. But I'm sure that nobody will shoot me or bulldoze my home. What right do I have to feel fearful? I love language, and I trust its power for inflaming imagination and for instigating peace.