In Jayyous, West Bank, Palestine: Soldiers in the Village

I was sent by the Common Board of Global Ministries of the United Church of Christ (UCC) and the Christian Church, Disciples of Christ, and Church World Service, to participate in the World Council of Churches’ (WCC’s) Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme in Palestine and Israel (EAPPI). The views contained herein are personal and do not necessarily reflect those of the Common Board of Global Ministries, the UCC or the WCC. If you would like to publish the information contained here or disseminate it further, please first contact the EAPPI Coordination at eappi-co@jrol.com for permission. Thank you.
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My Swedish teammate Patricia phoned us from the taxi stand at the center of our village, where she was waiting for a ride to Jerusalem. “There are soldiers in the village.”

This is not unusual in any Palestinian village. The Israeli army is a frequent visitor, sometimes with an obvious purpose in mind, sometimes seemingly walking through – helmeted, firearms on display -- for the sole purpose of reminding the villagers that they are here. (Perhaps to intimidate? Perhaps to provoke?) This is, after all, occupied territory.

But it was unusual for me to be wide awake and present when they’re around. We’ve had several nighttime visits from the army, along with several arrests of villagers. I’ve either been away at the time or actually slept through them and had my more readily-awakened teammates tell me what they saw as they observed from our roof during the night. I’ve been better at going to visit the affected families in daylight.

But this time it is around 1:00 in the afternoon. Part of our job as EAs is to observe, to document… to accompany the people among whom we’re working in the activities of their daily lives under occupation. My South African teammate, Mandla, and I grab our hats, notebooks and cell phones and hurry out. Yes, dealing with the presence of armed soldiers is a common activity of daily life here.

There is palpable tension in the streets. Groups of boys gather on corners, occasionally shouting to each other, or sending runners back and forth. (Of course there are always boys in the street. But it’s different… they are in identifiable groups, they are looking and pointing in the same direction… you sense that something’s up.)

Mandla and I stride through the village, eyes peeled. Mandla, who is not only extremely gregarious but also conducts English conversation sessions with village boys two afternoons a week, greets a lot of the people in the street, asking them if they’ve seen soldiers. We keep getting pointed to the western end of the village. We walk all the way through from east to west, to where we can climb up on high ground just outside the main population center and look down on the road alongside the Separation Barrier. Nothing. Quiet. (Eerie quiet? Do I just feel that way because I’ve been told soldiers are present?)

Mandla takes pictures – it’s a great view from here, both of the village, the nearby settlement and the Separation Barrier. Suddenly we hear what seems to me like a popping sound, and Mandla jerks around and says, “They’re in the village. That’s live fire.” (I’m momentarily struck by what a naïf I am. I can’t even recognize the sound of gunfire.) We hurry back the way we came.

Once back in the village streets, people respond to our inquiries by pointing toward the center of town. They’re surprisingly calm, going about their business. While the soldiers being in town is an affront, it’s also a predictable, unsurprising occurrence. I’m wondering if the soldiers have simply come and gone.

Until suddenly they appear out of a side street: three, with firearms at the ready. We scoot across the street to keep out of their way, and then try to follow at a distance, Mandla snapping photos as unostentatiously as possible. The soldiers turn around occasionally to warn us off. (Elice, whispering loudly, “Put your camera away, Mandla. Put it away! They’ll arrest you if they see it!”) Indeed, the soldiers already have pointed at the camera. A soldier suddenly turns around and shoots behind me. (I probably jump a foot in the air and rush behind a wall at the next corner. A few of the watching boys snicker.) We hear more shots as we allow distance to increase between the soldiers and ourselves. Mandla picks up some spent shells off the ground.

At the center of town we slip in and out of the assembled groups of onlookers. The soldiers and a few men and boys are arguing. The soldiers suddenly grab a boy in a blue shirt – he can’t be more than 12 or 13 – and start to march away with him. The boy tries to reach back toward an older man who’s been arguing with the soldiers. They all head off down the street, the soldiers holding onto the boy, two other village men at their heels, arguing. Mandla, more confident than I, goes boldly up to a soldier and says, “Why are you taking such a young boy?” The soldiers brush him off and tell him to stay out of the way.

By this time I’ve got our Jerusalem office on the phone so I can report what is happening. I follow the scene down the street, trying to describe as I go, struggling with how little I can say with certainty because I do not know Arabic or Hebrew. I realize I must hang up when a soldier looks at me threateningly, and I again scoot across the street. We see the group turn off on the road that leads toward the North Agricultural Gate where our villagers – those few who have permits -- cross the Barrier to get to their land. A ways down the hill, the young man is bundled into a military jeep. The other village men continue to argue with the soldiers.

My Jerusalem office coordinator calls back, asks me to let her listen to what’s being shouted in the street. When I reconnect with her, she asks me, “Do you understand what they’re saying?” “No,” I admit. “They’re saying ‘don’t throw stones.’” I can see older village men looking fiercely at the groups of boys, scolding. One boy throws a stone toward the soldiers and is practically knocked over by an elderly man who sounds as if he could be shouting curses at the miscreant. I’m so absorbed by the scene that it takes me a while to hear Mandla, and several older boys around him, shouting to me to get out of the way. If stones are thrown, the soldiers are likely to shoot back. One doesn’t want to be in between them.

An English-speaking Jayyousi tells me that the soldiers may come into the village just to see if they can provoke reaction. A common reaction is for the boys to throw stones at the soldiers and their jeeps. The soldiers, in turn, react by trying to chase down boys, seemingly any boys who might have been seen in the direction from which the stones came. (I speculate that the people here have a mixed reaction to the stone-throwers. On the one hand, everyone thoroughly resents and fears the soldiers, who can enter the village and disrupt their lives at any time, for any reason or for no reason. But no one wants additional trouble, no one wants to get hurt, no one wants more arrests, more deaths, more friends or family members in prison.)

Mandla and I move toward a house where we can see a young woman looking toward the scene from the half-constructed second floor. She tells us we can come up to observe from a safer distance. She motions to us to keep as quiet as possible, then points to one of the villagers arguing with the soldiers: “My uncle.” Several others join us over the next few minutes, adults and children, all warning each other to speak softly, all occasionally crouching down or slipping into corners to be out of sight from the street. We see a woman join the group around the soldiers.

In order to get a little closer, Mandla suggests we try the house of our favorite taxi driver, who picks us up twice a week at 3:30 a.m. so that we can monitor a major checkpoint at a crossing into Israel, and who has become a good friend and advisor. He lives near the center of town, and has a balcony overlooking the road to the North Gate.

By the time we reach his home, most of the action has subsided, but our friend has seen it all, and knows the family involved. Apparently, the blue-shirted boy was eventually released after much arguing and negotiation with the family.

When boys throw stones, he says, the soldiers will look for perpetrators. Sometimes they catch the actual stone-thrower, but more often they grab anyone they see. Even young boys can be treated harshly by the Israeli army, and can even end up in prison. He explains that the two brothers of this boy are already in prison. The woman we saw is his mother, who was arguing desperately to keep her youngest boy from being arrested.

This all leaves me with a wild confusion of feelings. I sense that most people I know in the U.S. would look at the stone-throwing boys as little hellions – and possible terrorists-in-the-making. I was brought up as a pacifist, taught “not to confront evil with evil, but overcome evil with good.” I would be horrified if, for example, my grandson were caught throwing stones at soldiers or at anyone else.

After a month and a half in Jayyous, in the occupied West Bank, my commitment to non-violent solutions has not changed. But I do live among people who have lost their livelihood because of the presence of Israelis on lands these villagers have worked for generations; because a Separation Barrier, manned by Israeli soldiers, and supposedly intended to “protect” the Israeli settlers, actually keeps the villagers from the land that is their living. I do look at, say, a 12-year-old boy, who may simply have been in the wrong place at the wrong time, under the control of three heavily-armed soldiers, and wonder how much of a “security” threat he, or his possible stone-throwing buddies, may truly represent. Security for whom, for what reason? I wonder what image of authority is taught to these boys? What is the lesson of this day for them? Who is terrorizing whom?