It grates on the soul
I'm reflecting on the long term experience of sustained protective presence work, and trying to figure out what resilience means in the face of unimaginable violence.
A few days ago I did an interview with my friend Kate, a journalist and Hineinu alum herself, for a piece she wrote following the Susiya attack where settlers brutalized and arrested 3 Palestinians and attacked 5 activists, assaulting us, then destroying our car with us inside. Following that attack in Susiya, the mainstream media blew up the story, because Hamdan, one of the Palestinians who was attacked, had just won an Oscar Award for No Other Land. As we discussed the media's response to this, she asked me what I thought people might not know or understand about the experience of doing long-term protective presence work. Here's my answer:
This sensationalized mainstream media coverage created a moment of empathy - journalists invited readers to imagine the experience of having your family attacked, getting brutally physically assaulted, then having the army blindfold and ziptie you, arrest you, and hold you in inhumane conditions. I do think people did this, they experienced this empathy. They read the articles, watched the videos, felt outrage, and shared posts. But this was no sudden fluke. This was not unprecedented, it was not even unexpected. This shit happens - on some level - every single day here.
As an American Jew, I will never truly know what it feels like for myself, my family, my community, to live in this reality, day in and day out for lifetimes. As someone who's had the rare experience of living here for a couple of months doing rapid response, I've begun to get the very beginnings of insights into the difference between seeing and reacting to one incident vs enduring a long-term reality.
For me, having grown up largely sheltered from violence and oppression, being attacked by settlers was amongst the most traumatizing things I've ever experienced. But in the week after, I struggled to access any emotions about what had happened, subconsciously compartmentalizing in order to be able to keep going out into the field. With my western frameworks of mental health, I was committed to "processing", to feeling all the feelings of what I'd been through. So I called a comrade who is a trained therapist, to process.
As I sat on a cinderblock behind the community center in Umm al Khair, she had me close my eyes, guided me into a reflective state of mind, then had me recount the incident moment by moment, stopping to ask what I was thinking and feeling at different moments throughout the attack. As I did this, I cried for the first time since the attack. I felt grateful to feel my feelings, I felt somehow human again. We discussed that after the call I would journal and process with some friends, that I would use this moment of access to my emotions for healthy processing. As she guided me out of that reflective state, back into my environment, they asked me to notice what I could hear around me. Above the cluck of chickens and the laughter of children playing suddenly my attention was locked on the loud cheers of settlers in Carmel, a few dozen meters away, in a celebration for Shabbat Rosh Chodesh, the new month. I tried to shed my initial response of anxiety to this, and tap back into the tender emotional state I was in.
We finished up our call, and just as I sat down in the house to journal, I suddenly heard, "Rafif! Rafif!” I came out to see settlers brazenly walking right through the community center and children's play area in the middle of the village. Before the tears had even dried from my face, I was on the phone, arguing with the police. The asked me if people had been beaten or if the settlers were armed, and when I said no, they asked me why they should come. I fought to stay calm while explaining that settlers were trespassing on Palestinians’ land, and that the police should come “even though the land was Palestinians”. In some sense, all of the emotions I had just accessed went a million miles away in an instant, the vulnerability I'd been able to access suddenly replaced by the quiet stoicism I tend to adopt whenever I'm facing the police or army. And at the same time, this settler incident, no more intense than any other incident I'd responded to dozens and dozens of times, felt so much harder. I felt so much more frustrated with the police who refused to come, so much closer to anger at these settlers who were making the lives of Palestinians so awful, so much more sadness for the children who ran in fear.
In January, settlers had committed a pogrom in my friend A's village inside the firing zone, burning his car, arresting him and others, and basically torturing them. He's a tender and deeply emotionally intelligent person, and he admitted plainly and without reservation to being traumatized, and he shared that he hadn't slept since the attack. I asked him if therapy was accessible in Palestine, and if he would be open to it:
“Yes, we have it here a little bit, and sure I'd be open, but what's the point?” he said cavalierly.
"Processing?” I offered gingerly.
He shrugged.
To process requires vulnerability. The sheer magnitude of emotions that would come from opening up that box is staggering. A has been kidnapped by settlers/army more than 10 times, not to mention the dozens of attacks, pogroms, harassment, land theft, and displacement he's endured. Where do you even begin? Even if he could begin to access those emotions, it's also potentially unsafe. I struggled with simply calling the police after having entered an emotionally vulnerable state. What happens if you're in that place when settlers attack, when the army raids, when you get arrested?
I don't want to suggest that people here have found a way to be unaffected. This trauma, this violence, embeds itself deep within the body, within the soul. Hour after hour, day after day, week after week. And when settlers walk through the community center of the village, the crime is not only trespassing. The residents of Masafer Yatta are ready for the worst at any time, not out of some catastrophized anxiety, but because they've experienced the situations they're preparing for many times, and they know they have to be ready. So when settlers come into the village, Is this the time they will be beaten? Will the settlers light their cars on fire, chase their children, beat them, kill them?
Last week, some of the most violent settlers in the region gathered together to hold a bonfire in the olive grove in Umm al Khair (which I wrote about here), and we expected that night that they would attack the village.
After they left, I was chatting with one of the lead activists in Umm al Khair, O, as he shared how proud he was of the way that the community came together in such an organized and cohesive way, responding to this threat and protecting one another. He said he was going to go and cook dinner for the whole group of 20+ of us that had stood guard, and joked that I couldn't make fun of him anymore (as I often do) for his wife doing all the cooking.
At many times, especially before I started Hineinu, I found myself overly idealizing Palestinian resilience. People here have survived so much violence, and that violence is beyond any experience that I had lived. I knew I didn't know what it felt like to experience it, so I just assumed that I didn't know what it meant to respond to it. I developed an almost deified view of Palestinians as people capable of some beyond-human resilience, some ability to rise above. But it's not true.
Violence sucks. To worry day in and day out for yourself, your loved ones, your community to suffer physical injury, loss of home, loss of livelihood, to have your agency stripped away, to have every authority figure who's supposed to protect you conspire against you, it fucking sucks. There's no magical way that people here have managed to be unaffected by the hardships they face. The measure of resilience does not lie in being unaffected by hardship. The hardship is going to happen either way, and the fact that I think we forget, is that people will endure either way. I think the test of resilience is in who you let yourself become despite the effects. If you experience hardship and fight to keep your access to compassion, tenderness, patience, joy, humor, resolve, that's resilience.
After 2+ hours of adrenaline and anticipation, when the settlers finally left, I felt completely strange in my body, in some way so relieved, but still totally wired and on edge. As we were chatting and joking, I felt that part of my mind was elsewhere, still caught in the preparations for the attack. So I asked O how he was feeling, and he paused. "People think that we adapt to this situation,” he said. "But no, we don't. You can't adapt to this, no way.” Then he went and cooked dinner for 20 people, who gathered together to eat together, drink tea, and make jokes. And that, for me, is resilience.
A few times now, I have recognized you on the edges of news footage and instagram videos reporting from the West Bank. I saw you again today, filming on your phone while a group of settlers pushed forward and it looked harrowing. I hope there is a moment of calm soon.
Thank you