I have an article in this month’s Foreign Policy in Focus.
Please check it out.

Their promo for the piece:

Artist and activist Ellen O’Grady provides a snapshot of life in the Occupied Territories in Visiting Hani’s House. Accompanying the powerful text are O’Grady’s equally compelling drawings, which document her discussion with Palestinian activist Hani Abu Haikel. He tells her of his meetings with Israeli young people. “I showed them a video of settler and soldier harassment. I swear when many left they were crying. They said, ‘We did not believe the Israeli democratic government could do something like that.’ They stayed two hours talking, even though we only scheduled a half hour. This is how I fight: not with a gun, but with words, through sitting down and talking.”

A drawing from the article:

During my time in Tel Rumeida, there were many mornings I stood on Shuhada Street as children walked past on their way to the Qurdoba School. If you look at the photo above, the school stands just around the corner of the buiding on the right side of the street. In the center of the photo, and across from the school, is the Beit Hadassa Settlement and just before the settlement is a military outpost. It’s hard to see the outpost in the photo, however it’s the square structure after the row of closed shops on the left. The metal grating on the second floor windows and balconies of the Palestinian homes offer protection from the rocks thrown by settlers. In a picture below, you can see that fabric also used for protection.

Beit Hadassa was set up in 1980 after the Palestinians who had lived in the building were expelled. The neighboring Palestinian stores and buildings were demolished by the Israeli military. In 1999 a new five story building (the whilte building in the picture) was built and several family were brought to live there. I believe there are 21 families living there now.

The Israeli government, the settlers in Hebron and their supporters in Israel are trying to make Hebron’s Arab Old City and adjacent neighborhoods into a Jewish Israeli city. They are doing this by tyring to force Palestinians from their homes by creating horrible living conditions and by expanding the settlements. I often heard stories about how Shuhada Street used to be the social and economic center of Hebron. I had the opportunity to talk with three families who used to have shops there. Now, it feels like a ghost town.

The street is lined with Isreali flags and settler graffiti.

Despite the curfews and setter violence a few Palestinian families continue to live on Shuhada Street. This little girl called to us from her balcony. It took me a moment to see her dangling feet.

Back in Jerusalem, where, once again, I have access to the internet. It’s nice, but also daunting. There’s too much to write about. Tomorrow I leave for the US. Tonight I have been listening to interviews from the past weeks. I keep coming back to my interview with Rachel Back, an Israeli poet who lives in a small Jewish village in the north of Israel, in the Galilee. Specifically I keep coming back to her reciting her poems. Below, I have attached I live on the ruins of Palestine.

Though born in the US, Rachel Back is the seventh generation of her family in Palestine. Her grandfather left there in the 1920s to seek his fortune in America, and she returned in the 1980s and lives not far from her ancestors village, which was destroyed in the Druze revolt of 1850.

She talked about living between the ruins of two villages. The village where she lives, Ya’ad, where we sat and drank lemonade and ate walnuts and raisins, used to be a Palestinian village. In 1948 the people of that village, Niyar, were evacuated from their homes in what Palestinians call the Naqba, the “catastrophe” of Israeli independence. The village was destroyed, but there are still remains of the old cemetrary. After our interview, before Rachel dropped me off at the train station in Acco, we went there. It exists on the land between the former village and the new Jewish village. Rachel told me descendents of Niyar still come to tend to the graves.

Here’s the poem:

I live on the ruins of Palestine

Slow to speech thick
of tongue quick
in anger ancient
parched
fear

In the ruins on a land
through a night
ignited

By a single
singed vision
and another
single spark

Cradled close in a charred palm
chiseled in a stonedream
carried across history

Through the dark beneath our bare
feet

Strangers all

On the ruins of Palestine