JAMIE'S STORY

As I grew up it was important that we were Jewish. It was important that Israel existed. We heard about this glowing land of milk and honey and the Israelis who had reclaimed the land. I literally heard nothing, zero, about the Palestinian people who lived in Palestine before it became Israel. It was completely void in my consciousness. It never occurred to me that there were other people were living there before the Jews came back and reclaimed swamps. What had happened to them, I literally learned nothing about that. I did of course learn about all of the wonders of the Jews who had built the Jewish state and kibutzim and all that was tremendous to me.

I was concerned about the oppression of Jews in Russia and getting the Jews out of Russia, that kind of thing. And I wanted to get out of high school really fast. The one place that I could go was Israel, so I started going to Israel when I was seventeen. I just fell in love with the place. I had such great experiences. I started learning Hebrew and I hitchiked all over the country. It was small, and it was still safe to do that. I had never seen seas and mountains before and all this history, it wasn't like that in Milwaukee--flat and boring.

Then when I came back to the states. I was in my sophomore year in college and the Yom Kippur War broke out when Israel was pretty much attacked from all sides. I was in synagogue at the time. So I went off to Israel for another year. I was a volunteer; I helped farm. I was up in the Golan Heights and down in the desert. This was in '73, not that long after the six day war in '67. At that time it felt like Jews were victims of these hateful Arabs all around.

I went to live in Israel for a couple of years in the mid-nineties. I don't know where it came from but I started to question for the first time. Being there I suddenly realized that I had no way to contact and know the Palestinian people who lived just over the border. It was like you couldn't meet black people downtown from the suburbs. That whole thing about not being able to meet and not knowing each other. Being such worlds apart just bothered me something terrible.

Later I was in Hebrew University in French Hill and someone said that this is occupied territory. It just hit me like a tone of bricks, so many places in Jerusalem; it just taken for granted since '67 that this was part of Israel. Something just stirred in me, I honestly hardly know from where. I started reading books while I was in Israel and I started to get familiar with Palestinian history, to look at how the Jew's return to the land of Israel really impacted the Palestinians who were living there in the first place.

Then I went to a women's peace conference and there was a brochure. I had a stack of brochures this high and I was cleaning my room three months later and one brochure out of a hundred and fifty fell like a leaf out off a tree. It fell at my feet and it said Palestinian Peace Trees. So I had email, this was 94, and I emailed the address. It was Leah Green who is head of the Middle East Diplomancy Project. A group of Americans was coming to the Middle East and was going to spend two weeks in the West Bank. They were going to spend a week in the village of Burim, near Nablus. Then we were going to go to Hebron and later meet with Palestinians from a wide spectrum as well as with Israeli peace activists and Kenesset members and settlers.

	Left: The school at Bourim Right: The family Jamie stayed with

Off I went. I'll never forget the first week in the village of Burim when we were planting plant trees to try to save some land from confescation. The Palestinian school had graffiti and pictures solders with guns at the kids. This was drawn on the walls of the schools. We painted a mural on the wall of the school and it got defaced immediately because there were settlers who lived on the top of the hills from this village.

I also began to see that the Palestinian villages were built half way up the hill and the settlers were on the top of the hill. I started feeling the hatred that the Palestinians were experiencing from the Jews, the settlers, and how unsafe they felt feeling living half way up the mountain when the Jews lived on top of the mountain.

Palestinians living in a tent after their house was demolished. photos by Jamie

We spent most of the day with a Palestinian family sitting in a tent next to the rubble of their home that was demolished. Why was it demolished? For no good reason, but because they didn't have the supposed permits. We also met a family in Jerusalem. There was a old law in the books from the 1940s that if a Palestinian family isn't in their home over a period of seven years, they can loose their home. That means, that say for instance you went to study in England for three years and then you went to the states for two years and then you went to marry someone and lived on the west bank for two years, it's seven years total, boom, your home was gone. There were so many ways homes were demolished, land was confescated, people were detained....