Checkpoints. Occupation. Bloodshed. Three words that were frequently used by three Jerusalem women of three different faiths who came to America to state their common case for peace.
In the first of four Birmingham-area appearances, Nuha Khoury, a Christian Palestinian; Michal Sagi, a Jewish Israeli; and Nahla Assali, a Muslim Palestinian, recently spoke at Southside Baptist Church, Birmingham.
They described the hardships and horrors of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The tour was sponsored by Partners for Peace, an organization dedicated to presenting the day-to-day personal impact of the Middle East crisis to Americans.
Khoury, who holds a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan and lived in America for 15 years, is now deputy director of the Dar al-Kalima Academy in Bethlehem. During her years in America, she said, she became accustomed to a relatively carefree existence. Her life now is vastly different.
She described the typical Palestinian way of life as one of controlled movement, joblessness, hunger and property loss at the hands of the Israeli military. Under occupation, she said, Palestinians are often confined to their homes for days on end and are allowed to venture out only three hours every four days for groceries.
Humiliating life
“It is humiliation at every second of every minute you are living,” Khoury said.
In her work with children ages 3 to 18, Khoury daily sees the effects of the conflict on Palestinian youth. The majority, she said, suffer from post-traumatic syndrome from witnessing shootings or seeing relatives get hurt.
Some of her older students have even experienced prison — as have six out of 10 people in her society, Khoury said — and one of her students is often unable to attend class due to prison-induced claustrophobia.
Khoury’s concern for the children also extends to their nutritional needs. Many of them, she said, suffer from a lack of vitamin A — a deficiency that one cup of milk per day would cure.
“They want to feel normal. They don’t want to feel humiliated by a soldier,” she said of the children. “Occupation kills futures.”
Sagi is actively involved in several causes but most notably in Checkpoint Watch, a women’s human rights group that monitors Israeli soldiers’ treatment of Palestinians at police checkpoints. Her concern for how human rights were being violated began with an occurrence outside her apartment building in Jerusalem.
On her way to a meeting one day, Sagi watched in horror as Israeli soldiers detained and harassed a Palestinian woman for no apparent reason. Surprised that her own people would do that, Sagi confronted the soldiers and was quickly told to mind her own business.
“This was something that happened in my own backyard,” she said. “It was really in my face.”
After that, Sagi’s involvement with checkpoint monitoring began. She estimates that 2 million people are daily affected by what she termed these “collective punishments.”
Sagi described waits of two to three hours at checkpoints after which Palestinians may learn their permits are not valid that day or there is some other reason they won’t be allowed through. The orders for who is or is not allowed to cross, she said, constantly change so that a person not allowed to cross one day may be allowed through the next.
Part of the efforts of Checkpoint Watch volunteers is to act as go-betweens, gathering information from the soldiers as to the orders of the day and communicating that information to people who may be needlessly waiting in line.
“Receiving a pass is often impossible,” Sagi said. “Many have no choice but to bypass a checkpoint.”
Symbol of occupation
Another symbol of occupation, said Sagi, is the wall being erected along the current boundary between Israeli and Palestinian territories. She views the wall as a major inconvenience that is of benefit to no one.
“I don’t believe it will give me security,” she said, “and believe me, I want to feel secure.”
Assali, a retired professor of English language and literature, immediately identified with her Southern audience by citing the example of Rosa Parks, a black woman known for her refusal to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus to a white man. An order of displacement was given to Parks, she said, and an act of displacement is what has happened to the Palestinians.
“A great injustice has been inflicted upon them and the world has deserted them,” she said. “The world is leaving the very weak to stand against the powerful.”
Assali acknowledged that the Jews have also suffered but to try and solve their tragedy at the expense of other people is not a solution.
“Two wrongs don’t make a right,” she said. “We need to think about what to do to end this bloody conflict that is taking the lives of innocent people on both sides.”
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