The most precious object for a person trapped in hell is a means of navigation. This is true of physical misery and emotional or psychological misery, and it is true both literally and figuratively. Navigation is vital. Keep that in mind.
If someone in Washington, DC, where I live, was tempted to visit the village where I grew up, most would be able to fly from Washington DC to Tel Aviv, hire a taxi or rent a car, and drive fifteen minutes southeast to my childhood village. But, like almost everybody else whose family lives in my village, I am not permitted to fly into Tel Aviv because I am a Palestinian and my village is in the occupied West Bank. When I was compelled by medical necessity to return home a few months ago, I had to fly from Washington to Doha and Doha to Jordan, before crossing three different border patrols – Jordanian, Israeli, and Palestinian, and then at last arriving home. (It is darkly humorous that all this trouble was still preferable to shouldering the colossal financial burden it would have incurred to seek the treatment I needed in the United States.) I landed in Jordan in the afternoon and had to make haste to get to the border crossing which closes at 5:00 PM local time. It is difficult to budget time for border crossings. You can hope for an average of about two hours, but sometimes it can take you eight or more. Don’t make it through before 5 and you have to find some place to stew before it opens again the next day.
When I finally made it through all three patrols, out of Jordan and into Jericho, I was confronted for the first time on this trip with a challenge familiar to all Palestinians in the Occupied West Bank since October seventh: which roads can we take? Life in the occupied territories has never been easy, and it has been growing more and more difficult for as long as I’ve been alive. Creating quotidian obstacles to a normal life is one of the ways that Israel exercises collective punishment against all Palestinians in that area. But since October 7th that strategy has intensified astronomically. Movement is harder than it has ever been. Which roads are open to Palestinian drivers? This is not at all clear – they aren’t marked. Many are blocked off, many have been destroyed, making passage impossible. Over the past ten months Palestinians have developed, through slow, redundant trial and error, paths to make their way around. When we finally reach our respective villages, we have to find which entrance is open since the main entrances to most Palestinian villages and cities have been sealed with enormous iron gates.
The hospital that I needed to visit each day is located in Ramallah. My village is very close to Ramallah, about twenty kilometers total (but pull up Google Maps on your preferred device right now and try to elicit any exact information about distances within the occupied territories from the application. This will give you the smallest taste of what life is like on the ground: Waze, Google Maps, and all other navigational systems go haywire in the West Bank – someone somewhere is making sure of that). Before October Seventh, when Palestinians could access highway 463, it took me twenty five minutes to get there. On this trip it took me an hour and a half both ways.
The streets that are still open to us are filled with a kind of talk that I found first shocking and then simply heartbreaking. Over the month and a half I was home, I had many conversations with friends and family – very few of them gave me any reason to take heart. I was surprised to discover that the totalizing sympathy that I have for the people of Gaza is not shared by Palestinians in the West Bank. They are not angry with Hamas for the role they have played in the immiseration of their own people. Israel has taken good care over decades to keep deep divides between the people of Gaza and the Palestinians in the West Bank. A house divided cannot revolt. That strategy plays a role in the lack of empathy I witnessed. But it is also true that the Palestinians I spoke to have been poisoned by Hamas propaganda in much the same way that Israelis have been poisoned by Israeli propaganda. They repeat to me that what Hamas did on October Seventh was justified – not because they believe that Israeli civilians deserve to die, but because they are convinced that no such crimes were committed. Person after person – acquaintances, close friends, even family members – told me that no Israeli civilians were killed on that day, that the horrors I have read about in western Newspapers are merely Israeli lies. I stood in front of these people and showed them videos on my phone of Hamas killing civilians and I was told again and again that the videos had been doctored by Israeli propagandists, and that I have been duped just like CNN and the New York Times was. Finally, in a last ditch effort to prove to them that Israeli civilians did die that day, I showed them a statement Hamas had released in which they admit that they had killed civilians, but that they had only done this by accident. “Well they apologized for it!” my friends said with a shrug. (It bears emphasizing that the only people who say that Hamas is justified in murdering Israeli civilians are Western leftists – not Palestinians.) And so when I demand that these people justify their swelling support for Hamas, this is what they tell me.
But I know there are other factors as well.
Perhaps you have heard about the settler violence perpetrated continuously against Palestinians in the West Bank. That sort of terrorism has been going on for years, but now it is committed with total impunity by people often armed with weapons that belong to the Israeli army. Palestinians in the West Bank interact on a daily basis with two sorts of Israelis: the army officers overseeing their occupation, and the settlers who are driving them violently from their land. Palestinians are unarmed, helpless, and lack any authority to call for help.
And it is also clear to me that the financial situation which is crushing Palestinians in the West Bank is at least as much of a factor. Their support for Hamas has grown in step with their own poverty and frustration. Financial struggle is hardly a severe enough phrase for the destitution which has racked Palestinian society in the past eleven months. The best jobs available to Palestinians before October Seventh were jobs in Israel. Since the fall, though, Palestinians have been denied permission to work inside Israel. About fifty thousand or so Palestinians are currently working illegally – paid by Israeli patrons who depend on Palestinian labor. But these illegal risks are hardly dependable and make little progress towards lifting any burden.
Whence salvation? My friends do not understand that my opposition to Hamas is motivated primarily by the firm faith that for a better future Palestinians must rid themselves of armed militias. They believe I oppose Hamas because I support Israel, as if any Palestinian political identity has to do primarily with how we feel about Israel, and not how we feel about one another. They see the way Israeli propagandists use Palestinians who condemn Hamas terror to justify attacking Gaza, and they are disgusted. Their unwillingness to demand more of our leaders is its own obstacle against navigation. How can we develop an opposition leadership while we are frozen in place?
On my trip I met with a member of the Palestinian Authority leadership. I asked him what the PA is doing to keep Israel from annexing the entire West Bank. He threw up his hands and said that they are aware of everything that the Israeli government is doing, they know that the PA funds are being cut, that the settlements are expanding, that settlers terrorize Palestinians with impunity or worse, but their only hope is that the liberal movement in Israel will force Netanyahu from power and install a peace partner in his place with whom Abbas can broker a deal once and for all.
This answer did not satisfy me. We must also work towards change from within our own society, and demand more of our leaders than either Hamas or the PA are willing or able to do.
I know that there are Palestinians who oppose both Hamas and the occupation. They are our future leaders. The only way forward is for us to come together and write a map ourselves.