When I think of Palestine I like to remember it in springtime
By Elizabeth Raymer**
When I think of Palestine I like to remember it in springtime, when the weather is warm but not hot and the sun glints off the white stone walls and softens the air. Truth to tell, I love Palestine in any season, for the warmth of its hospitality, its beauty, its perseverance, its faith.
Bougainvillea is not native to Palestine, but it grows well there because of the warm and sunny climate.
Each time I’ve returned, though, the situation seems to have worsened. “Do you remember when Qalandiya checkpoint was a booth on a dusty road?” I’ve asked friends, recalling the checkpoint between Jerusalem and Ramallah from my first visit, in the summer of 2003.
This past November I looked forward to visiting Palestine for the first time in more than eight years, though I knew that this time I’d see far worse than what I’d witnessed on earlier visits and over several years of volunteering there.
During a five-day pilgrimage with Sabeel we saw Israeli schoolchildren — on a new observation deck in Sderot, an Israeli town near the northern border with the Gaza Strip — pump their fists and middle fingers into the air at the sight of smoke risking from Gaza. This seemed a perverse form of entertainment: witnessing genocide and celebrating it.
Young Israelis gather on the Sderot hill which provides a view into Gaza.
We visited the settlement of Um Al Kheir in the South Hebron Hills and met with a community leader there, who described escalating violence by Israeli settlers since October 7th: blocking roads, issuing demolition orders, taking villagers’ land for their own, night raids, and physical attacks, including against five women recently that had resulted in broken bones.
Since October 7, 2023, he said, “we live in a hell like never before.”
Following the pilgrimage a friend took me on an evening visit to the Jordan Valley and described how Bedouin farmers had been driven out by settlers; about five families had already left, he said, and the settlers’ attacks were confirmed by a group of international filmmakers we met with there. The roads we drove on through the West Bank were new Israeli roads, and the signage did not acknowledge a single Palestinian town or village we passed by, but only Israeli settlements and to points in Israel.
This is Israel’s increasing domination of Palestine. That dusty booth in the road? Today Qalandiya checkpoint is a fortress-like structure with ramps, turnstiles, metal detectors, airport-style conveyor belts along which all belongings must now pass, and unsmiling soldiers behind plexiglass barking instructions and locking turnstiles at whim.
A portion of the Qalandia checkpoint.
“It’s just for humiliation,” my friend told me. On the last day I had passed through that checkpoint during my first visit, more than two decades earlier, youth had been shot at there. But more than that violence it’s the daily degradations — the omnipresent checkpoints, the severe restrictions on movement (many if not most Palestinians can’t even visit Jerusalem), the short trips that should take an hour or less but may take three times that long — that must wear down the psyche.
On our second day of pilgrimage the Rev. Munther Isaac of the Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church in Bethlehem described to us the Palestinian concept of sumud — steadfastness: refusing to forget the past, or give up — that was developed during the second intifada.
When I think of Palestine I like to remember it in springtime: of driving through the Jaffa Gate, lit softly in the late-morning sun, at the beginning of a journey; of the heartfelt goodbyes at the end. Today I also think of new beginnings, of what it will take to rebuild Gaza, and historic Palestine; how it will take an international effort to right the hideous wrongs of not only yesterday but today — and of how sumud, and continuing to tell our stories, can help plant the seeds for that.
** Elizabeth Raymer is a journalist and communicator who lives in Toronto. She has been an advocate for Palestine since the early 2000s and volunteered extensively there over a period of 10 years. Along with a dozen other Canadians, as well as Americans and Britons, she participated in a solidarity pilgrimage organized by Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center in Jerusalem, from November 17 to 22, 2024.