1. Mahmoud Darwish Palestinian Poet, 1941-2008
Palestinian girl in a refugee camp with Mahmoud Darwish poem

2. His writings address other themes as well, but Darwish, a refugee and exile himself, speaks to the experience of Palestinians who lost their land and human rights due to the nakba (“catastrophe” in Arabic). The refugee girl in the preceding slide has etched one of his poems into a stone. In the summer of 2015, I visited refugee camps in Palestine and took these pictures of children in the camp.

3. The Nakba (The Catastrophe)
For some time, many believed Israel was “A Land Without People for a People Without Land,” a safe place for Jews, who had faced extreme discrimination and persecution at many times and places in history. Unfortunately, the land was not “without people.” People had lived there for centuries, including a very small number of Jews (3% in the late 19th century), and mostly Christians (10-15%) and Muslims.
“Almost half a million Palestinians were displaced between December 1947 and May 1948 – following the UN Partition Plan and before the proclamation of Israel – reaching a number of 750,000 refugees by the end of the Nakba. Today, 66 percent of the Palestinian people worldwide (more than seven million) are themselves, or the descendents of, Palestinians who have been forcibly displaced by the Israeli regime. The deliberate and planned forcible displacement amounts to a policy and practice of forcible transfer of the Palestinian population. This process began prior to 1948 and is still ongoing throughout Palestine today – we call it the ongoing Nakba.”
from Corporate Complicity in Violations of International Law in Palestine. Bethlehem, West Bank, Palestine: BADIL Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights, December 2014, p. 5.

4. “PRESENCE... is the critical question of the colonial problem….”
Nigerian author Chinua Achebe (whose great novel, Things Fall Apart, is sometimes taught in this class) makes this point in reference to the British colonization of much of Africa, when the humanity of the indigenous population was discounted by the colonizers, or their very existence was ignored.
(Here you see an old road sign that at least acknowledges the Arabic name for the city, along with the Hebrew and English names; a new sign, however, simply fails to include the Arabic name.)

6. From July 25 to August 7, 2015, I participated in a delegation to Israel/Palestine with the organization, Interfaith Peace-Builders. I am in the bottom row, second from the left. (Jewish myself, I am deeply concerned about Israel/Palestine and would be happy to share more of what I experienced; please just and ask!) The information on this PowerPoint is based on that trip.

7. I attended a wonderful concert by this group of Palestinian musicians, Le Trio Joubran; they performed this piece, which incorporates a poem by Darwish (a direct link to this same video is provided in the Darwish folder):
The poem performed by the trio is on the second page of the Darwish poem pdf file, “On This Earth.” Some lines from the poem read, “We have on this earth what makes life worth living: on this earth, the Lady of Earth, mother of all beginnings and ends. She was called Palestine.”
To understand the context of Darwish’s poems, we need to understand the deep attachment that many Palestinian people feel for their land. While in a restaurant in Ramallah, I saw this handmade sculpture, a “map” of Palestine. A waiter explained to me that it was created by a political prisoner who used to frequent the restaurant. For more on attachment to the land, read the first Darwish poem from “Diary of a Palestinian wound.”

8. I stayed one night with a family in New Askar Refugee Camp; this picture on the wall is of a son who was a long-time political prisoner.
Darwish addresses the common experience of political imprisonment in “The Prison Cell,” on page 3 of your pdf file.
“Over 5,000 Palestinian political prisoners are currently being held in Israeli prisons and are often denied their basic human rights. One of the many rights they have been denied is their right to communicate with their families and receive regular visits.... Family visits are routinely, and often arbitrarily, restricted or cancelled by the Israeli authorities.... When family visits are able to take place, severe restrictions are placed on them by the Israeli Prison Service....”
(Palestinian Prisoners: A Question of Conscience. Eds. John Calhoun & Ranjan Solomon. Geneva: World Council of Churches, 2014.)

9. Here the mom and dad I stayed with are enjoying a rare visit with their son in the Israeli prison (they hadn’t been able to see him or communicate with him for years).

10. Much of my trip introduced me to various aspects of the “ongoing nakba,” which includes home confiscations ... In this picture that I took in the Palestinian Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan, notice the Israeli flag marking an apartment that has been taken over by a Jewish Israeli.

11. I took the previous picture facing in one direction and this picture was taken in the same location facing in a different direction by another member of our group – showing an example of another facet of the ongoing nakba, home demolitions. Thousands of Palestinian homes have been subject to “administrative demolitions”; homes are demolished due to lack of proper building permits…but authorities will not grant the building permits required….
Tom Hier

12. Another feature of the ongoing nakba: Israeli settlements
Another feature of the ongoing nakba: Israeli settlements. This is a view of the Ma’aleh Adummim Settlement from the Mt. of Olives in Jerusalem.

13. Modin Illit Settlement, constructed on destroyed olive groves in the Palestinian village of Bi’lin, where we spent one night.

15. Iyad (sometimes spelled Eyad) Burnat – organizer of weekly nonviolent protests in Bil’in, beginning We stayed with him in Bil’in not long after he received this award at Tufts University. Below is some footage from protests in Bil’in.

16. An image from one of the creative nonviolent protests in Bil’in (using a reference to the film “Avatar”).