A rumor of war

Here in Seattle, after a long and dreary winter, it is an utterly perfect, sunny spring Thursday. It is April, and I should be out in the garden or down by the lake, something to soak up the idyllic glory of Seattle's fleeting springtime.

Instead, I am on the phone talking with former Seattle resident (and Seattle Weekly editorial assistant) Kristen Schurr. Outside my window, kids are playing. Outside Kristen's, it is a war zone, and children are shot at every day.

It is life in a Palestinian refugee camp. Hers happens to be Al-Azzeh, outside Bethlehem. It's been a bad week.

"The first night I was here, just crossing the alley in front of the apartment, I was shot at," she says matter-of-factly. "They showed me how to duck and run." She's used her new skills regularly in the past few days. "Just today, I went into a little shop inside of camp; we got shot at."

During our four conversations last week, Schurr practiced the maneuver, pausing during a sentence as she scurried across some alley. There's a sniper tower in the adjacent Israeli settlement, and the Israeli army has taken over all of Bethlehem's tallest buildings. At times, as with my other conversations with people in the area, I could hear the gunshots and 18 mm shells over the phone.

Is she brave? Reckless? Stupid? Why on earth would someone choose to go into such a place? Especially now? Is it a martyr complex? An all-time bad vacation story for the grandkids?

SCHURR, 33, NOW lives in New York. She is working for her doctorate at the New School in Manhattan—specifically studying the Middle East. It's the culmination of years of activist interest in the Palestinian tragedy, she says: "The 1987 intifada politicized me in the first place. I started reading about it in high school. That's what I've studied, and now I'm working on my Ph.D." Why did this, of all the world's issues, stand out to her, even in high school? "I dunno," she says, "just the absolute injustice of it, the complete humiliation by the Israelis . . . sanctioned and paid for by the U.S.; it's just one of the world's great injustices. There's just no two ways about it. It's so cut-and-dry."

With several people from Western Washington, she's in Palestine for a few weeks as one of a couple hundred delegates for the current tour of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM). It's the third such tour for the ISM, recently organized by the Center for Rapproachment, a Palestinian nongovernmental organization (NGO) based in Bethlehem. Along with other "internationals" from Europe, Asia, and North America, the activists' professed intent is to be foreign, nonviolent witnesses to the occupation—human cameras doing the work U.S. media mostly isn't, who could show their solidarity through their presence, through protests, through house rebuildings and olive tree plantings, and then return home to tell their stories and nurture their new friendships.

This particular delegation knew it was walking into a tense situation. One cannot fly into Palestine; the only airport—in Gaza—has been bombed out by Israel. To get to Bethlehem, and Al-Azzeh, Schurr says, "I had to fly into Israel and then sneak past a checkpoint." She's talking on the Israeli cell phone she rented at the airport; Palestine doesn't have those, either.

And now, cities like Bethlehem have almost nothing—their infrastructure and many of their buildings destroyed. Shortly after Schurr's arrival, a Palestinian suicide bomber killed 26 Israelis at a Passover seder, and things got a lot worse. The internationals' desire to agitate for peace became an opportunity to become human shields as war erupted in front of them on the streets of cities that already have been under military occupation for 35 years.

"Palestinians are forced to live in unimaginable conditions," Schurr says. "Just to cross the street, they have to duck and run—that's life here. There are no schools here, people aren't able to work, we have two or three days' worth of food left inside the camp. Israel has been continually attacking Palestinians and putting them in a humiliating position where they're supposed to beg for the most basic human rights.

"This camp is made of stone buildings with narrow alleyways. There's no room to build out, so they build up, generations of families living on top of one another. The Israeli military comes in sometimes and rounds up men and disappears them. Sometimes some of them come home, sometimes not." Last Saturday, Schurr accompanied a Bethlehem man who had been playing with his children in his yard; Israeli troops came in, arrested him, and, she says, beat him and denied him his medication while he was in jail. When he was released several miles from his home, Schurr went to walk back with him so that he wouldn't be shot on the way if manatajawol, or curfew, were suddenly declared. It is one of the first Arabic words the internationals learn.

"It's not safe to sleep at night, so we sleep in the early light hours," Schurr explains. "We get shot at in the night and have to run from one room to another. With the U.S. weapons, they have night vision, they have access to weapons that can. . . . I don't know how to say it.