Earlier this summer I took part in the 2022 International Volunteer Solidarity Summer Camp hosted by the Lajee Center. Lajee is a grassroots community center in Aida Camp run by and for refugees near Bethlehem, in the Occupied West Bank, Palestine.
As well as bearing witness to extreme and unrelenting violence inflicted by the soldiers, “settlers” and structures of the Occupation, I learnt a lot about political traditions, resistance cultures, survival, will and endurance from Palestinians who shared with a level of trust and generosity I can only hope to try and be worthy of.
Over the next few months I'll be writing through it to selfishly help me unspool and organise many loose threads as well as a tiny way to begin to start making good on a promise I made to new friends.
I was part of a group of people from around the world, aged 21-71, with a commitment to Palestine and a desire to make connections there. Our time was split between work at the centre, meetings, visits, walking tours, lectures, films screenings, hanging out and making friends. We met first, second and third generation of refugees and internally displaced people of the West Bank, from Hebron to Jenin, Ramallah to Nablus and Bethlehem, where we were with families, community workers, volunteers, former political prisoners, leaders, writers, teachers, farmers, lawyers, childrens’ advocates, and many kids who shepherded us through debke lessons, Arabic classes, mural painting also putting us to work on various physical tasks around the center.
People shared testimony of a brutality so horrific it would be almost unbelievable were its marks not visible everywhere, had we not, more than once, seen it happening. “Evidence” does not need to be sought out in this place, instead it hounds you, taunting.
More than voluntary work this was a deep, demanding practice-led political education of such rigour and generosity that I still can’t quite believe how lucky I was to take part, but was also a chance to make lasting relationships based on mutuality, solidarity, friendship and care. As recent news shows us, love is a strategic threat to occupation.
Okay love you thank you much more to follow.
~ BB
PS. I started writing trying not to assume too much knowledge, but to keep it digestible couldn’t contextualise everything. I am one eyewitness, not a journalist lol, so providing sources for everything is not necessarily possible nor sensible, but I’ll link out wherever further info is online. I’ll use some pseudonyms where needed out of respect and safety. Hmu for questions discussion and of course corrections. Respect to the eyes, ears and insights of my fellow international volunteers, thanks to Claire for help with the fastidious note-taking.
Aida is one of 19 refugee camps that were established after 750,000 indigenous Palestinians were forced from their homes and land or massacred by Zionist militias in 1948 at the start of the Nakba, or catastrophe. Established in 1950, Aida is home to around 5,500 refugee Palestinians. What began with tents leased by the UN from Jordan under the expectation of temporary shelter is now a maze of semi-improvised concrete structures rising higher and higher to hold three generations of displaced families, still crammed into the 0.07km sq km, forbidden from expanding despite desperate need and denied adequate access to basic utilities. From their roofs, you can see illegal Israeli colonies being built and expanded on land where many of these refugees and other had villages and farms.
Refugees here are surveilled constantly, terrorised by almost daily invasions of jeeps and soldiers, their streets a training ground for new recruits to the Israeli Defence (or; accurately; Occupation) Force. The IOF routinely test chemical weapons including tear gas and skunk water, as well as sound bombs, rubber bullets, raiding homes, arresting boys sleeping in their beds as well as often using live ammunition to wound, disable or often worse. Aida is surrounded by the apartheid wall and four military watchtowers. I saw soldiers kidnap, arrest children, and shoot teargas at them more than once, and these incidents have only gotten worse since a report found Aida to be the most teargassed place in the world.
Importantly - a few hours with anyone living here makes it abundantly obvious that this place is also miraculous wellspring of a clear-eyed resistance and steadfastness, and that the Lajee is its beating heart.
Lajee means refugee, and the Center was set up and is run by and for this community in 2000. Today it sits in a building directly facing the apartheid wall, metres from the pale blue gates to the military base bearing the slogan ‘the most moral army in the world.’ Lajee houses a multitude of self-initiated programmes and projects that develop social awareness, deepen education and foster in young people the critical skills to help them to take on an active role in society through a framework of struggle rooted in justice for all Palestinians. Lajee also runs a kindergarten, sports and leisure facilities, and a holistic community health worker programme. These addresses the dire health consequences of occupation in the total absence of the assistance that the UN is supposed to be mandated to provide to refugees through the toothless, largely defunded UNRWA agency. Against a backdrop of an ever more brutal occupation with no political settlement in sight, an impotent and corrupt internal authority that neglects and rejects refugees, zero sanctions for the rogue occupying force and constant betrayal from an international community that is content to trumpet the universality of rights and protections for everyone except Palestinians, the stakes for a place like Lajee to succeed in providing light, joy, hope and crucial services couldn’t be much higher. The people maintain their dignity collectively through cooperation, creativity and doing it themselves.
I first made the promise under my breath walking amongst Martyrs' graveyard in Jenin, instead of crying useless tears in front of mothers, massacre survivors whose pain had long ago turned to steel inside of them. I made it up against that cemetery’s adjoining wall, under the tree where Shireen Abu Akleh had fallen to her knees one hundred days before. I picked up a carob pod from the stony ground as something to hold the memory of this place and shook it.
After that day, the promise turned into a private mantra, the mental repetition of which, usually while on a minibus or under a tree, became somewhere to quietly deposit large and unwieldy feelings in an effort to stay useful and open.
I made it with my fists clenched under the table in the children’s library when Asha showed us video, how the bullets made his limp body bounce, about the Cemetery of Numbers, how she felt lucky compared to the mothers of other martyrs because, after years of bureaucratic struggle they had at least confirmed her boy was not ‘in the fridge’ any more, how if she was ever to be permitted to visit that cemetery to somehow locate the shallow grave he had been tossed into, decay would still rob her of everything but a permanent purgatorial grief, the special punishment for mothers for bearing children that resist.
I made it to the rocks in Masafer Yatta, the South Hebron Hills, where “settler” violence in these areas now designated Firing Ranges is so sadistic and relentless that some villagers live in caves. We look past the rebar carcass of a destroyed Masjid and see water tanks on the roofs of concrete huts full of bullet holes. Our friend points out the gnarled skeleton of a small pylon, explaining how every time he finally gets the correct paperwork signed off to get a tiny bit of electricity up to these hills, soldiers drive over them.
I promise the olive tree under my back when we see bombs headed for Gaza drop over the horizon, drones powered by British-made engines streaking the cloudless sky.
I make it in the alleyways of Aida as the tiny ones who run these streets held onto my arms to trace moles and tattoos, holding out theirs to show me tiny M16s scrawled in biro, demanding more, and again when she demonstrated how a kuffiyeh bigger than her body can, if folded properly, protect both eyes and throat from the gas.
I make it in my head with Aida’s Gen-Z showing off intricate debke steps like they're tiktok dances, alive to their struggle, their lineage in resistance and the place of culture inside that, already ready as leaders-in-waiting of their community using knowledge, truth, self-sufficiency and sumud to survive in struggle, up against the wall every single day. I commit to nothing more that trying to be a useful echo for them.
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The promise, when implied and when said outright, was a variation of this:
“You have been here now. You have met us. Go back to where you live and tell the truth. Talk about what you have seen. Tell them what is happening. Go back and tell the truth about Palestine."
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