How can I even begin to describe what it is like to visit Palestine? There are hardly any words. Seeing the actions of the Zionist Entity on social media, a television screen or in the news is much different than walking the land of Palestine. The flag which we raise from the streets of Dublin to Beijing to New York is here made real, concretized in the spirit of the Palestinian people and the land which they cultivate, on which they build their villages and raise their children, in defiance of Israeli occupation, its mechanisms of control and acts of terror and everyday brutality designed to make life miserable for its 3-million strong indigenous population.

Ramallah

Jerusalem, to Israeli inhabitants, Western tourists on holiday and diaspora Jews on their State-managed Birthright trip, appears as a normal city, orderly streets bustling with merchants and tourist sites and coffee shops. This is a facade, for the region is the epicenter of violent settler-colonial ethnic cleansing, hidden from sight. Bus 218 near Damascus Gate heads for the Qalandia checkpoint, from where entry and exit into Ramallah is strictly regulated by Israel. “This is the cage they built for us, “ tells me an elderly Palestinian man who spots me staring at the apartheid wall, 10 meter tall, half a meter thick, sprawling as far as the eye can see on top of which nests barbed wire, surrounded by military towers, floodlights and loudspeakers. The walls, yellow plated and green plated cars, roads for one and the other, the Israelis and the Palestinians, Jew and non-Jew; human and subhuman; an entire regime built on separating people by their origins. This logic is by no means unique to the Zionist Entity, but here it is accentuated to its extreme, enlarging the erstwhile system of apartheid in South Africa, the British occupation splitting Catholics and Protestants in the North of Ireland, the Villa miserias of Argentina between the rich and the poor, Fortress Europe which casts asylum seekers out to the sea to die, the wall between Mexico and the United States, the camps of Donald Trump imprisoning migrants, segregation of the Roma schoolchildren from their Hungarian counterparts and anti-Traveller laws in Ireland … walls of the past, walls of today and walls of the future which are threatening to be fully materialized, this time dividing the Palestinian underclass from their Jewish rulers.

What unites the segregation of people in these cases is the psychosis of an in-group and an out-group, the fear of being “invaded”, the delirium of being under siege. “It is shocking for you, but this is my everyday life. Here, everyone you see is suffering. It is not an easy life for us, life here is miserable, “ he explains. Caught by the barbed wire nested on the wall – more massive than the one that divided East and West Germany in the 1960s – bottles and stones, on its surface, graffiti; small acts of resistance by the Palestinian population, in the face of Israeli brutality. He offers to guide me through the checkpoint. A short walk, and a turnstile appear; the Israeli military towers blare out stern warnings, and shine their lights on the Palestinian side of the border. The difference is immediately visible. The streets are dirty, overcrowded, overflowing trash bags dot the median strip of the road, a building has collapsed, rainwater harvesting cisterns stand atop residential complexes, smells of chaos … it is poor and destitute, a world away from the Israeli territories. On our way to the city center, we pass clinics and schools protected by the United Nations, fenced off, and a large sign outside reading “firearms prohibited”. “This is no man’s land here. The Israelis only take the garbage every two weeks. We cannot even travel freely. They shoot us if we try to cross [without permission], “ he says. He seems to know everyone here. “I make peace with everyone. That is why I have so many friends here, “ he continues as he waves and greets locals. “No one listens. The world is blind to our suffering, “ he finishes, adding on a hopeful note that “many American Jews are waking up to the reality of occupation, and oppose Israel. Information is key”.

The apartheid wall as seen from Bus 218, travelling between Jerusalem and the Qalandia checkpoint.

In Ramallah, atop a hill, stands the Mohammed Darwish museum, in honor of his memory. A massive fortress, with a tiny museum, a symbolic act, really, which expresses the unbreakable steel spirit of the Palestinian people. The flag which we raise around the world, the flag of Palestine, there stands representing a real nation, no longer in the abstract, but materialized in the subjected Palestinian people themselves. They will never give up. Ever. That much is clear. The Israelis cannot put a stop to the righteous resistance of the Palestinian people no matter how hard they try. Next to the Abdul Nasser mosque, where I stay in a hostel, sounds of prayer fill the street, with tenacity, the Palestinian people unbowed in the face of occupation.

The society is cohesive, and the streets are safe; the door to my hostel is permanently unlocked; but the place is haunted by the looming Israeli........

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