When Lily discovered there were a few spaces left for an eight-day tour of the West Bank in Palestine, she made a quick decision to join the group. She didn’t know what to expect and decided to delete all her social media posts before going, thinking that the fundraiser she had set up for Palestine a few years ago might cause her problems at the airport in Israel.
She admits that she was scared when she set off from London in November 2022 just six months after the well known Al Jazeera journalist, Shireen Abu Aqla was shot in the head by a live bullet during an Israeli military raid on Jenin; a refugee camp in the West Bank. But on her arrival at the airport and when crossing checkpoints throughout the trip it became clear that being a white British passport holder put her at an advantage.
“I felt really scared before going away, I didn’t know what I was getting myself into but I wanted to learn more. There were times when I felt uncomfortable going through checkpoints but I saw myself passing through checkpoints easily but the Arab and Palestinian women were hassled,” explained Lily, who lives in St Werburghs.
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They had been briefed at Tel Aviv airport that they might get stopped and questioned by Israeli airport security and advised not to leave until everyone in the group had made it through. Lily was waved through immediately but then had to wait for five hours while the Muslim women in her group were questioned and searched before being cleared for entry into Israel. Lily encountered a similar theme throughout the trip, with Israeli soldiers allowing her to pass easily through checkpoints in the West Bank, while Palestinians and even British women in her group who were of Arab heritage or identifiable as Muslim women were subject to more robust checks by soldiers.
While Lily felt uncomfortable at times going through checkpoints during her trip to the West Bank, for the Palestinians, military checkpoints are part of their daily life. Lily organised a trip for three Palestinian women to come to Bristol, with the support of CADFA, a charity which promotes human rights through organising exchanges between people in the UK and Palestine.
The women are currently touring the UK and talking to people about their life in the West Bank and their experience of life under military occupation. Last week they were in Bristol and gave a talk at the Palestine Museum and the Pickle Factory in Easton.
Shadi, a retired school teacher who now lives in Abu Dis who spoke at the meeting in Easton about how she has to pass through a military checkpoint to return to her own village, Beit Iksa. There are around 700 checkpoints in the West Bank and getting past them can be difficult, with Palestinians sometimes held up for hours.
Shadi said: “Many women give birth at the checkpoint while they wait for an ambulance. Many patients die at the checkpoint before an ambulance arrives.
“Most students come from outside the village and sometimes they are prevented from entering so they can’t go to school or university that day. They do this to try and force people from leaving their houses.”
Another woman, Naheel, who visited Bristol last week spoke about how she was forced to leave her home in Jerusalem with her two children who she now lives with in one room. She said: “I was obliged to leave my house near Jerusalem that’s inside the wall (Kufarafa). We now spend three to four hours a day crossing the checkpoint.
“I live in one room with my two kids. My children always ask me, ‘why did we leave?’ and I tell them that we had to move to protect our house in Jerusalem, sometimes I find it hard to tell people that story because others don’t have any other place to go.
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“The Israeli government plan from 2020 was to make East Jerusalem 80 per cent Israeli, we can’t build or have our own houses or land. Since our grandparents' generation we have been forced to leave our homes.”
Afnan, who also gave a presentation in Bristol, discussed what life is like for women living in the West Bank and spoke about her sister being attacked by a settler while on her way home from university. Lily said that when she visited the West Bank and travelled around the various Palestinian villages she discovered that everyone had their own story to tell of how their lives had been impacted by the occupation.
What was shocking for Lily and the other women who had come on the trip was how Israeli state violence had become a normal part of daily life. Lily said: “There was a day where we were out and one of the women from our group stayed home. She wasn’t advised to but she did and there were a load of tear gas bombs in Abu Dis that day.
“Apparently that’s just normal. We were staying with an 80-year-old woman, and the woman from our group who stayed behind was really upset about it after seeing an 80-year-old choking on tear gas in her own home.
“It’s a regular occurrence and they drink milk and eat onions to relieve the symptoms. It has become normalised.
“The soldiers are only 17 or 18 - young people with no real sense of the world who are given machine guns and basically told [Palestinians] are the enemy, do what you want. Palestinians aren’t looking for sympathy, they want solidarity. It’s oppression and nobody should have to live like that."
In terms of the value of the exchange organised by CADFA, Lily added: “Where the worlds ignore them by joining a trip like that you are acknowledging that Palestinians and Palestine exists."
To find out more about the work CADFA does or to sponsor a trip, you can get in touch via its website here.
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