An Israeli in Bil’in   

by JOEL CARILLET

A young Israeli woman experiences life from the other side, and protests.

It is a Friday afternoon in November 2006, and Olga Ginzbourg, a twenty-one-year-old student majoring in economics and sociology at Tel Aviv University, isn't doing homework. Instead, she is visiting the West Bank village of Bil'in, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Palestinians protesting the route of Israel's separation barrier.

Bil'in, site of the longest running demonstration against the barrier in the West Bank, is home to 1,600 Palestinians. Since early 2005, Israeli and international activists have converged here each Friday just after midday prayers, joining forces with village residents opposed to the separation barrier. Today, in 2009, the demonstrations continue. On February 6, for example, two demonstrators were injured and dozens suffered tear gas inhalation. This story, however, is about the day I attended the protest in 2006 and the young woman I met there.

Beginning in the village center-and accompanied by journalists wearing helmets and bullet-proof vests-the demonstrators, led by a tractor, set off on foot for the barrier, about fifteen minutes away. There is no way to know what will happen in the hours ahead-who will be wounded or arrested, how precisely the soldiers will respond. But what is certain is the goal.

The weather this day is unseasonably warm and the sky a delightful blue. But the landscape, dissected by the barrier, is clearly scarred, and thousands of olive trees belonging to Bil'in are visible in the distance but beyond reach.

In some parts of the West Bank, the barrier is a hulking twenty-four-foot-high concrete wall. More often, however, as in Bil'in, it is a three-meter-high electrified fence, augmented by razor wire and electronic sensors. But whatever the form, it separates people from their land, and this is why the demonstrators are here.

The procession has stopped in front of a yellow metal gate built into the barrier. Between the marchers and the gate are extra coils of razor wire and, a few feet beyond the wire, Israeli soldiers stand in full riot gear. The demonstrators are demanding passage to their fields, but nobody here is operating under any illusions. As always, the demonstrators' demands will be rejected. The only question is how heavy-handed that rejection will be.

More than half of the village's land-mostly agricultural fields devoted to olive cultivation-now sits on the "Israeli" side of the barrier. Israel argues that the barrier is necessary for security. But others, including the International Court of Justice and human rights groups like Israel's B'Tselem, criticize its illegal placement. Rather than follow the Green Line, the internationally recognized boundary between Israel and the West Bank, the barrier often juts deep into Palestinian territory. "In setting the barrier's route," B'Tselem writes, "Israeli officials almost totally ignored the severe violations of Palestinian human rights. The route was based on extraneous considerations completely unrelated to the security of Israeli citizens." 

To the Palestinians whose land has been lost due to this illegal routing, the barrier is not about security; it is about an occupying power taking the fields upon which their communities depend. It is about oppression.

Enter Olga Ginzbourg. In the course of the next two hours-in which demonstrators will attempt to pull back the razor wire, and soldiers will respond with stun grenades and batons-one young woman will stand out.

In part, it was her light brown hair in a sea of dark hair and helmets that caught this writer's attention. But what most drew me to her was the sincerity written upon her face, both as she interacted with the villagers and as she engaged the soldiers.

I had intended to interview Olga in Bil'in, but during the clashes that followed the demonstration-even if the demonstration ends without much violence, a clash between soldiers and stone-throwing Palestinians inevitably erupts on the village outskirts-Olga and I were separated. But with the help of both Palestinians and Israelis, three weeks later I was able to track her down in Tel Aviv, where we met for an interview.

Born in the Ukrainian port city of Odessa, Olga immigrated to Israel with her family in 1990, when she was five years old. She was young when she left Ukraine, but not so young that she hadn't already encountered prejudice. "In kindergarten in Odessa, some kids called me a ‘stinking Jew,'" she said. "Anti-Semitism was strong."

Olga is a member of Israel's 1 million-strong Russian immigrant community. The political base for many of the country's far-right politicians, it includes among its number Israel's former Deputy Prime Minister, Avigdor Lieberman, who in November 2006 called for the execution of any Arab Knesset member who met with representatives of the Hamas-led Palestinian government. Lieberman is well known for his hard-line politics, but Russians in general have a bad reputation among Palestinians. It isn't uncommon, for example, to hear a Palestinian say that Russian immigrants serving in the IDF or Border Police are more aggressive than their peers.

There are, of course, exceptions to every stereotype, and Olga is certainly one. Until 2006, she was like many Israelis: impatient with criticism of her country, and quick to defend its policies. And like many Israelis, she had reason to be angry with Palestinians. In 2001, at a Tel Aviv hangout popular among Russian youth known as the Dolphinarium, twenty-one people were killed when a Palestinian stood at the entrance to the club and blew himself up. Most of the dead were teenagers, and two were people Olga knew.

But while studying in Spain in the spring of 2006, Olga met people who challenged her views of the conflict. They talked about what happened in 1948 and what was happening even now in the Occupied Territories. While not convinced of their perspective, she returned to Israel mulling over the challenges they had presented to her. When later in the year she saw a poster in Tel Aviv announcing a large demonstration to be held in a troubled Palestinian village called Bil'in, she decided it was time to go see the situation for herself.

In October 2006, for the first time in her life, Olga would visit the occupied West Bank. The experience would transform her.

 

"I was so shocked," Olga told me of that October day. "The soldiers were so violent. When a citizen who lives in a democracy comes and sees what is happening, he is shocked. The police and soldiers just don't see what they are doing." We were talking now in a swanky restaurant in Tel Aviv. The atmosphere of the establishment-nice clothes, flirting couples, peace-offered a stark contrast to Bil'in.

"People don't want to know. Ignorance is bliss," Olga said as a waitress brought our drinks. "If people looked at all the information, they wouldn't stand by. I don't know ... this is what I believe." Olga picked up her glass, taking a sip before adding, "Palestinians ask for far less than Israelis do." Her gaze then shifted from me to the glass. "I want a strawberry martini; they want less."

Olga's experience in Bil'in led her to embrace what her friends in Spain had told her: the idea that Israel's military occupation is often brutal and self-serving. In Bil'in, she said, "I saw things as they are, heard the history of Bil'in from the activists and from the people of Bil'in, saw the way the village people were treated by the military. My eyes were opened to a very unpleasant reality of my country." After this initial visit to the West Bank, she used the internet to learn more about life in the Occupied Territories. "What I found did not get any easier to digest," she said. "It got worse."

Remembering the pained look on Olga's face in Bil'in as she pleaded with soldiers, I asked what she had told them. "I was not telling the soldiers to go home," she said, "because they can't. I was merely asking them to not shoot at kids, to know what they are doing by guarding a barrier that keeps people from their own fields. The soldiers have to build a reason for why they are there. Sometimes they tell me: ‘We're here to defend you. You can protest because of us. Because of this wall you have fewer terror attacks. This is for your protection.' I tell them I love Israel as much as they do, but use your mind."

Like most Jewish children, Olga explained, she was raised to believe that "if you put a Palestinian and Israeli child together, the Israeli will want peace, but the Palestinian will want to kill the Jew." But in Bil'in that stereotype quickly crumbled, unable to withstand the weight of actual encounter. After the demonstration, she was invited to the home of a villager who also had been protesting. The man-who during the week worked as a taxi driver in Ramallah-was proud of his seventeen-year-old daughter, who studied English, and he wanted Olga to meet her. At the home Olga was touched by the family's hospitality, and the next time she came to the village she in turn brought a gift of her own. In addition to her onion-which many protestors carry to cut the sting of tear gas-Olga carried an English-language copy of Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities. It was for the driver's daughter.

When asked about her own parents, particularly about what they think of their only daughter's new interest in the lives of Palestinians, Olga said they are terrified for her. "You could lose your life for nothing," her dad says. But Olga counters, "How can I not do something when I am privileged, when Palestine is only a few kilometers from my house?"

It is impossible to stand by, she says, once you've seen the human face of the men, women, and children who suffer because of your country's policies. "If I can't change something-even the smallest thing-it's not worth living."

Olga and I talked about other issues during our two hours together. She criticized the United States for what she called its blind support of Israel. She lamented that so few Israelis know even the basic details of what happened to Palestinians in 1948. She also talked about the Holocaust book that Israeli students are required to read in high school, arguing that the way the subject is taught leads young people to think that Jewish suffering is all that matters. "They poison you with this," she said.

For all of her criticism, though, she also made clear to me what she had explained to the soldiers in Bil'in. "I love my country," she said. "And if Israel didn't exist, I believe the Holocaust would repeat itself."

Years ago Robert F. Kennedy said: "It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope."

In listening to Olga-a woman beautifully able to both love and criticize, able to venture across a political divide to see the other side-I sensed anew that the way the world is, is not the way the world has to be. Even more, I saw a ripple of hope.

 

Postscript, February 2009

Olga finished her degree at Tel Aviv University and now works for a high-tech company in Israel, where, she says, she is making good money and saving for a long trip abroad, perhaps to Tibet. "I must say that I am in a quite difficult spot right now in life," she says. "The [Gaza] war brought so much desperation and grief, I haven't even got the words to describe it-the way that we take others' lives, as if they carry no value, as if I who live inside the borders of country X am so different from those in country Y. Don't we all want fair lives, to make a living, to see our children grow?"

Olga looks back at the time of this article, at the very beginning of her life as an activist, as an easier time for her than she is experiencing now. She explains that she can no longer say she loves her country as easily as she did in 2006. Her experiences have left her more radicalized and despairing, and she half jokes about "joining a monastery and quitting this life."

But in the end, she insists, she is committed to keeping on the path she began then, trying to change the consciousness of her own people. She says, "I have opened my eyes to this new and not-so-shining world, and I can't go back."

 

Joel Carillet is a Tennessee-based writer and photographer.  His recent book is 30 Reasons to Travel: Photographs and Reflections from Southeast Asia.  He can be found at www.joelcarillet.com.