Returning from Palestine

It does not escape me that being a Jewish American political candidate from a largely pro-Israel congressional district visiting occupied Palestine over Christmas was not a particularly common move. It was also the first international flight I had ever taken, which was intimidating. I don’t like sitting still.

There was a lot of suffering I witnessed, but also resilience and joy. Traumatized people have no choice but to find these things where we can. It’s how we survive.

As a school shooting survivor, I learned that the feeling I had hiding under a desk for hours is something the Palestinians feel for the entirety of their lives. The impending sense of doom, the idea that the next person they see can be someone with an assault rifle prepared to kill them, that is all they know. And America pays for it.

Upon returning home, I had privately expressed that if it weren’t for the campaign, I would’ve locked myself in my apartment for a week and just cried. My confidant (who’s spent a lot of time in the West Bank and has been there and back multiple times) and my therapist said the same thing. Crying for my new friends’ suffering will not do anything to stop it. And all I want to do is whatever I possibly can to help stop it. This is not to say I should repress my emotions, but the best thing I can do with the pain is use it as motivation to go out and fight for these people as hard as humanly possible. That’s what I can do about this. I am uniquely positioned socially and politically to make a meaningful impact here. I recognize that this is true. But I’m only human.

Unless something dramatic changes, there will be comprehensive legislation that I have developed with experts on the matter introduced very shortly in Congress. It’s become clear to me that I am significantly better at being in Congress than I am at running for Congress.

After a week of witnessing a human rights atrocity, I landed at JFK and I broke down. I don’t do that very often. The shooting at my high school in Parkland, Florida led me to travel around the country meeting victims of gun violence and hearing their heartbreaking stories for the past eight years. Since my young adulthood began, I’ve felt like I cried every tear out of my body in 2018. Crying sessions have been few and far between ever since, no matter how sad I’ve gotten. And I’ve gotten very sad. I didn’t cry while I was in Palestine, but I experienced a lot of things that would’ve made a normal person break in an instant. My heart and my spirit ached, but my body couldn’t produce the tears. That’s just not how it operates anymore. But when I landed, that’s when it hit.

The hard part of returning from Palestine wasn’t thinking about the horrific violence that tormented the people I had met for their entire lives. I’ve connected with countless human beings whose lives have been forever changed by tragedy. It’s no less heartbreaking, but I’ve had no choice but to get used to it. The hard part of returning was knowing that I had to leave the friends who I’d met there behind. And with the way the Israeli government has recently changed its laws to ban critics of their radical extremism, I will most likely never see them again. I went to hell and the people there were endlessly kind and generous, and I got out but they had to stay. There is no other option for them.

My friend Jasper Nathaniel (subscribe to see his phenomenal work here), a brilliant journalist who has put his life on the line to do right by his fellow human being and almost lost it in the process, helped me deal with the overwhelming guilt and horror that I was feeling as I tried to adjust back to my regular life. Or, however regular life can be when you’re running for United States Congress in a highly contested, high profile, and extremely crowded primary. A week might not sound like a long time, but in Palestine, it was a very long time. And it is a personal tragedy that I didn’t get to stay there longer.

Jasper arranged the trip. He connected me with the Palestinians who showed me their land. Many West Bank trips that westerners will go on are arranged by liberal zionist organizations operating out of the State of Israel. Well-intentioned as they may seem, you will only get the real story of this matter from Palestinians who actually face the consequences of violent occupation every single moment of their lives. It was important to us that this trip was guided by the Palestinian people.

In only a week, I went from refugee camps the IDF had destroyed in population centers to small villages surrounded on all sides by Israeli settlements. I saw apartheid checkpoints where Palestinians get turned away from their homes by soldiers who provided them with nothing resembling a reason. I walked with the Mayor of Beit Sahur in Bethlehem at the front of a peace march to call for an end to the genocide in Gaza on Christmas. I played basketball and socc- uh, football with adorable children. I saw an unbelievably wide range of human experiences in a very short amount of time, but there were two glaring things that the many different Palestinians I met had in common:

1. They were extremely generous.

2. They are living under violent occupation.

Oh, and I suppose there’s a third one, albeit much less important. Most of them drink coffee all day and well-past midnight, and they put sesame seeds (to which I am severely allergic) on everything. Israeli settlers put me at risk of serious danger, but the only times the Palestinians made me feel unsafe in their homeland was during meals. Sesame can pop up in even the most unexpected places. It isn’t just West Asia (which I learned is what you’re supposed to call the “Middle East”)- sesame seeds show up in most cuisines. It just happens to be that Palestinians especially bear an affinity for them. Sesame is the hell of my life.

Over the next few weeks, I will be writing extensively about my experiences. The situation in the West Bank is too complicated to explain in one or even three pieces, so I’ll probably be writing five or more. What the State of Israel is doing there is far more complex than the genocide in Gaza. They are breaking Gaza’s neck, but slowly choking the West Bank out using much more meticulous tactics. Gaza bears virtually zero significance to the Zionist movement. The West Bank is where the money is at. It’s the ancient kingdom of Judea and Samaria or however you spell it.

Make no mistake: no matter how much longer the State of Israel will take in the West Bank, they have the same exact intentions as they do for the Gazans. Ethnic cleansing.

You would not believe what I saw. Well, you most likely will, but that won’t make it any less nightmarish and disturbing.

Life under occupation is a horror, and to anyone who supports what the State of Israel is doing, I truly believe in my heart that if you saw what I did from the perspective of the human beings being affected, your worldview would change. It is never too late to take the side of human rights. Don’t be afraid and think you have no choice but to double down.

I will be writing about my first day in Palestine (and my first day ever overseas) very soon. Thank you.