Three women, three faiths, one vision
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By JEFFREY HAGE jeff.hage@lee.net
Monday, April 30, 2007 10:17 AM CDT
It’s 8 a.m. and a line is forming at the corner of Wheaton and Coleman streets as students and teachers jockey for position to get their cars past the stop signs and into the parking lot of Chippewa Falls High School.
The wait can take a few minutes, but it’s just one of those minor inconveniences of the morning.
It isn’t as simple for Huda Abu Arqoub and Amal Nassar, both Palestinians and residents of the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
The two women, along with an Israeli woman, spoke to Chi-Hi students this week about their experiences and their unique perspectives as a Jewish Israeli, Christian Palestinian and Muslim Palestinian.
Abu Arqoub, a teacher on the West Bank must pass several Israeli checkpoints to get to her school each morning. Her students must do the same.
And it’s the same for Nassar, a nurse who struggles each day to reach the hospital where she works.
For them, every day is different, dependent on the mood of an Israeli soldier at a checkpoint.
It’s a “daily violation of rights,” Abu Arqoub said.
That’s not the case if you’re an Israeli. Tal Dor can bike, drive or take the public bus. She faces no checkpoints and doesn’t see the cement walls that separate Palestinian and Israeli communities. Her family members have never seen the 27-foot cement wall, either.
In fact, Dor and her fellow Jewish Israelis have been shielded from the reality that there is a conflict between her country and the Palestinians. They have not been taught the true history of the conflict and many seem unaware of what goes on beyond the wall that separate Palestinian and Israeli communities.
As she stood before an auditorium of Chi-Hi students, Dor asked how Chippewa Falls got its name. An unsuspecting student raised her hand and began telling the story of how the Chippewa Indians once occupied our lands and how the Indians played a role in our community history.
Dor then asked where the Indians were now. Another student told a story of how the Chippewa lands were taken by the white settlers, with the Indians being driven from their lands or placed on reservations.
“The Indians were pushed away by white people … that sounds familiar to me,” Dor said.
“I am a ‘white’ person in Palestine,” she said, noting that she joined the army instead of facing the threat of jail when she turned 18.
Dor, like many of the female soldiers, worked in the schools, where she was among five women in uniform in the classroom.
“The children look up to uniforms. They look up to guns,” Dor said.
And the children learned without the right to ask questions about the other side of that 27-foot wall.
Today the 29-year-old Dor urges people in her country to critically examine both its past and its present.
She was born in Haifa. Her parents were Zionist immigrants from South Africa, one of whom came in 1948 to fight to establish the state of Israel.
She is active with Zochrot, an association working to spread awareness in Israel of the history of the Palestinian Nakba (Catastrophe) in 1948 and the present reality Palestinians face.
That reality, Dor says, is a society where the Palestinians are treated like second-class citizens in a country where they have had their land stolen from them.
Abu Arqoub works with Hebron schools to document the unique situation students and teachers face as they endure Israeli military and settler violence. She sees overcoming these daily injustices as a key component to peace-building.
Though Abu Arqoub was born in Jerusalem, Israel denies her Jerusalem residency. She cannot travel freely to the city of her birth or visit relatives there because of Israeli-imposed restrictions. Her family has lost 250 acres of land planted with olive trees and vineyards to Israeli confiscation and settlement construction. She has only visited the land once, in 1988.
Nassar’s family is in a daily struggle to keep ties to its land. Her family has fought continual legal battles to preserve their land, which Israel confiscated in 1991.
Nassar, a Palestinian Christian, is a children’s nurse in Bethlehem. She founded a project that promotes coexistence, peace and nonviolence. Her work is motivated by the belief that Palestinians and Israelis, especially young people, must shape their societies and build a peaceful future based on principles of justice and sharing the land.
One Chi-Hi student asked a question on the minds of many students: Why do the Palestinians stay?
The answer is simple, Nassar said.
“It’s where my land is. I was born in Palestine and grew up there. I want to live on the land where my roots are. I don’t want to be a stranger to my land and I have no desire to live as a refugee.”
Abu Arqoub said her plight is similar to that of the American Indian.
“The land is like our mother. We have a sentimental relationship with it,” she said. “We feel that if you give up your land, you give up your dignity.”
The women passed out a list of websites and encouraged students to research the war and see what they can do, even in the littlest way, to help bring hope to the Palestinian people.
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