Against the Wall

A day with Hannah Mermelstein, a peace worker in Israel's occupied lands.

by Bruce Schimmel

Just as it's not good to be a doctor's interesting case, it's also bad to be a journalist's unfortunate example. But that's what's become of the Palestinian family that Hannah Mermelstein, a 25-year-old native Philadelphian, wants me to meet. Munira Amer and her family are passively resisting the Israeli occupation, and that makes them prisoners in their own homes, living symbols of Israel's inhumane treatment.

Back in 2002, Munira's family owned a successful greenhouse business. But their buildings were razed to make way for fences that were built as violence escalated. In 2003, the family refused to relinquish their home — and so the fence was built around them. With chain-link and razor wire, they were separated from a nearby Jewish settlement and from unoccupied lands. A battlement, some 150 feet long and 30 feet high, kept them from their village. Made of solid concrete, it was built — so it seemed — out of sheer spite.

These fences are meant to contain terrorists. But Mermelstein and others say that the walls that are spreading across the occupied lands are just another means to terrorize innocent Arabs into abandoning their land. In her work for the International Women's Peace Service (www.iwps.info), Mermelstein reports on Palestinian suffering and documents her own support of their nonviolent protests (www.palestinemagnets.net).

Amer's situation is so cruel — and absurd — that I had to see it myself. And so in defiance of U.S. State Department warnings, I agree to meet Mermelstein in the Arab town of Hares, her home in the occupied West Bank, about 40 minutes due east of Tel Aviv.

Hares is a town of some 2,500, but it's easy to miss. That's because almost no Arab towns here in the occupied lands are marked by road signs — another form of intimidation, says Mermelstein. With so many roads connecting Arab towns rendered impassable, she doesn't bother with a car. For our trip to the fenced-in house, we flag down one car to get to the roadblock, and another to travel beyond. We pass a town where every store is shuttered, which has been made a ghost town, Mermelstein says, by the roadblocks.

"Everyone here knows I'm Jewish," she says. "And I am here because I'm opposed to what is happening in my name as a Jew — and with my money, as an American." Being a woman, even in an Arab village, says Mermelstein, can be an advantage. "A woman can get away with things that men can't. A woman who goes around a soldier is less likely than a man to get beaten, arrested or shot."

Arriving, we chance upon an Israeli TV crew that has also come to report on the family living inside. Amer opens a narrow gate with a key she's been given, as soldiers guarding another passage to the Israeli side watch warily. It's hot inside the concrete house, and she brings out glasses of frothy lemonade. There's an extra cup for her husband, who's now approaching the gate guarded by soldiers.

As Mermelstein translates for me, the two women sit so close to each other that their knees sometimes touch, and occasionally they clasp hands.

People in the nearby Jewish settlement used to buy her plants, I'm told, but now their children throw stones over the razor wire at her on Sabbath. She passes around some well-thumbed snapshots of several sophisticated greenhouses, since destroyed. She says they now live on what they can grow. I ask, why not leave? "Where else would we go?" she answers with a shrug.

What would she say to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, I ask, if he came to see this?

"He wouldn't come here," she responds.

Again I ask what she'd say to Sharon.

"I'd say to him, "Shame on you.'"

I wonder silently what country in the Arab world would allow her story to be told. Outside, the Israeli TV crew is filming a dolly shot of the concrete barricade. A cameraman is crammed into a shopping cart, which is rolled along a part of the barrier where a lush, green landscape dotted with large pink flowers has been painted in what Mermelstein says is an act of nonviolent resistance.

"These people believe in nonviolence," says Mermelstein, "and that's what Israel doesn't like. Using nonviolent tactics, it's harder for Israel to continue the image of Palestinians as violent." As we hop into a car to leave, I look back through a tangle of concertina wire to see Amer's husband, still waiting for the soldiers at the gate to let him come home.