We are a unique community. We are able to live, survive and recover. To develop and be educated by the past….
We come from different localities but as Palestinians we share many of the same concerns: violence from settlers, checkpoints, restriction on trade with Jerusalem, land-confiscations, demolitions, settlers taking our land. Still, we manage to make small but important changes in our communities. Now we at least understand our own needs and priorities – and we act on some of them.
Sometimes it takes a while to understand a photo. To get an idea of why you shot it in the first place. When I shot this photo, I had just stepped out of a conversation with a group of women in the small Bedouin village of Birein in the Palestinian West Bank. The women were talking about the many changes they are trying to make in the village and in their own families. The enthusiasm and optimism they demonstrated was astonishing. Astonishing not least in the face of the daily grind they live - dictated as it is by both the Israeli occupation and some of their own traditions and norms. They live under the constant threat of new demolitions, violence, heavy restrictions on movement, and the unemployment, poverty, and disillusionment following from that. The women also explained how they must constantly move within and around the obstacles presented by male-dominated structures within their own society and families.
Months later, editing the photo, it was not that difficult to figure out why, in that very moment, I took it. A car with all four wheels stuck in the mud... a symbol of what the women and men who try to achieve social and economic change are up against... and at the same time a symbol of how far the so-called Oslo Accords (and associated political processes) between Palestinians and Israelis have moved since I first visited Gaza and the West Bank some 30 years ago.
Despite this ever-present sense of political limbo - and outright worsening of the situation since the early 1990's - I'm still blown off my feet when confronted with the energy and enthusiasm of citizens and activists struggling, day-in and day-out, to achieve small but tangible concrete changes in their own families, neighbourhoods, and villages throughout the West Bank and in Gaza.
A few basics about this story. It builds on photos and conversations with community activists in a number of villages and neighbourhoods in the Palestinian West Bank and Gaza. They all engage in activities aimed at improving collective and individual wellbeing in their respective communities. To do that, they use an approach known as "supporting community led crisis response" (sclr). In contrast to most traditional aid, this way of working gives individuals and groups direct control of how aid is carried out in their local area. No more - "we help you - you sit back and be helped". Instead, volunteer groups receive a cash grant along with relevant training and they then use the grant and their own resources to realise activities agreed as collective priorities by the entire community. In Palestine activities span a very wide range - all according to local priorities and choices: Rehabilitating mother and child clinics, protect agricultural land from being seized by Israeli settler, improve the chances for girls to continue their education, increase access to clean water or using the grant to advocate for electricity to an entire neighbourhood or village.
Quotes, photos and other impressions were gathered during several visits between 2016 and 2022. Quotes are not attributed to individuals as that could be problematic for some of the individuals in question. Also quotes are not attributable to the individuals in the accompanying photos. Exceptions to this are explicitly stated. Permission to photograph, take notes and subsequently publish from our encounters have been confirmed by the individuals involved. Both Arabic and English versions of this story will be available online.
Lastly, a wee warning. Observer, participant, documentarist, instigator... Not so sure if I can tell the difference anymore. All I can promise is to use words and photos to convey a story that is loyal to what I have seen and heard.
What I do know, though, is that I owe a great many thanks to all the people, community groups, and organisations who so generously and patiently have hosted me during my visits.
©nils carstensen and Local2GlobalProtection, November 2022,
In March 2022, 38 people from villages and neighbourhoods in the West Bank and Northwest Jerusalem met to share their experiences as members of 18 different Protection Groups. Within minutes, participants were engaged in intense discussions, exchanging experience on how to collectively manage small cash grants, decide together in their communities on activities, and manage the relationship with both the NGOs involved and local authorities. What stood out, as the day drew to a close and it became time for tea, coffee, snacks, and small talk, was how working together, men, women, youth, had started challenging and changing relationships between men and women in their communities and families - as well as changing the dynamics between ordinary citizens, local authorities and NGOs working in the area.
We never used to leave the house… but now we meet in the village. We go outside the village to buy items for the project. We meet with people from other communities. It is really different!
By now, we have carried out 45 projects worth more than USD 150,000. The contributions to this [from NGOs] has been small – the rest we have managed to raise ourselves.
Before no NGOs worked in our village – now 12 NGOs are working with us....
The most important thing I learned was how important it is to be transparent and honest. Before I did not even know what an invoice is! Now, I can negotiate with traders and manage projects in the community.
As a Protection Group we managed to make a road connecting three communities by raising, on our own, USD 30,000 for that work in order to top up the community grants from the NGO. We did it!
Before I never left the village without being accompanied. Now I, and we as women, move on our own: we do tenders, talk to traders, and we know what and how to ask.
At one point my husband said to me: It’s either me or the Protection Group! But I stayed in the group…. and my husband is still here…
Visiting Gaza is always a bit touch and go because of all the restrictions in place controlling movement in and out. And taking photos in Gaza, at least as an outsider, is equally challenging, and at times best left untried. But, maybe having to make do with just a few discreet shots from inside hotels, restaurants, and meetings rooms, should just serve as a healthy reminder of the two million people who live in Gaza, and who may never get a chance to come and see how you or I live.
At a gathering of community activists and NGO staff in Gaza, a discussion evolves about why community led ways of working seem to be gaining popularity - first and foremost with the communities and activists involved but also with NGO staff.
Maybe it's because this way of working (sclr) feels very much like an extension and revival of traditional Palestinian community savings and loans systems. It is so close to what we often call sumud in Arabic – steadfastness, resilience, resistance…
This way of working taps naturally into being human beings – it just feels right.
Our Protection Group has 15 members, and we have all been nominated and elected by the wider community. The members are from across the area. I joined the group from the beginning in 2019. We have worked on drinking water and we have organised cleaning the streets of garbage.
Visiting Beit Hanoun, north of Gaza City, we meet 10 members of local Protection Group on a leafy patio amidst a newly planted orchard. While sipping coffee and tea, they tell us how, some years back, the Israelis uprooted all the old fruit trees on their land. All this to construct the walls and checkpoints now named after Beit Hanoun - or Erez as Israel prefers to call it - which controls movement between Gaza and Israel.
As we leave Beit Hanoun later that morning, we find ourselves threading carefully through meticulously planted rows of apricot seedlings, trying not to trample any single one of them.
In 2021 we topped up the NGO grant, so we could do the solar electricity for streetlights. We contributed with USD 1,900 ourselves to complete the work.
Without the Protection Group and the cash grant, the “Baladia” (municipality) and the electricity company would not have done anything. A lot of advocacy and lobby and even talking directly with the authorities was needed to make this happen.
Yes – even if it is true that traditionally we could not meet between men and woman - now with the Protection Group that has changed. This has provided us with the possibility to meet, discuss and plan together.
Our recent peer learning event was both useful and fun. For instance, we created close connections with the members of other Protection Groups and exchanged tips on how to do the best and cheapest procurement by going directly to the mother company rather than the often more expensive smaller retailers. But the fun part of the event was equally important as a motivation to continue and some sort of compensation for all our voluntary work.
As we conclude our visit to a village in southern Gaza, small pieces of “kishik” are offered around. Kishik is a local delicacy, you mix sheep's milk with flour, yogurt, salt, chilli and shabt (dill). You leave it in a big jar in a cool place for about 14 days, making sure to stir it a bit every day. Then you leave it in the sun to dry until it becomes firm, and it is ready to be enjoyed.
In most parts of the world, when you are at the beach, you find yourself staring across a seemingly endless sea. Your gaze instinctively travels to that blurred line on the horizon where you cannot tell exactly what is sky and what is sea. For many of us, there is something comforting about this seemingly endless, hazy view. In Gaza, the sense of endlessness - with its associations of freedom - is dampened by the "buffer zone" imposed and upheld by the Israeli navy which does not hold back from firing directly at any vessel they deem in violation of the ever-changing security zone. On calm nights this "floating wall" is made even more visible by Gaza's fishing boats using strong lights to attract sardines and other fish. Competing for the best catch, the fishing boats push as close as possible to the Israeli "buffer zone" and in doing so render this restrictive maritime border as brightly lit as a busy highway. If you can afford it though, freshly caught fish is there to be enjoyed in Gaza's seaside restaurants - challenging the "war, violence and destruction" imagery, which otherwise has become so synonymous with Gaza.
Back on the West Bank different but essentially similar "security measures" - or “walls” - are equally obvious and omni-present.
Beit Mirzeim is beautifully situated across the sloping South Hebron Hills. One early spring afternoon, members of the Protection Group take us on a walk through their village. Soon we come across a couple of seemingly abandoned homes. Peeping through a couple of windows confirms that no one lives here anymore.
Following an elderly woman, we walk further down the road and towards the periphery of the village. Taking a left at a fork in the road, a rather glaring structure manifests itself across the hillside.
The wall - or "security barrier" as Israel prefers to call it - and the "security zone" extending from it - surrounds the village of Beit Mirzeim on three sides - and explains the abandoned homes in its vicinity. The loss of land, homes, agriculture, and other livelihood options inflicted by this encirclement is hard for an outsider to imagine. Equally unimaginable is the social and psychological impact this sense of loss and confinement inflicts on the people living in the continuous presence of these huge slaps of concrete.
Meet Waed Abu Daher. Waed, housewife, mother of four, and a member of the Protection Group in her home village of Birein. Along with nine other women across the West Bank, all active members of their local Protection Groups, Waed was elected to the Birein Village Council in recent elections. The most concrete example of how their work with sclr and the Protection Groups are changing power and gender dynamics in their communities.
After these last years, words like “forbidden” or “not allowed” are simply no longer in my vocabulary…
On Women's Day, March 8, 2022, Waed Abu Daher was awarded an EU prize as a role model for other women in Palestine. During a large award ceremony at the Ramallah municipality building, Waed and her fellow awardees were asked to address an audience of several hundred, including dignitaries such as the Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh, and the resident EU Representative.
As Waed concluded her award speech, she emphasised that this was a prize she could only accept, not as an individual, but on behalf of the many other women working for change in communities across Palestine. Turning to face the Prime Minister, Waed then suggested it may be time for many more women to take up seats in the Palestinian Authority at all levels. With a smile in her eyes and looking towards the Prime Minister, she went on to suggest that the time for Palestine to have female prime minister could also come. She quickly added that if someone in Ramallah should one day decide to give her a call, she would certainly not refuse to pick up the phone… at which point laughter and applause spread through the auditorium, eventually also including the Prime Minister and his aides.
Before I could not go anywhere – just stay at home. Now I can go and visit anyone. I can do make-up classes and I can talk to organisations who visit us.
In the first meeting at the beginning of the project, we got to really meet one another and got to know each other a lot better than we did before. That was also the first time for men and women to sit together in a meeting – and to talk to each other. Back then, in 2018/19, we were only some seven large families here. Now with electricity and improved water, with better streets, a small clinic, and new livelihoods, we are 17 families on this side of the road.
Birein is separated in two parts by a road frequently patrolled by Israeli army units and groups of aggressive settlers.
After our achievements together, men have a different attitude and a different trust in us as women. The cash grants and with that the water, electricity etc. have somehow changed the attitude of the men – as well as us as women… as well as us as women…
Before, the men took all decisions, and we knew very little. Now we meet as women – and we meet all together – and we raise our voices with the men so now we are part of deciding and know what is happening in our village.
Back in 2012, YMCA came here with a lot of energy and power. But we had seen so many NGOs before who came to talk to us, to take pictures – and then nothing! So at first, we actually told them to go home! They insisted and we agreed to listen a bit more and began talking together with them. That was the beginning of what later became the Protection Group. At first, we were only 7 women and 4 men, and the women were sceptical about the men because of old experiences. Back then, it was still like each woman was alone in her house. But, after we began talking, we got to know each other in a different way. We work together in the Protection Group, we have our action plan and based on that all the activities we have achieved together. The awareness of women’s rights also has been very important for us.
Men were – and some still are – sceptical but with time they have become increasingly supportive. At the same time, they are also somehow afraid of this new power of the women. Before, when visitors came to the village, we as women would hide behind the curtains of our homes. Now, it is completely different… we as women go out to meet and discuss with the visitors.
It was a river with two banks
and a heavenly mother who nursed it with drops from the clouds
But they kidnapped the mother
so it ran short of water
and died, slowly, of thirst.
Extract from “A river dies of thirst”, Mahmoud Darwish, 2008*
Conversations, observation, reading, reflection, photography and, not least, poetry - it all matters to the teller of this story. Looking at Palestine involves so much more than sticking with the predominant images of violence and conflict, or being paralysed by the complex, ever competing, current or centuries-old narratives stirred up by merely mentioning Palestine and Israel in the same breath.
A “fake” flower. Fake as in made of plastic. But placed where it is in a friend's bathroom in Bethlehem , it holds its own beauty.
“Listen,
if stars are lit,
it means there is someone who needs it.
It means that someone wants them to be,
that someone deems those speckles of spit
magnificent.
.... wrote the Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky**. That was 1914, Moscow and a time of war, suffering and great turmoil in Russia and in the world. Mayakovsky titled the poem LISTEN! Throughout the poem, Mayakovsky never mentions the word hope - yet the association is there for anyone to make.
Hope may seem faint, delusional, and possibly misplaced when you are confronted with the hard-nosed political, economic, and military realities in and around Palestine. Nevertheless, hope-against-all-odds was at the heart of nearly all the conversations I had with groups of community activists over the five weeks of my most recent visit to Palestine. Hope, maybe not for yourself and your age mates, but hope for your children and grandchildren - for the next generation.
Finding ourselves in the realm of evasive, fluid, and illusionary things like stars, flowers, and hope, maybe best to turn to the poets again. In the poem “If we want to”, Mahmoud Darwish addressed his fellow Palestinians in 2008.*
Re-reading the poem in East Jerusalem in the spring of 2022, it seems as relevant as ever to Palestinians, to Israelis, to the occasional visitor - and just about anyone who thinks they got it all figured out:
"We will become a people, if we want to, when we learn that we are not
angels, and that evil is not the prerogative of others
* "A River Dies of Thirst", Mahmoud Darwish, Archipelago Books, 2009
** "Listen", Vladimir Mayakovsky, The Redstone Press, 1987