Part 1 of Day 10 in Israel-Palestine, 15 January 2026: Walaja

On Jan 15th I went to the West Bank for the first time. I want to specifically thank my dear friend Amy Laura Cahn for having years of conversations with me about my feelings about visiting my family and not engaging with human rights work in Palestine (she gave me permission and helped me give myself permission). Then having conversations this past November about me feeling like I couldn't any longer give myself permission to not engage, and encouraging me to do it even while people I love are really worried. So thank you so much, ALC.

I met with Aviv Tatarsky on Thursday. Here is a video, Aviv is the man in the beard sitting outdoors. This will give you a good idea of who he is and the town he is talking about is the one we went to: https://www.upaya.org/video/engaged-dharma-and-on-the-ground-israeli-palestinian-solidarity-work/ Aviv does this work through his Buddhist work and also he is staff at Ir Amim, an Israeli human rights organization. https://ir-amim.org.il/en/

Aviv is lovely. I will definitely be working with him long term.

He took me to this town, and really these descriptions are better than any description I could give of the issues there. The name of the town is pronounced: "Wah-lah-jay."

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Walaja

• https://www.btselem.org/jerusalem/dispossession_and_home_demolitions_in_al_walajah

• https://www.zochrot.org/villages/village_details/49135/en

Aviv has worked with the people in Walaja for 15+ years. He's helped with agriculture, helped with a zoning plan which would allow the people of Walaja to be able to get building permits which would allow them to "legally" build and maintain their houses, he is currently selling homemade goat cheese and other artisanal foodstuffs made by the people of Walaja, in Israel and it's the only way they can make money right now because since 10/7/23 Israel won't give out any work permits to any residents of the West Bank. (Which makes no sense since as far as I understand Hamas and the Palestinian Authority don't like each other.) So people on the West Bank, unless they are employed in the West Bank, can't get jobs.

The major takeaways for me:

• In this photo I took, you can see on the bottom left what is said to be the oldest olive tree in the world, possibly 3000+ years old, which happens to be in Walaja! https://www.dailysabah.com/world/mid-east/west-banks-ancient-olive-tree-symbolizes-palestinian-endurance

• A key way the Israeli gov't oppresses people in Walaja and the West Bank is demolishing homes it deems illegal because of lack of permits, which the Israeli gov't also makes it impossible for WB residents to get. And people just re-build. Over and over. Aviv told me one family has rebuilt their home four times. It actually reminds me of people in coastal Louisiana in the sense of unbelievable resilience and determination to stay home.

• If you read the Wikipedia entry above, you will learn that Walaja was/is very near "the Green Line" (please Google that to educate yourself if you don't know what that is), and thus is now in a sort of no-man's-land where it doesn't really fall under the Palestinian Authority in Area A and also isn't in Israel and not really in Area C and so has very few if any services, including trash pickup, and they don't have their own water line, their water line comes from like one pipe coming from the Israeli settlement next door -- during the dry summers Walaja pretty much has no running water and has to truck expensive water in from capitalist Palestinian water companies in Bethlehem that are very expensive.

• The history and current situation reminded me so much of Native American reservations and the Trail of Tears and how dozens if not hundreds of Native American tribes were death marched from their home land in the 1800's in the USA to places like Oklahoma. The similarities are eerie in some ways. Although, having worked very closely for almost 20 years now with several non-federally recognized really badass Native American tribal communities in Louisiana, I do think that between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas -- the former is I think considered not super effective and the latter is so violent as to actually be dangerous for the Palestinian people, as I think the past three years have proven -- I do think our federally recognized indigenous tribes in the USA have better leadership and more legal agency (within each tribal organization, at least the ones that are federally recognized -- I mean, non-federally recognized tribes like the ones I work with have excellent leadership but no legal recourse). However, no one internationally seems to give a fuck anymore about Native Americans, which contrasted with how Israel and Palestine are regarded by the whole world, I find extremely offensive.

Another thing this all makes me think about is what does it mean to be indigenous? How far back in time are we allowed to go to claim indigeneity? I think about this all the time because I do a lot of personal and professional anti-racism work and in my professional life I work with Native Americans. I am told I am a settler colonialist in the USA and here. And in the other places I am from my family and people were and still are unwanted -- members of my family were literally murdered during genocide in 1939 in Poland. So, I don't feel like I am indigenous to anywhere. Which feels terrible. Jews are a diaspora. We were colonized by the Babylonians, and then the Romans, and then the Ottoman Empire. If I am not indigenous to this land here, where am I indigenous? Possibly nowhere. Someday I will write professionally about this. I think White people in the USA, for sure White gentile people, long ago gave up any connection to their ethnic culture and just became White. I think we as Jews did this when we went to the USA. Actually, James Baldwin has written beautifully about this: https://www.fredjoiner.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/On-Being-White-and-Other-Lies.pdf That is one of my favorite ever essays of all time. I have to admit that being told I am not indigenous to the land here feels a bit like a kick in the teeth to me, because otherwise there is no land on Earth where I morally belong. I am not saying this justifies the Israel government's genocide and violence and colonial efforts to literally replace the Palestinian people. But I do have deep pain about this. I don't know what the best answer was to hundreds of years of oppression of Jews in Europe; clearly this arrangement is not the solution. Was the only solution for us to just accept we have no home and be in contsant danger? Maybe. We are still in constant danger anyhow. So clearly this did not solve anything. On the other hand my family here feel more safe here as Jews than anywhere else. I really don't know the answer.

I am going to have dinner with Aviv on Tuesday and my goal is to discuss how I can work with him into the future long-term.

Here are some photos I took in Walaja -- the last one I took nearby in Beit Jala, a historic Palestinian Christian town near Bethlehem. That's where we met Ibrahim, the man from Walaja who now lives in Bethlehem and is a taxi driver and drove me to Bethlehem after Walaja, which is the next post, part 2 of Thursday! I might write that one tonight or tomorrow.

Above is the Mosque in Walaja.

Above is a house in Walaja that was recently demolished.

This shows the solar water system most Israelis have in their houses and apartments, and this was the home of a family in Walaja who has not had their home ever demolished which makes it seem very suspicious (i.e. as Aviv told me, collaboration with the Israeli gov't).

Traditional Palestinian terraced agriculture and you can't see it but in the upper left a Walaja man was pasturing his sheep.

Here you can sort of see the man walking on the road and his sheep walking into the pasture. Note the huge fence built by the Israeli gov't to hem in and imtimidatre and inconvenience the people of Walaja.

The checkpoint to the area where Walaja is. No one checks you going into the West Bank, you only get checked going back into Jerusalem/Israel.

Jerusalem -- it's SO CLOSE. Why is Walaja in a weird no-man's land? Why aren't they Israeli citizens? It's so ridiculous.

A Walaje home being built or re-built.

The Barrier.

Nearby Jerusalem and settlement.

Graffiti on the Barrier in Beit Jala.