The Americans of the Middle East

After a long and dreary winter, it is an utterly perfect, sunny spring Thursday. It is April, and I should be out in the garden, or down by the lake, or doing something to soak up the idyllic glory of springtime.

Instead, I am on the phone, talking with a New Yorker (and former co-worker) named Kristen Schurr. Outside my window, kids are playing. Outside Kristen's, it is a war zone, and the children are shot at every day.

It is life in a Palestinian refugee camp. Hers happens to be Al-Azzeh, outside Bethlehem. It's been a bad week.

"The first night I was here, just crossing the alley in front of the apartment, I was shot at," she says matter-of-factly. "They showed me how to duck and run." She's used her new skills regularly in the past few days. "Just today, I went into a little shop inside of camp, we got shot at."

During our conversations last week, Schurr practiced the maneuver, pausing during a sentence as she scurried across some alley; there's a sniper tower in the adjacent Israeli settlement, and the Israeli army has also taken over all of Bethlehem's tallest buildings. At times, as with my other conversations with people in the area, I could hear the gunshots and 18 mm shells over the phone.

Is she brave? Reckless? Stupid? Why on earth would someone choose to go into such a place? Especially now? Is it a martyr complex? An all-time bad vacation story for the grandkids?

Schurr, 33, is working for her doctorate at the New School in Manhattan -- specifically, studying the Middle East. It's the culmination of years of activist interest in the Palestinian tragedy: "The 1987 intifada politicized me in the first place, I started reading about it in high school. That's what I've studied, and now I'm working on my PhD." Why did this, of all the world's issues, stand out to her, even in high school? "I dunno, just the absolute injustice of it, the complete humiliation by the Israelis ... sanctioned and paid for by the U.S., it's just one of the world's great injustices. There's just no two ways about it. It's so cut and dry."

Kristen's mother, Bonnie, lives in Seattle; her daughter's vacation plans surprised her. "I knew that she was a political activist in New York, but I wasn't sure what they did, until I found out she was going to the West Bank." Bonnie Schurr admits that she and her family have mixed feelings due to concerns about Kristen's safety: "I want her to be safe, and then as time goes on [during the last week] and I see that she's so strong, I hear the resolve in her voice, and I admire her greatly ... I'm just absolutely astounded at the courage. They have guns pointed at them, people yelling at them, and they just keep walking, they keep holding up their peace signs. Just about the only thing they have to protect them is their international citizenship ... She's just incredibly strong and brave."

Schurr is in Palestine for two plus weeks as one of a few hundred delegates for the current tour of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM). It's the third such tour for the ISM, recently organized by the Center for Rapproachment, a Palestinian NGO based in Bethlehem. Along with other "internationals" from Europe, Asia, and North America, the activists' professed intent was to be foreign, nonviolent witnesses to the occupation -- human cameras, doing the work U.S. media mostly won't, who could show their solidarity with the Palestinian cause and the Palestinian people through their presence, through protests, through house rebuildings and olive tree plantings, and then return home to tell their stories and nurture their new friendships.

This particular delegation knew it was walking into a tense situation. One cannot fly into Palestine; the only airport, in Gaza, has been bombed out by Israel. To get to Bethlehem, and Al-Azzeh, Schurr says, "I had to fly into Israel, and then sneak past a checkpoint." She's talking on the Israeli cell phone she rented at the airport; Palestine doesn't have those, either.