Interviewed in Ramallah, West Bank
The West Bank village of Bil’in is located two miles east of the Green Line demarcation boundary and twelve miles west of Ramallah. It’s well known for weekly protests against the occupation of the West Bank and the construction of the West Bank barrier wall.
Construction of the West Bank barrier began before the Second Intifada, and the proposed route of the wall crossed through the western edge of Bil’in, effectively annexing a broad swath of land that included private property and much of the village’s grazing land. In 2005, people from the village began protesting every Friday afternoon against the incursion into village lands. These regular protests quickly became a focal point of the Palestinian protest movement, with hundreds showing up each week from throughout the West Bank, Israel, and the international community. Celebrities and international leaders have joined in the protests, from Richard Branson to Jimmy Carter. Human rights lawyers have taken up the cause as well, and in 2007, Israeli courts ordered that the wall be dismantled and moved closer to the Green Line, stating that there was no pressing security concern to justify the route of the wall through Bil’in. That same year, however, Israeli courts declared legal the construction of thousands of additional buildings in the Israeli settlement of Modi’in Illit that would occupy land privately held by residents of Bil’in. The territory between Bil’in and the Green Line remains strongly contested.
Tali Shapiro has been attending these protests since 2009. We meet Tali at a weekly protest amid a barrage of teargas and percussion grenades. She wears jeans and a T-shirt with a bandanna around her neck, and she passes out alcohol wipes to soothe the eyes and sinuses of people unfortunate enough to get a face full of noxious gas.
Tali agrees to meet with us later at a café in Ramallah. Ramallah is in Area A, and Tali is legally forbidden to visit as a citizen of Israel.1 However, like many other Israelis, she seems to be able to enter the city without too much trouble from Israeli or Palestinian Authority police. In fact, when we speak to her again in 2014, Tali explains that she has relocated to Ramallah, a move she’d been planning for years.
AS A KID I WAS VERY SHELTERED
My parents were born in Israel. Their grandparents came from Poland, Russia, Ukraine, and Lithuania. I was born in 1983 in Mevaseret Zion, a suburb of Jerusalem.2 I have one brother, Benjamin, who is a few years older than me. My parents worked in medicine—my father was an anesthesiologist, and my mother was a psychiatric nurse. We were in Israel for the first five years of my life, and then we moved to the States, to Seattle, for two years while my father had a residency there.
Living outside of Israel gave me perspective. Before living in the U.S., I’d never had questions about who I was or where I was from. One of the things I specifically remember in the States was the Pledge of Allegiance. Having to stand up every morning and pledge allegiance to a flag that was not my own was very suspicious to me. I’d think, Oh wait, I can’t really do this, can I? But then, interestingly—and I was around seven years old at the time—I began to think, If I feel strange pledging allegiance to this flag, what should I be feeling when I sing the Hatikva?3
And then after Seattle, we came back to live in a small town called Omer, outside Be’er Sheva.4 Omer is a really affluent town, maybe one of the three wealthiest in Israel. It was really lovely and really boring—pleasant, a lot of greenery, all the houses pretty much the same. There wasn’t much to do, but it was a nice place to grow up.
As a kid, I was very sheltered. There were so many terrible things going on all around, but my parents shielded me from confronting anything difficult or complicated. For example, my mother wouldn’t take me to funerals when relatives died, because she didn’t even want me to see that. And my family had this history of being part of the Zionist movement. My grandparents helped start towns—they had streets named after them. So I grew up in this sheltered, patriotic world. So much in our culture was about Israel, Israeli security. During holidays, I remember teachers sending us home with little chocolates with Israeli flags sticking out of them.
And everyone loved soldiers. Everyone had been a soldier and therefore a hero—my mom, my dad, uncles, aunts, everyone.5 We were fed the idea in school and in the media that by the time my generation was old enough, there wouldn’t be a need for everyone to do military service, that it was just a temporary problem that would be solved. That isn’t something you hear anymore, but when I was growing up in the nineties, after the Oslo Accords, there was this idea that Israel wouldn’t need this big military any longer.6
IT’S SORT OF LIKE SUMMER CAMP WITH GUNS
As a teenager, I didn’t really think about military service that much. I was just a typical bored teen in a small town. And I didn’t understand the politics of the situation at all. I’d hear terms like “settlers” in the media from time to time, but I think girls, especially, were shielded from knowing about those sorts of issues. I didn’t really know what a “settler” was, even in high school.
At age sixteen I got my draft registration in the mail. I was confronted with the possibility for the first time that I’d probably have to be a soldier. The way the registration order works is that you start going through the process of figuring out what sort of unit you’ll be in, in what capacity you’ll be serving. I got a pretty sad-ass order that basically let me know I was going to be a secretary or something, while some of my friends were going to be scouts out in the wilderness or doing other assignments I viewed as interesting at the time. When I was sixteen, my school took us to Gadna camp for a week.7 It was part of a standardized school program, and something that most Israeli teens do—it’s sort of like summer camp with guns. We stayed in tents in the desert and female IDF officers taught us how to take apart a rifle, took us to the firing range, things like that. So at sixteen I was handed this rifle on a school field trip. It was my first experience with a weapon. It was big, greasy, and heavy—a killing machine. But I still got into the challenge of the shooting range.
Then, right after I turned eighteen, around 2000, I enlisted. Up until then I wasn’t sure if I’d have to serve or not. Only about 40 percent of the Israeli population ends up serving, even if everyone is supposed to enlist. So what happens is you’re in a situation where you don’t want to do it. But you feel an obligation to do it, there’s social pressure to do it. It’s considered very selfish within Israeli society if you refuse to serve in the army. People just look at you like, oh, you’re just a big baby. You’re a traitor if you don’t serve.
My one month of basic training was done in the north, near Haifa. Basic training was a strange experience. It didn’t seem like we were learning anything. Other than practicing at the firing range, we were just dealing with the discipline of day-to-day life, like making our beds the right way, dressing the right way, handling kitchen duty. We all slept in tents in the cold weather and ran a bit during the days. We’d get yelled at if we messed up and would have to run extra laps. I think basic was a little easier for me, because I wasn’t going to be assigned to combat duty. Like I said, I was selected to be a secretary.
After my month of basic training, I was transferred in September to the biggest military base in Gaza at the time, which was right on the edge of Khan Younis.8 I served during the Second Intifada.9 I remember the sounds of shots fired and explosions all through the night. We would be up all night trying to figure out if the explosions came from “us” or “them.” If it was “us” then it would calm us down. In the base, rumors were a way of life. The rumors kept us scared. The most prevalent rumor that was allowed to spread in the base was that “Arabs were about to take over the base”—and this was the biggest military base in Gaza!
I remember the rumble of buildings collapsing. When a building collapses it’s a huge explosion. The first time I heard the sound, there we were eight girls in a room at night, and we all woke up thinking, Are we going to die? But little did we know these were explosions that our army caused. It could be so loud, it was hard to feel like I wasn’t in danger, even though I wasn’t involved in combat. In fact, most enlisted female soldiers weren’t allowed to carry weapons—only female officers and female field medics. I remember a commanding officer saying that female soldiers with guns were more likely to cause damage than do anything useful. That seemed like a pretty common attitude in the military.
I still didn’t understand the political situation then. For instance, my understanding at the time was that some crazy people decided to jump the border out of Israel, and then the military had to send people out to protect them. It took me a few weeks to realize these were the settlers I was hearing about on the radio all the time. My thought was, Why don’t we just pull back, and then the settlers will pull back too? It just all seemed weird to me, mostly.
REALITY CAME TO ME IN SMALL OBSERVATIONS
I was stationed in Gaza for one year and eight months. Most of my days were fairly routine, actually. I’d file personnel reports every morning on who was on the base, who was off the base, what they were doing. And then after doing that, I’d still have time to go eat, work out in the gym, take a nap, read. I’d see friends who were out of the base for fourteen hours and simply exhausted. Meanwhile, I was just trying to fill up my days, feeling stuck in a mundane routine.
But a few moments are embedded in my mind—I guess they were in the back of my head until I could deal with them. We were stationed on a hill that was overlooking the beach, and there was a dirt road where the kids would go to school. So I’d see them, you know, walking hand in hand or running to catch a ride to school and I remember thinking, That’s the enemy? Hmmmm, okay.
And then another moment was when I was at the border crossing, waiting for my ride home, and there was this Palestinian guy on his knees without his shirt on. He was cuffed with his hands behind his head. And there were other soldiers who were pushing him into the jeep rather roughly. I immediately assumed that he did something really bad, and this was normal procedure during an arrest. Today when I look back at this incident, I have other questions. Was he beaten, was he stripped to humiliate him? So reality came to me in small observations.
And I remember one surreal moment later in my service. An officer who I wrote reports for had a map of Khan Younis spread out on his desk. One day, he called over his deputy and asked how many houses we demolished that year. The deputy told him that we were up to 297 houses. So the officer took a black marker and made three Xs on the map. He showed his deputy the marks and said something like, “It’s almost the end of the year. Let’s do a few more and round it up to a nice, even 300.”
Nobody ever said anything about the morality of what we were doing. I think most soldiers were really just preoccupied with how shitty life was. Because the army was like prison, with occasional leave to go home. But it’s high-discipline bullshit that you’re preoccupied with, wearing the uniform correctly, doing dishes, having to work from morning to night.
I JUST WANTED TO DO SOMETHING TO STOP THE WAR
After my military service was up at the end of 2002, I moved back home with my parents for most of 2003. I was just trying to figure out what to do with my life, how to get out of Omer. I applied to a fine arts program in Tel Aviv and was accepted, so I moved there to start school in the fall of 2003.
For the three years I was in school, I didn’t think about politics much—I was just focused on my art. But in my last year, I switched from fine arts to animation, and I started a relationship with another student in my program. He was much more political than I was. He challenged everything that I had grown up believing. At home, at school, in the media, in the army, in college. Everything. We probably had a political conversation every day for the three years we were together, just naturally while watching the news on television or reading the paper. I didn’t know it at the time, but I slowly started to move away from the sort of blind patriotism I’d grown up with.
During this time I was also trying to make a life in Tel Aviv. I was able to make some money selling prints of my art, and I also supported myself by doing online marketing work. I remember a documentary I saw that was made by the BBC. The larger narrative in the documentary was about activists and journalists that had been killed by the Israeli military—Rachel Corrie, Tom Hurndall, James Miller.10 At one point in the documentary, there was a story about a twelve-year-old girl who was shot in the head by an Israeli soldier while she was sitting in class during the Second Intifada. The girl went into a coma, but miraculously survived the shooting, and the documentarians were there in the hospital at the moment when she regained consciousness. They captured the moment when she opened her eyes and she realized that she’d been blinded by the shooting. I remembered what I was like at twelve, and I just couldn’t separate myself from her. Then a little later in the documentary, the filmmakers interviewed the commanding officer of the unit responsible for shooting the girl, and I recognized the officer as one of my former commanders. I realized that I had served in that unit around the time the girl was shot. I didn’t understand my feelings at the time, but it was the first time I had felt this emotional sense of responsibility in some way for what the state of Israel was doing.
I broke up with my partner in 2008. Then late in 2008, Cast Lead came.11 When the media started reporting that it was likely that Israel would invade Gaza, I started having a panic attack. I felt like a caged animal. I just knew a lot of people were about to die. And then when the invasion happened, and I watched it all unfold on the news, I felt I was going crazy. I just wanted to do something to stop the killing. I suddenly found I couldn’t do my art any more. It just didn’t seem important. I joined a protest march against Cast Lead in Tel Aviv, but it didn’t feel like I was doing enough.
A few weeks after Cast Lead began, my ex called me up and he said, “Hey, you want to go to Bil’in?”12 By that time I had already seen the protests from the village on YouTube, and I said, “I’m scared shitless, but hell yeah.” The one thing that was on my mind was that I wanted to meet the people in those protests.
So I started coming to the West Bank in 2009. We used to meet at Levinsky Park in Tel Aviv to ride to the protests.13 Just going to the park and starting to talk to the other activists there, I knew I was where I belonged. We went to Bil’in every Friday—that’s when the protests against the wall took place. There was a lot of tension in the West Bank at the time because of the operation in Gaza. Soldiers were tighter on the trigger. But what I remember first about the protests in Bil’in is just what a festive atmosphere it was. There was dancing, joking. It felt like a celebration—of resistance, of continued existence. The protest I’d gone to in Tel Aviv was solemn, serious, like a funeral. It was respectful, but I much preferred the celebration of life in Bil’in as a form of resistance.
In Bil’in, the protests at the wall were intense. Teargas, rubber bullets. Of course I knew something about what was going to happen. I’d seen videos of the weekly protests, and I’d been carefully briefed about the dangers by other protesters. But being there in person, I felt so vulnerable. Probably the most important thing for me about those first few trips to Bil’in were just meeting Palestinians, talking to them. Their situation went straight to my heart.
I’VE BEEN ARRESTED PROBABLY TWENTY TIMES
I’ve been to the weekly protests throughout the West Bank over 250 times now. I go just about every week, unless there’s a family wedding or other big event I have to be part of. Before activism, I felt I just had a complete estrangement from the world. And now I feel deeply part of it, as complex as it is. So now at least I have some kind of context to who I am and where I belong.
Getting to Bil’in was never much of a problem. We’d often go by car, and since we’re not Arabs we’d just pass through the checkpoints back to ’48, like any settler coming from the West Bank could.14 Only three or four times over the last five years have any soldiers at checkpoints going into ’48 boarded the bus and checked everyone’s IDs. Lucky for me, I have two passports—my Israeli passport, and also a European one. I have Polish citizenship, passed down from my grandfather, and if I need to I show the European passport to checkpoint guards to help me get into areas restricted to Israelis.
When we get to Bil’in, we start by congregating in the center of the village. Then we start marching toward the wall. Usually, we don’t have the chance to start demonstrating at the wall, because the army will start dispersing us even before chanting begins. And the dispersal is brutal. Most commonly, it’s through teargas. It’s a terrible experience, the choking, the sore eyes, the whole thing. It’s an extreme physical experience. I think after four, five, six times, you kind of become emotionally desensitized—you’re prepared to get gassed. But physically, you never get used to it.
I’ve been arrested probably twenty times. The soldiers treat me differently, because I’m female, because I’m small, because I seem feminine. I use these things to my own ends—I’m kind of reaping the rewards of machismo. As a woman, I feel I should shield the men, because many times they get treated very brutally, and if I’m there, then it de-escalates the situation. Sometimes I can keep men from being arrested—not just Palestinians, but also Israeli and international men as well. My presence helps ease tensions sometimes.
I’ve seen some terrible things, though. Beatings happen often. And sometimes people are hit by teargas canisters. That’s one of the ways people are killed during protests. A friend named Iyad was hit in the face by a canister once. He wasn’t even that close to where it was fired, but it crushed his face. I didn’t see it happen, but I saw him getting dragged to an ambulance. His face was bloody—I couldn’t even recognize him, other than his clothes. He survived, but he has a big Y-shaped dent in his forehead now, and he has issues with memory loss.
I remember another friend, a young Israeli guy, who was struck in the knee with a canister, and his kneecap was broken. It hurt him a lot—he was writhing in pain when he was struck, but we decided not to take him to an ambulance, because he didn’t want to get arrested. After the protest, he basically grew a second knee while we were driving home—it was that swollen. We ended up calling his mother and meeting in the parking lot of an IKEA. She had no idea he was at the protest and would have been very much against it. She was calm about it, but I think quite worried, and after he was treated at the hospital, she gave him a lot of shit about being part of that kind of protest.
