i had no idea

Poking around the excellent Mondoweiss today, I came across this short video that was recorded on the previous delegation to Gaza I was on in May/June, in which blog author Philip Weiss interviews longtime activist Dennis James in the lovely indoor/outdoor restaurant at Marna House, where I sat up late on my last night in Gaza listening to shelling.

Dennis said something which I have heard a lot of people who have traveled to Palestine express, including veteran activists, something which I've felt myself. Multiple times during the six-minute interview, he says, in regards to what he witnessed on the trip, "I had no idea."

One of the things I am still sorting through as I get ready for my second trip to Gaza is just how utterly unprepared I was for what I saw there. It took me a while to realize this truth. I thought I knew what to expect. I had no idea.

I was very knowledgeable about Palestine, and completely supportive of the Palestinian cause, before I traveled there. I had read and read and read. I had watched nearly every film, documentary and fiction, shot in Palestine that I could get my hands on. I had followed news of the war daily on blogs written by activists on the ground. And still. I had no idea.

I have spent a lot of time studying state-sponsored violence and organizing against it. I am pretty familiar with the darker side of humanity. I thought I had lost my capacity to be shocked. Boy was I wrong.

After just a few hours in Gaza, I realized that, far from exaggerating the level of violence that people in the Occupied Territories face, I had vastly underestimated it. Vastly. It is staggering. At times it feels like standing in front of a tidal wave.

You can read the word disproportionate but until you're walking through a neighborhood where every house has been flattened--no, where every house has been blown up with land mines individually planted by Israeli ground troops--you don't really understand what it means.

I thought I understood occupation. I didn't. Not until I was riding down Gaza's coastal road at sunset, watching the lights of Israeli gunboats glitter in the sea on one side of the bus and the red warning lights of the eastern border blink on the other, all while listening for drones overhead. Not until I was listening to shelling and trying to imagine what it would be like to sleep under that every night. To sleep in a tent under that every night.

I thought I understood repression, violence and state terror. I was not prepared. For the shattered American International School, the destroyed parliament building, for the piles of rubble that appear without warning in the middle of a block, that used to be a home or a shop or a police station. For sitting in a meeting with family members of detainees, women and small children holding pictures of their family members who are prisoners in Israeli jails, facing their pain and feeling powerless beyond description. At that meeting, I happened to be sitting next to an ISM activist who leaned over to me and said at one point: "I feel ashamed, because I was arrested in the West Bank and I only spent one day in jail." I knew exactly what he meant.

I thought I understood resistance. Blessedly, I had no idea. I had no idea how extraordinary the human capacity to stand up to violence is, what fearsome weapons political will and solidarity can be, how amazingly powerful small acts of resistance can become. A flag planted on a pile of rubble, the Islamic University student who talked about her brother, a volunteer medic killed during the war, and said "they killed my brother but they can't kill our dreams," even something as simple as a cup of tea, offered by someone standing beside the ruins of their home.

In Palestine you will see how cruel people can be, but also how strong--how brave and sweet and loving and resourceful and creative and resilient and defiant and human. You will understand exactly how much violence oppressors can deliver--and exactly how much power the oppressed have to defeat it. You'll realize that human beings can do anything.