This past spring break, 15 students from UVA became the first ever group of UVA students to visit Palestine on PalTrek, a student-led, student-organized, and student-funded trip that offers students a chance to hear directly from Palestinians on the ground and gain an understanding of the Palestinian narrative. PalTrek was started by a Palestinian student at the Harvard Kennedy School who wanted his peers to have a chance to experience his culture, and has since grown to many other campuses, including Columbia,[1] Berkeley, the University of Chicago, and more. This is a snapshot of what we, UVA PalTrek, saw in Palestine.
In Hebron, a Palestinian city under Israeli military occupation and home to some of the holiest sites in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, we try to use the bathroom. We are told by armed Israeli soldiers, fingers on their triggers, that we can only use the bathroom if we are not Muslim. After that, we take pictures of the streets, empty because of checkpoints that do not allow Palestinians to enter their own homes. A young Israeli soldier, mustache not yet fully grown in, approaches us and demands we stop taking pictures. Our Palestinian tour guide affirms that we all have the right to do so in a democratic country. The Israeli soldier tells us that he is the law in Hebron and what he says goes.
Pictured: A checkpoint from Bethlehem to Jerusalem; it is usually more crowded in the mornings when most Palestinians cross for work.
Driving north from Bethlehem to Ramallah, we take the only road open to Palestinians.[2] The road is ostensibly controlled by the Palestinian Authority, which is responsible for its maintenance. The road is pockmarked and lined with garbage. Our guide points out the sewage from Israeli settlements nearby that pollutes the waterways and valleys around us. Even though the Palestinian Authority controls the road, they are not allowed to have police powers—they can’t so much as issue a traffic ticket. Hundreds of Palestinians die on this road every year because of traffic accidents, our guide says. Next to us, we see clear roads with much smoother pavement. Barbed wire separates us from them. Those are the settler-only roads in Palestinian territory that Palestinians are banned from using. Because of traffic on our road, we are over an hour late to our meeting.
In Susya, an unrecognized village in southern Palestine under a demolition order, we meet shepherds and farmers. It is March 8, International Women’s Day. Fatima tells us that home demolitions are also a women’s issue. Palestinian women are in charge of the home. It is where they sew, make handicrafts, and tend to their families. When Israeli soldiers bulldoze a family home, women lose everything. We also speak to Mohammad, a teenager who apologizes for his English skills. Getting to school is sometimes difficult for him, because Susya has no water or electricity, as Susya’s residents are Palestinian and Israel does not recognize them. We ask Mohammad about the dogs in the village. He replies that people very much love their dogs. One night, he was awakened by his dog barking very loudly. Unable to sleep, he went outside and saw armed settlers attempting to set his tent on fire. He had to wake up his grandfather in the next tent over too to make sure settlers had not gotten to him.
Throughout the trip, our Palestinian guide periodically goes to sit at the back of the bus. He doesn’t say why. Finally, at the airport on our way out, we understand why: at each checkpoint, advanced facial recognition technology and soldiers scan cars for Palestinians. They rarely check buses full of tourists like us, or cars driven by settlers. But at the airport, armed soldiers stop us. They order our guide out and check his documentation. Even though he is one of the 1% of West Bank Palestinians allowed in Israel, he is not allowed to use the airport. He tells the soldiers he is just there to drop us off and they let him go.
Pictured: An Israeli soldier in Hebron motioning to the group about cameras
PalTrek included students of varying perspectives and levels of knowledge about Palestine, the occupation, and Israel. But one of the things we all came to understand was this: what we saw is apartheid, and it is wrong. In coming to recognize Israeli apartheid for what it is, we join a group of international, Israeli, Palestinian, and U.S. organizations, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, B’Tselem, Ir Amim, Adalah Justice Project, the Movement for Black Lives, and even two former Israeli Ambassadors to South Africa.[3]
We have a request of you, our peers: do not go on iTrek. While iTrek is cheap, it comes at a severe cost: normalizing and whitewashing apartheid and destroying fundamental principles behind the rule of law. As law students, we hold immense power through our actions and the future careers we will have. We regret that our peers on iTrek did not see what we saw.[4] We invite everyone, including, and perhaps especially, those who have gone on iTrek in the past, to join us on PalTrek. Just as our lives were forever changed, we believe yours will be too. We hope you will agree with us that all people deserve freedom and equality under the law, including Palestinians.
---
The Law Students of UVA PalTrek 2022
[1] https://clspaltrek.home.blog/2019/03/25/introducing-paltrek/
[2] https://visualizingpalestine.org/visuals/segregated-roads-west-bank
[3] https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-palestine-south-africa-former-ambassadors-call-occupation-apartheid
[4] We also regret that our peers on iTrek were apparently under the mistaken impression that they had visited Gaza. https://www.lawweekly.org/col/2022/3/16/the-return-of-itrek As we learned during a briefing with UN officials in Jerusalem, Gaza has been subject to an intense military blockade since 2007, and no one, save for aid groups and an extremely small number of people granted permission by the Israeli military, is allowed in or out.