Personal Account of West Bank Experiences

Hi, I'm home safely,

and I just wanted to thank everyone who reached out.

Honestly, it's still quite raw and I'm still processing things, replaying the images

of the armed settlers who detained us and the four IDF soldiers who

helped them blockade our van.

It was quite scary, but you know, I also have just been thinking about

all the Palestinians I met and their stories, they don't have the

platform I do.

And I was just

so emotionally moved as a human being, not as a politician,

just as a person hearing those stories.

There was a father who broke down in tears,

talking about how his 14 year old son, an American citizen, was killed by the IDF,

and he talked about how he hasn't changed his son's room because

of the grief he feels.

I met Palestinian families who did not have enough water to flush the toilet

or to wash their clothes while Israeli settlers had four times the water.

I talked to a school principal who described the scene of

a school shooting,

something we're familiar with here in the United States.

And he said that even as one of his students was killed,

he does not know

if there has been any investigation into the school shooter.

The police, the IDF have never talked to him. He has had no justice.

I talked to street owners and shop owners in

Hebron who said that settlers from the would urinate down on them,

would throw acid at them,

would throw rotten vegetables at them.

I saw checkpoints

where you had two different license plates, one license plate if

you were an Israeli settler,

another license plate if you were Palestinian,

and I talked to a Palestinian man,

Palestinian American, who was at that checkpoint a couple of days ago,

and he was beaten because he did not speak Hebrew.

And he said, well, he's been away

from Palestine for years and he didn't speak Hebrew and the guards beat

him and took his money.

You know, it doesn't really matter what your ideology is.

What is happening in the West Bank is just inhumane.

No human being would tolerate it.

That's what I want to try to get across. It's like the Jim Crow South.

We need to stand up for human dignity.

We need to tell the stories

of what's happening to Palestinians and Palestinian Americans in the West Bank.

It's just wrong.

And I intend to

try to give them a voice and try to tell those stories in the days and weeks ahead.