On Saturday, May 1 I had to decide whether to go to Nablus, Bethlehem or to what was left of the Jenin refugee camp. School wasn’t going to start again for another four days; the last day of classes had been over a month earlier. They stopped at about noon, I understand, when people burst into classrooms and announced that Israeli tanks were coming and everyone should go home immediately. Students ran.

That day my class finished at eleven and I was at the Qalandya checkpoint, on my way to Bethlehem, when I got the news—the director of the Arabic program called my cellphone and told me Al Jazeera was broadcasting a warning from the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) that all internationals should evacuate Ramallah immediately. She said shelling would begin in about an hour. This was the day after the Hamas bombing in Netanya (which was revenge for an assassination where an Israeli Apache helicopter fired missiles into an apartment building in Nablus, killing a Hamas man and two or three of his kids).

I knew if I went to Jerusalem and Bethlehem I would be stuck there until the IDF operation was over, which might be as long as a month, so I raced back to Birzeit. You have to go through Ramallah to get there, and in Ramallah, although the streets were packed with people buying things like food and candles, there were no normal street sounds. You could feel it in the air. I overheard people talking on cellphones about the progress the tanks were making entering the city.

I ended up staying in Birzeit for a month of extreme boredom and sadness. I read a lot of news on the internet and played a lot of Uno with my roommates, Palestinian students who also went to Birzeit University. They were having trouble watching their home be destroyed on television. (Palestinians I know who had been through every war since 1948 said this was the worst, that there had never been destruction like this before.)

I had nightmares about soldiers; they had nightmares about soldiers and snakes. IDF tanks and jeeps would drive through Birzeit shooting. Once they put a bomb in the middle of the street that almost killed a close friend. Afterwards he was too shellshocked to sleep in his apartment, which was heavily damaged, even after we cleaned it up. Another night the IDF came and blew up buildings, a jeep with a loudspeaker driving around outside warning if anyone went outside they would shoot them in the brain.

Eventually we were running out of food and money, so parties like Fatah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad gave students free food. The Islamic Jihad guys were especially pleased to be giving an American student free food. So when the Qalandya checkpoint and Surda, the checkpoint between Birzeit and Ramallah, were finally reopened I had to get out, even if it was only for a few days. I decided to go to Nablus, Bethlehem or Jenin.

In Nablus was one of my Arabic tutors, an energetic journalism student named Mamoon. We had plans to write an article together on the upcoming student government elections at Birzeit, which was surprisingly an important political event in the Middle East. Mamoon had gone home to Nablus to wait out the fighting, which lasted all of April, and I’d tried to visit him several times. Each time I ended up wasting at least half a day, unable to get past Qalandya for one reason or another. (The Qalandya checkpoint is the main entry into Jerusalem from the West Bank, and also where you get taxis to most other cities.) Once I’d been tear-gassed while trying to get to there. Mamoon was severely annoyed with me because I’d failed again only two days before.

In Bethlehem was the family of x, my first and best friend in Palestine. He had managed the xHostel in East Jerusalem, where I stayed my first night in Israel/Palestine. We became very close friends and I would often go to Jerusalem to see him and hang out. He’d gone to Belgium over a month earlier, but before then had taken me to see his family in Bethlehem. They are amazing. They have five sons, all in their early twenties, and one daughter. x, x and their kids are all incredibly articulate and supremely interesting people, and all speak English very well. I was going to see them when I decided to turn back at Qalandya in late March on the day "Operation Defensive Shield" began. We’d worried about each other during the last month of incredible violence in the West Bank, and I missed them and wanted to see them.

In Jenin I could see the flattened refugee camp, and I had friends who were in the surrounding villages.

So on May 1 I went to Ramallah. It’s two kilometers from Birzeit and you have to pass through to get to Qalandya. I was with Nathan Musselman, an American friend who also lived in Birzeit and had studied Arabic for six months. When he got out of class we took a taxi to Ramallah; I had decided I would make up my mind where to go when we got to Ramallah, where the IDF had partially withdrawn. The Surda checkpoint was unmanned that day, and our shared taxi drove right through, something I’ve only done two or three times in four months. Usually there are soldiers, and they don’t let cars go through.

In Ramallah we walked to the parking garage down the street from the Al Manara. The city was still in shambles; not even the Star of Davids the IDF troops had spray-painted on the stone lions in the middle of Al Manara had been cleaned off. At the parking garage, we miraculously found a taxi to Nablus. This was almost too good to be true; Nate questioned the driver in detail to make sure it wasn’t any mistake. Suddenly I had to decide on Nablus, Bethlehem or Jenin, and was still unsure of what to do. We sat down and talked about it. Nablus had Mamoon and another friend. Bethlehem was still occupied but the curfew was being lifted for a few hours. That’s where Nate was going; he would be able to help me find the x house if I went with him. (This time I didn’t have my cellphone—a long story. In the past I’d just called the x’s and given the phone to the driver for directions.) Jenin was far away, and expensive to get to.

After ten or fifteen minutes I decided on Bethlehem after making sure Nate would help me find the house. There was some question over whether or not this would be possible—I’d only been there a few times before and there was no way to call the xs, and I’m horrible about finding my way around and get lost easily. It also wasn’t very polite to show up unannounced in the middle of a siege, but I knew the xs wouldn’t mind. They called me their son, and x and I always signed our emails to each other "your brother."

Nate and I took a shared taxi to the Qalandya checkpoint. The illegal checkpoints are an ugly part of the occupation that we don’t hear much about in the U.S., but play a major role in the life of every Palestinian. They’re officially there so the IDF can search for weapons and arrest wanted men. But this is where major human rights abuses are constantly going on, daily. Palestinians are shot, shot at, tear gassed, sound-bombed, beaten, arrested, stripped naked, threatened with loaded weapons, detained by the side of the road for hours, and called "dogs" and much worse. I always hated the warning shots.

To people who have never passed through an IDF checkpoint, warning shots probably don’t seem like a big deal—after all, no one is hurt or killed. But when a soldier close to you starts firing his machinegun over your head, it is absolutely terrifying. Unless you happen to be looking at the soldier who starts shooting, you don’t know what’s going on, who’s shooting or if it’s you being shot at; you just get down. Having a gun pointed at you is the same type of experience. You don’t know if you’re about to die or not and are thinking these may be the last seconds of your life. Most of the scary experiences I’ve had in the West Bank have been at checkpoints.

At Qalandya that afternoon sixty or seventy Palestinians were waiting behind barbed wire and concrete slabs for their turn to try to get through. There was an armored personnel carrier (APC), some machinegun nests and several concrete and sandbag encampments facing them. The teenagers who usually manned Qalandya had been replaced about two months earlier with older, meaner soldiers who shot their guns at people more. There were about ten of them in view on the Ramallah side; three of them were checking IDs and searching bags. Palestinian men had to lift up their shirts a safe distance away to show they had no bombs.

We waited maybe a half hour, then got waved up. A bearded young soldier examined my passport. His English was perfect and I asked him if he was from the States. He said his parents were and asked me what I had been doing in Ramallah. "Seeing a friend," I said. "You have a friend who lives in Ramallah?" "Yes." This got the standard reaction: the soldier closed his eyes and shook his head slowly, amazed at how stupid I’d been, willingly venturing into a terrorist den, and thinking I was lucking to be alive. It’s not uncommon for soldiers in these situations to say things like, "Someday you’ll understand." He gave me back my passport and I walked to the other side of the checkpoint, where sixty or seventy more Palestinians were waiting to get into Ramallah.

Nate and I got a taxi to Jerusalem. The trip took about a half hour because we had to go through another checkpoint. An annoying teenager sat next to Nate, then me, talking and talking and talking. I, of course, hardly understood anything.

In Jerusalem the Palestinian taxis to other cities are by the Damascus Gate in the Old City, which houses the Wailing Wall and the Al-Aqsa and Dome of the Rock mosques, plus a bunch of other religious sites. It’s a very interesting place. Nate wanted to bring the people he was going to see, a family he’d stayed with for all of April in the A'zza refugee camp in Bethlehem, something they wouldn’t be able to get while the IDF was still occupying the city and the curfew in effect. (May 1 was the second time—I think second, but maybe third time—the curfew had been lifted in about five weeks.) He got them dates outside the Old City, and we went inside to a sweet bakery where he bought them a kind of candy I don’t know how to describe, and I got the x’s some cookies. We knew none of our friends in Bethlehem would have had these kinds of things in weeks.

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She was also one of the founders of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), a Palestinian rights group that leads delegations and stages nonviolent direct action protests. Their activities don’t just make some small difference or raise awareness—they literally save lives. They were the ones who organized the foreign activists who went into Arafat’s compound when the fighting began, and x personally broke the curfew in Ramallah to deliver food and medical supplies.

For an Arab person to break the curfew at that time, in that place, is courageous beyond description. Only people who have been in areas the IDF is attacking know what it takes. The delegations ISM leads—composed of foreigners who come to Israel and Palestine for a short time to fight the occupation nonviolently—are not petting-zoo tours. They are on the front lines, risking their lives to help Palestinians. In April in Bethlehem, at an ISM protest Nate was at, a British woman was shot by IDF troops in the stomach. (She lived.)

Nate told Huwaida he’d heard about a protest several days earlier at the Church of the Nativity where the activists had got all the way across Manger Square, to the door of the church. "Yes, I led that," x said. There was something planned for the next day, and we said we wanted to help and would call her later. I didn’t know what they were going to try to do, but knew that if ISM was calling the shots it would be worth taking serious risks for. The benefit to Palestinians would be enormous.

I remember it being very sunny when we left the Old City to find a shared taxi going by Bethlehem. I hadn’t eaten, so I bought some bread and hummus. Nate was worried about the time, so I didn’t eat until after we got out of the taxi van. We jumped out at the Tantour checkpoint, ten minutes from the Damascus Gate. Tantour is a Christian research institute which does important work in inter-religious dialogue. The road going into Bethlehem is next to it, and the IDF has a permanent Qalandya-style checkpoint there. No one was allowed into Bethlehem because they hadn’t pulled out yet, probably mostly because of the people still trapped in the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem’s Old City.

Bethlehem was still a "closed military zone," even though it was in Area A, which means that under the Oslo Accords it was supposed to be under the full control of the Palestinian National Authority. We went around the checkpoint by walking through Tantour. This was normal, but I was still nervous; when sneaking around checkpoints I’m always tense, waiting for the Israeli soldiers to see us and start shooting. I ate the bread and hummus and we passed a man with a herd of sheep and three other Palestinian men fleeing Bethlehem with suitcases.

We came out from behind the walls of Tantour about two hundred meters beyond the checkpoint at Hebron Road, which runs straight through Bethlehem. I looked back at the checkpoint. "Here comes a tank," I said to Nate. "Don’t look at it," Nate replied. We walked along the sidewalk as an IDF Mekvar tank went past. This experience is considerably different that being passed by a car. The noise from the tank is so loud you can’t hear anything else. It’s painfully loud; you want to cover your ears. Hot air and exhaust blows out the sides with incredible force, blowing your hair and clothes sideways. The treads leave holes or gouges in the street. There are two or three mounted heavy-caliber machineguns on top. Tanks are very scary; they’re like huge monsters, the meanest and heaviest things on Earth.

On the wall in my room at Birzeit I had a poster of an eleven or twelve-year-old throwing a rock at one of the tanks in Gaza. It’s a powerful picture and very famous in Palestine, probably because it’s a great metaphor for the entire "conflict" (without excluding the suicide bombings U.S. media is so obsessed with). It’s also a powerful photo because the kid was shot to death two days after it was taken.

The streets were mostly deserted, though occasionally we would pass an old man or a car full of people. The curfew was lifted, but that was a dangerous area. People are generally afraid to be out and about there even without a lifted curfew because it’s between the checkpoint and the IDF military base by Rachel’s Tomb. The destruction wasn’t so obvious when we were walking in; most noticeable was the dirt everywhere from when IDF bulldozers would block the roads with mounds of dirt, and the ripped-up streets from the tanks.

We passed the place Nate used to work when he’d lived in Bethlehem nearly a year earlier. We also went by the Children’s Hospital, where he would walk sick or wounded Palestinian children in April, hoping snipers wouldn’t cut them down because he’s White. Eventually we came upon two kids, both about ten years old, one of whom was smoking a cigarette. The smoker had met Nate before, and he told us a tank had been shelling somewhere earlier. "What’s this!" I said, taking his hand with the cigarette. (That’s about the extent of my Arabic.)

As we walked and talked, Nate pointed out some snipers on the roof of one of the buildings, but I didn’t see them. We passed someone else Nate knew, x, who worked at a hospital. He said a tank shell had killed three kids in Bethlehem earlier. He was shaken; the bodies had just been brought to the hospital.

We were going to the A'zza refugee camp. "Refugee camp" evokes images of tents and water that’s carried in, but in the West Bank and Gaza, that’s not what they’re like. Refugee camps are fairly normal-looking poor areas in cities, or they’re a city themselves. The refugees are people who lived inside the Green Line—inside what is now Israel—before 1948, and their descendants. The United Nations created the Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) specifically to deal with Palestinian refugees, and the agency has played a very large part in the lives of millions of Palestinians. UNRWA built the cement apartment buildings that make up the camps, run the schools in them, and generally administer the camps. Entering A'zza, it’s hard to realize it; it’s just a poorer part of Bethlehem. Nate had to tell me we were there when we came around a corner.

Whenever I’d ask Nate what he did during April, when life in the West Bank stopped because there was so much fighting—almost always one-sided "fighting," that is, pitting the IDF against anything Palestinian—he’d say, "Playing with little kids, mostly." He’d play with the children of the family he was staying with and keep them from going out onto the main streets, where they might get shot. This was no inconsiderable task. He said it drove him crazy how they always wanted to go see the tank or jeep or APC going by. Their curiosity would instantly turn to extreme terror if the IDF vehicle would stop, but they always wanted to go see what was rumbling past.

Three little girls ran up to us and were very happy to see Nate. We talked with them for a few moments, then went on. Suddenly there were kids leaning out of windows and swarming over the streets, all screaming, "NATHAN! NATHAN! NATHAN!" They appeared out of nowhere. Nate pointed back to the direction they came and yelled something in Arabic. The kids were with us now and he was turning them around and pointing them back the way they came, telling them to stay out of the streets.

On the side street where the entrance to the building he stayed in was, about twenty-five little kids were playing and running around, and greeted Nate like a returning hero. We had fun for a few minutes while Nate introduced me to everyone, explaining that I was also a Nathan. We went inside to the bare, dingy first floor of the home where thirteen people lived. One man and about six women greeted us; Nate was held in very high regard here. During the first three days of "Operation Defensive Shield," when there was fighting in the streets, his presence as a foreigner and an American was comforting to the Palestinian refugee family—had the soldiers come to that apartment, Nate being there probably would have made a huge difference how the family and their property were treated. (When soldiers invaded Birzeit in April, my roommates were also glad they had a White American with them.)

We sat down with the adults of the family and were given a cup of tea. After some conversation I didn’t understand Nate and I went outside to play OUT with the kids. OUT is a pretty simple game. You roll a basketball at other people, and if it touches anyone’s legs they’re out. I was a prime target in this game and was out fairly soon. An APC went by on a street perpendicular to us and we tried to get the kids inside. A soldier was standing, his body half out of the hatch, and when one of the Palestinian kids shouted something and waved, he waved back.

At two, when the curfew was lifted, we said goodbye and left to find the x house. We had about two hours before the curfew was back on and Nate hoped to be back in the camp. We walked to one of the main streets in Bethlehem, Manger St. It was packed. People were mobbing stores that carried food, their last chance for another indefinite amount of time. We passed the Paradise Hotel, where a fire started during the previous Israeli invasion causing hundreds of thousands of dollars of damage.

Before the year 2000, European money was poured into Bethlehem to build the city up into a major tourist destination. At one point two thirds of all Bethlehem residents were somehow involved in the tourism industry. This culminated in the Bethlehem 2000 celebrations. Walking through Bethlehem, which was now totally fucked, there were still stars hanging from lampposts reading "Bethlehem 2000." A lot was destroyed, and everything achieved in the last ten years has been lost. Everything. (There have been articles about this in mainstream U.S. media; The Washington Post comes to mind.)

We found a taxi and set off in the direction the x’s lived. Their house was on the side of a large hill. There’s a kind of valley, populated with houses and other structures, and on the other side you can see the Church of the Nativity and the Old City. We drove past the Old City and I recognized the face of the hill their house was on. The taxi driver drove around and went up the hill from the side. Several times the car almost got stuck; something like twenty tanks seeking high ground had parked there weeks earlier, and totally destroyed the dirt roads.

We kept stopping and asking people where the x family lived and getting directions. When we finally found the house I convinced Nate to come in and meet my favorite Palestinian family while the taxi driver waited to take him back. One of their sons saw me, surprised, and led me inside. x, the father, was sleeping on a sofa. He woke up and hugged me, kissing me on both cheeks. x came out, and soon we were all sitting down, eating the cookies I’d brought. x said she would have liked to give me something, "but we have nothing." It was hard for the family to find work because of the constant closures of Bethlehem, and they were also low on food because of the curfew. One son was in Belgium and another was in the hospital after being shot in the leg.

Nate explained he had to get back to A'zza, and everyone tried to figure out how Nate and I would meet up the next day. The land phonelines were down, but the x’s had a cellphone, and Nate’s family in A'zza had one too. We exchanged their numbers and decided to call each other later that night, and meet the next day in front of the closed Bethlehem Hotel. This was on the other side of the Old City and the Church of the Nativity. A'zza was on one side, the Old City in the middle, and me and the x’s on the other side. I was worried about walking to the hotel for two reasons: I can never remember how to get anywhere, and that was not a good area to be walking around in under a murderous curfew. I’d never been to the Bethlehem Hotel before, and if I got lost, there would be no one to get directions from. I also had no cellphone. x told me not to go.

The curfew was about to end. To solve the problem of me finding the Bethlehem Hotel the next day, Nate and x came up with an idea. x and I would ride with Nate in the taxi to the hotel, then Nate would leave for A’zza and we would walk back to the x’s house, with me miraculously remembering the way the next morning. On Sunday I would walk back to the hotel, find Nate, and later we would meet up with x and the other demonstrators. I did not feel good about this plan. I worried about snipers and getting lost on Sunday.

We dropped Nate off and x and I started walking back. He said we should hurry; there was only fifteen minutes left in the curfew break. Walking through the Old City was unforgettable. It has narrow cobblestone streets and tall stone houses. The houses are connected with no spaces in between, like walls. Normally, this is a beautiful place.

Trash was everywhere, including large, stinking piles of burned garbage. Bullets were on the ground. Bullet holes in the houses. Windows broken. Dead cars were everywhere; they’d been burned, blown up, smashed. In some places the road was wet with slimy water or sewage. Other places were smoky from burning garbage. We walked fast. I tried to draw a map, writing down landmarks like "burned car" or "spray-painted blue Hebrew graffiti."

"There’s no way I’m going to find my way back tomorrow," I said to x. "Yes you will," he always replied. "It’s easy. Only one street." Because we were turning at intersections and going off in different directions, I didn’t consider the route to be one street. Eventually we were out of the Old City and started down an endless stone stairwell. At the bottom we walked up the hill to the Hiluo’s house.

I spent the rest of the day talking with x, x and their grown children. They’re the kind of people who, no matter what they say, it’s so true and so insightful you want to write it down. If you wrote everything down and made a book out of it, it would be a history and a philosophy book, and would win a Pulitzer and the Nobel Peace Prize. I resolved to write some kind of article about their family for the papers back home who wanted me to send them stories.

There was so much the x’s had been though that was indicative of what every Palestinian had been through. Relatives on x’s side of the family lived in a cave behind their house for seventeen years; x had been in prison for four years before he turned 21; the other sons couldn’t find work laying tile because Israel was allowing in massive numbers of Chinese laborers; there was a deep dimple in their metal front door made by an M-16 bullet. When "Operation Defensive Shield" started the x family spent ten days hiding in back rooms.

The story having to do with the x family I found myself emailing home about the most happened last June, before I’d ever even been to the West Bank. Further down the face of the hill they lived on was a shack. (The hill was densely populated with houses and other small buildings.) A man who supported Hamas sold chickens there. One day two Palestinian collaborators went and bought some chickens, and put some kind of homing transmitter in the shack. This could have looked like a cellphone or some other small everyday item.

x
was down there doing something and started back up towards his house. The two collaborators also left, and a few minutes later an F-16 fired a missile that honed in on the signal coming from the shack. The Hamas man was killed instantly. So were two other men who happened to be there. Four kids, all under twelve, were playing soccer nearby and three of them lost pieces of their bodies like arms and legs in the explosion. x, further up the hill, saw x come running to help the wounded. x was a __________ teacher with zero political affiliation. He’d taught members of the Hiluo family and was close with them. x screamed for him to get back but he kept going. A second missile hit, killing x and throwing his body twenty meters into the air. Then a third missile hit.

I heard this story the first day I was at the x’s with x after asking what the martyr poster in their living room was. Later, back in East Jerusalem, I asked x some more questions about what happened. He told me the Hamas man who was the original target had joined after friends of his were killed by the IDF. "Nathan," x said, "Never pick up the gun. If you do, you are already dead. You are only waiting to die."

That night we had soup with the best bread I have ever eaten. There was no meat, which was fine with me because I’m a vegetarian, but x apologized for this. Afterwards she brought out some jam and tried to get me to eat more. After dinner I talked politics with x and x, and then with xand xin the other room. We also watched some TV. (They got CNN.) I asked what the crane over the Church of the Nativity was, and we went outside and they pointed and explained there was a sniper in the box hanging from it. There were actually two cranes, plus a balloon with cameras on it. This was the second surveillance balloon the IDF had brought in; the first one had been shot down by Palestinians inside the church.

Much later, when it was dark out, the shooting started. I went with x and x to the window to see what was happening. We saw two tanks moving towards the church. They disappeared behind buildings and we heard them fire. They were shelling the church. The M-16 gunfire started to get heavier and heavier. I, like everyone who lives in the West Bank or Gaza, can recognize the different sounds M-16s, Kalashnikovs (also called AK-47s) and tank-mounted machineguns make. About ninety-five percent of the shooting was M-16, and occasionally there would be some Kalashnikov fire. Once or twice the Kalashnikov fire was automatic, but usually it was just a single shot, followed a few minutes later by another one.

The IDF fired flares over the church, and sound bombs too. Sound bombs are basically used to scare people; they explode with a tremendous noise and not much shrapnel. At protests they’re thrown into crowds and are absolutely terrifying. Worse than warning shots, more effective than tear gas. I can only imagine what the people in the church were thinking when the sound bombs were going off above them.

I crouched at the window with x and x. Eventually we had to crouch lower when we heard bullets whizzing past overhead. When it was all over the bell in the church began to ring. x said that meant something bad had happened. "Like someone got killed?" I asked. She said no, they didn’t ring the bell for that any more.

We turned on CNN and I found out what it was: parts of the church were burning. Walter Rogers came on (I think that’s his name), and started giving a live report. What he said was so amazing I had to grab a pen and start taking notes. (Those notes are still at the x’s, but I remember some of it.) He said he’d been in bed and was woken forty-five minutes ago by Kalashnikov gunfire. "It was almost as if every Palestinian with a gun decided to take it out and start taking pot shots at the Israelis," he said. "The Israelis responded with light arms fire."

The Palestinians inside mistakenly thought the IDF was trying to enter the church, so they started lighting fires. The Israelis, concerned for the church, offered to put out the fires, but the Palestinians refused to let them. Then the Israelis offered to bring in Palestinian firefighters to put out the blaze, but again the Palestinians refused. The Israelis were also, Rogers testified, making every effort to protect the sanctity of the Church of the Nativity because they knew that they would be blamed for whatever happened to it.

Rogers said something about being able to personally verify this claim, not mentioning the tanks that were shelling the church an hour earlier, or the soundbombs, or the flares. (I think the flares were what started the fires; they were burning and coming down on the church.) To illustrate this point, Rogers said he wanted to "tell an anecdote from when the Israelis were occupying Bethlehem a number of years ago." The Armenians, Franciscans and Greek Orthodox who ran the church were unable to decide who would fix the roof. Finally Israel halted the bitter argument by saying, "Fine, we will fix the roof of the church." His report was a lie.

When Rogers was talking there was lots of footage of the flames in the church. When it was over, somebody changed the channel to Al Jazeera, which was showing video of the sound bombs and flares being fired over it, and the sniper crane, pictures that wouldn’t have fit in with Rogers’ version. The audio was almost all M-16 fire. Earlier in the day x had told me he’d seen a CNN report on the Nativity Church standoff the night before. "I live in Bethlehem," he said. "I can see the church. I heard what they said and I wanted to break the TV."

The phones were jammed that night, so I wasn’t able to talk with Nate and confirm our meeting the next day. The x’s said sometimes the IDF would jam the signals when they were going to do something. I went to bed.

The next morning we had hot milk for breakfast. It was great—x put sugar in it. I was worried because I hadn’t been able to get through to Nate. x said this was good, it was too dangerous to go, anyway. Then, sometime that afternoon, I got through and we agreed to meet at 2:30 in front of the Bethlehem Hotel. When this was done I felt the first twinges of nervousness in my stomach because now I would have to walk there, through the Old City, while Bethlehem was under curfew.

x
told me not to go again. I said goodbye to everyone and told them not to worry if I didn’t come back that night; I didn’t know what would happen and thought I might sleep on the other side, at Nate’s or somewhere else. I also made lots of jokes about calling them to say goodbye from Ben Gurion Airport when I was deported. I left with only my wallet, passport, and a pen, wearing Dickies pants and a Makah Museum tee-shirt. I’d taken my Birzeit University student ID out of my wallet before leaving, in case the soldiers got me.

I walked down the hill and then up the endless stairs. I was very worried about snipers, and remembered all the horror stories I’d read about in newspapers, like the woman in Ramallah who stuck her head out the window to tell her kids to get inside and had it blown off. An American friend in Ramallah personally witnessed an IDF sniper taking aim at a house and firing twice. The next day they found out one of the bullets had hit a neighbor in the face while she sat in a chair by the window.

Going through the Old City was eerily quiet. Unlike when there was the curfew break and I walked through with x, now there was no one, only silence. As I went past piles of burned trash and broken everything, three little kids found me, all about 8 to 10-years-old. They showed me the live bullets they were collecting. One of them was carrying a sock with something the shape of a paperback book in it. He pulled out a loaded M-16 magazine and held it up for me to see. The littlest one demonstrated what it was for by pretending to hold a rifle and firing it. He made automatic firing sounds. "That is not good," I said in Arabic, pointing to the magazine. They pulled out a piece of metal, presumably from a shell or missile or rocket. When I left them the little one was still shooting.

Later I passed two more kids; a boy about 10 and a girl about 12. She told the other boy I was a Jew, and I told her I wasn’t. I said Israeli soldiers were bad and I wasn’t one. She didn’t believe me. I said I was American and a student at Birzeit University and she seemed to lighten up a little. I could see the sniper crane in the sky behind her—we were very close to the Church of the Nativity—and I tried to tell her to go inside. I passed other people, standing in the doorways of their apartment buildings.

I found my way out of the Old City and was almost to the hotel when I heard a noise and saw an IDF jeep coming down the road. I froze. Then, without thinking, I did the stupidest thing I have ever done in the West Bank. I sprinted into a building that had some Palestinian men in the doorway. They had already seen me, but got frightened when they saw me running towards them. They brought me inside and the jeep sped past.

Soon we were talking in English and they told me never to run. Another jeep went by, and an APC. We watched through a slit in the door. A tank went roaring by at about five miles-per-hour. It stopped down at the intersection where the hotel was. It seemed to take forever to turn and drive away. Another tank went past the intersection. By now I was worried about where Nate was; he would have to be hiding somewhere too.

After a few minutes of quiet I went out and walked to the Bethlehem Hotel, which was about one minute away. Nate had been hiding behind a wall in front of the hotel with some Palestinians. We set off for the refugee camp. There, we waited around for a while and then went to the x at about four.

Walking there, Nate said he was amazed we saw a few other people walking around. A week earlier, when he left Bethlehem for the first time in over a month and came to Birzeit, no one was challenging the curfew like this. People who went outside were being killed. One time, when he was on an ambulance run (as a human shield; ambulances take a lot of IDF fire), Nate saw a man lying in the middle of the street with his stomach blown open by a sniper. The dead man still had a plastic bag in his hand filled with bread and cigarettes. It took twenty minutes before the soldiers let the ambulance crew remove the body. As we walked and talked, Nate pointed out some snipers on the roof of one of the buildings, but I didn’t see them.

x
, from England, was there. She worked at the x and was also active with the International Solidarity Movement. She said everyone was outside, and behind the building were about twenty-five foreigners sitting on the pavement. (Not all of these people would be going to confront the soldiers.) They were all American and European, no one over age 30 except for a man named Dennis from the U.S. Earlier the Palestinians in the Church of the Nativity had contacted someone with ISM and said they needed food because people were starving, and foreigners who were willing to go into the church with them. The presence of internationals would stop the IDF from doing things like shelling the church or shooting at anything that moved. The people going in had already been chosen. One was a registered nurse; the rest were chosen to represent a wide range of nationalities.

I went inside and started bagging the food. There were noodles, lentils, rice, sugar, salt, a kind of spice you dip bread in, and Halwa candy. The food was put into as many different bags as possible, so if some of the bags didn’t make it into the church, there was a chance others would. x said salt was the most important item there. The people going in went to a nearby store and filled their backpacks with more food, for themselves when they got inside. We made signs; mine had an arrow pointing to the left and said "TEL AVIV 65km."

We broke up into about five groups. I was with Nate; I wanted to be sure to follow him because he had quite a bit of experience at protests and would know what to do if things got out of control. In chaotic, violent situations like confrontations with Israeli soldiers you usually want to do what everyone else is doing; I trusted Nate, and wanted to be close to him to see what he was doing. We were planning on whatever was going to happen to be ugly; the day before, when I was making Nate promise to call me at the x’s about the protest, he said he definitely would because he wanted to see me get my ass kicked. "It’s not going to be pretty," he said.

We were in small groups because there was a strong chance not all of the groups would make it to the door. Each group had some food, so the most important group was the one that was going inside; everyone else was basically expendable. x and x drew a map and debated about which route would be best to take. In the end it was decided people would enter Manger Square from two directions, with one group going first and hoping to draw the soldiers away from the other group, which included the people who would try to enter the church. To get to the front door of the Church of the Nativity, you emerge from the maze of the Old City and cross Manger Square. The square is about the size of three basketball courts. x and x’s map had the areas with barbed wire and barricades marked.

I had been worrying about getting shot, but at this point, looking at their map, I started getting seriously worried about being deported. That had been my worst fear since coming to the West Bank, that I would be involved in some protest and get arrested and deported. Nate was also doing some serious thinking about this possibility. Listening to x explain to everyone how we were going to get the food and people to the door, I couldn’t see how those of us not going in would get away.

But it had been done before, a few days earlier. Huwaida had surprised the soldiers and led a group across the square, getting all the way to the door. But the Palestinians inside didn’t know what was going on and wouldn’t open the door because of the snipers. The soldiers came and took the food and made everyone sit down. The activists did, then x told them to stand up and start walking. The soldiers-kids, really-didn’t know what to do and everyone walked away, disappearing into the Old City.

In the event that the group going inside couldn’t get to the door, an alternate for each group was needed. I volunteered. Then I started to think about it; the people who went inside would eventually be caught and most likely deported, not matter how the siege ended. There was no way they would get away. I started talking with Nate about this—I could not be deported; I was making a life for myself in Palestine and wanted to stay for many years. I changed my mind and said I didn’t want to be the alternate and someone else in my group, Trevor Baumgartner, 27 and from Seattle, volunteered.

x
and several other people left to go the Old City and see if anything had changed in the area around the church; more barricades, soldiers on patrols, shooting—anything that might affect what we were going to do. I kept asking Nate what the chances of getting deported were if we got caught. Three English girls in our group were also getting worried about what the soldiers’ reaction might be when we entered Manger Square. I was pretty scared by then too; this was probably going to be the most dangerous thing I’d done in the West Bank. The fears of being deported started to fade, replaced by old fears of getting shot, much stronger this time around.

Georgie came back and said it was a go. I ran inside to go to the bathroom one last time, then took my plastic bag of food and joined the others. We set out in two large groups, planning to rendezvous inside the Old City by Manger Square. There were about ten people in my group. We went through Bethlehem, passing kids in the streets who watched us curiously. Inside the Old City it started getting very, very frightening. The anticipation is the worst. I knew there might be shooting but really didn’t know what would happen. "I just don’t want to get deported," I said to Nate several times.

During the last few minutes walking to Manger Square there was no talking, only whispering; we didn’t want to alert the snipers, or the troops that could be around any corner. We were ahead of the second group, so when we got close to the church we stopped. Nate told everyone to get off of the street. We went into an alley and waited about five minutes with hardly any talking. I sat down and thought about things; what was about to happen was going to be very serious. Most of the dangerous situations in the West Bank and Gaza I’d been in had come suddenly, with little warning, so there wasn’t time to sit worrying about it beforehand.

The other group arrived. Some people started to talk and other people shushed them. We whispered to each other. My group was told to go first. As we set off, Nate pulled out his passport and gave it to x because she wasn’t going all the way with us. He did this so if we got arrested it would be hard for the IDF to identify us. Sometimes, if you had no ID they would just let you go after a few hours. I handed over my passport too.

We walked down streets and through corridors, past barricades and surprised groups of journalists. Some of them followed us. One man with a videocamera must have got in someone’s way, because he angrily said, "I’m not in your way!" We were still trying to be quiet.

I was with about ten people when we stepped into Manger Square. There was a tank off to the left, about fifty meters away, and a line of barbed wire that ran across the entire square. The church was about 150 meters away. It looked like a gigantic stone wall. We raised our hands above our heads and walked quickly. You don’t want to run in these kinds of situations because that forces a 19-year-old Israeli soldier with a machinegun to make a split-second decision, which may be to kill you. "Stay together," Nathan said calmly. "Stay together." The other group came out of another street, closer to the tank. Now there were twenty-two people in the square with their hands raised, moving towards the church. The barbed wire was coiled, and people were stepping on each strand to get over. My legs were long enough I got over it with a little hop.

It wasn’t scary any more; things were happening very quickly and there was no time to worry. Shouting in Hebrew, then screaming in Hebrew. A soldier ran out from the left side of the square by the Peace Center, a building built by the government of Sweden that the Israelis had occupied and made their military command post. He tackled Johannes Wahlstrom, a 21-year-old from Sweden. I passed about five feet from them. They were both on the ground and Johannes had his hands up, the soldier still pulling on him. "Okay, okay," Johannes was saying. A few seconds later I was at the door.

The Door of Humility is a little over one meter high, so you have to bow down to go through. We stood in front of it, blocking it with our bodies so the snipers wouldn’t be able to fire inside. x told us to raise the signs so the Israelis wouldn’t be able to see what was happening. The door opened. I couldn’t see anything inside, only blackness. People where going in. They would bend over and disappear, one after the other. Huwaida was at the door handing in the food. I handed in my bag of food and the door closed, the whole process over in about thirty seconds. There was cheering from inside the church.

It did help. A lot. After the internationals went in only one Palestinian was killed in the eight days that followed before the standoff ended, Khalef Nagagra, a Bethlehem policeman and father of eleven whose house had been destroyed by the IDF. A certified nurse was among those who went in; she was able to treat Nagagra, who died after being handed over to the IDF.

The people inside the church were literally starving to death; they were eating grass and the leaves of a lemon tree. We didn’t give them much food, but it was something. That day there were forty Palestinians who had decided to surrender to the IDF instead of starving. This definitely would have meant jail, and probably torture. (Read the Amnesty International reports on the treatment of Palestinian prisoners in Israel.) When the food and human shields got in they decided not to.

According to the Israelis and the lawyer doing the negotiating for the Palestinians, what we did canceled the agreement that the two sides were very close to reaching. This was good. Afterwards the Palestinians had more to negotiate with, may have got a better deal in the end. The shooting directed at the church, which had almost been a nightly occurrence, stopped after the internationals went in. So did the alarms and barking noises the IDF blasted over high-powered speakers aimed at the church. Our action also helped the morale of the Palestinians inside the church, and, we were told, that of their families on the outside.

The twelve of us on the outside looked around at each other after the door closed; all the food had gone in, and so had the human shields. "Okay, go," someone said. We started walking back across Manger Square. Photographers came out of the Peace Center, ran up to us, and started taking pictures. They walked in front of us walking backwards and got right in people’s faces.

Soldiers were also rushing out of the Peace Center, running over to us and grabbing people. We linked our arms together in an attempt to stay together. I was linked up with Nate on the right side, and someone else who was pulled away on the left. People were talking to the soldiers, trying to calm them down. The soldiers were shouting in English and Hebrew. People were on the ground being kicked. A soldier got Nate in a headlock and started dragging him towards the Peace Center. I went with them, still linked up with Nate and trying to pull him away. We were separated from the others. When we were almost to the Peace Center I realized the only reason I was being dragged with him was because my arm was linked with his. I looked across Manger Square at the Old City and saw no soldiers.

I unlinked my arm from Nate’s and started walking quickly across the square, to the streets we’d came in from. I didn’t look back, and no one chased me. It was a very strange sensation; the further away I got the more invisible I felt. I couldn’t believe no one was coming after me. "I’m escaping!" I remember thinking.

I went down a street into the Old City. A young soldier was crouched along the wall, his M-16 pointed at the church. I raised my hands and yelled, "American citizen! Don’t shoot!" (I’ve said this many, many times in the West Bank.) He was about 21 and waved me towards him. I kept going, walking around him in a wide arc. I turned right, and saw two soldiers. They shouted for me to stop and I yelled back that I had no weapon. I turned around and walked as fast as I could in the opposite direction. Ahead of me was another corner where I could turn right or left. A blue metal barricade was in front of it, and directly across was a soldier leaning out of a second-story window screaming at me to stop. I shouted that I was American and he shouldn’t shoot, and that I had no weapon. My hands were still up. I went past the barricade and two more soldiers came around from the right, I started to go left but there was one there, too. There was nowhere to go, so I stopped and put down my hands.

"What are you doing?" one of the soldiers shouted. "I don’t really know that myself," I replied. "Are you drunk," someone asked, angry. "No," I said. "Then why don’t you know what you’re doing?" "Well," I said, "I’m a Christian and I wanted to go to the church to pray because it’s Sunday, but there’s something going on over there. Can I just"—I pointed past him down the street—"go?" "No," the soldier said.

Two of the soldiers ordered me to follow them, and they sat me down on some steps, then took up positions covering the church. Others walked by, looking at me and talking to with each other in Hebrew. Behind me was a door, and beside me a barricaded corridor that I could see sunlight at the end of. The soldier nearest me kept looking back every ten seconds to make sure I was still there. When he wasn’t looking, I was stealing glances at the corridor, thinking about running for it. I decided they probably wouldn’t shoot because they knew I was not a Palestinian or any kind of fighter. I was there for about a minute. I was getting close to running for it when a soldier came over to me and said to follow him.

He took me down one street and we turned right, back towards Manger Square. He pointed a finger at me and said, "Don’t even think about running." I looked behind me and saw a barricade with about fifteen journalists behind it taking pictures. (They were at the position you always see the Church of the Nativity from in the news, down a street on the left side of Manger Square. Sometimes the IDF would put smoke bombs there to block the view; that’s what the tank was also there for.)

He led me around the tank, towards the Peace Center. At the doorway of the Peace Center about seven of the ISM people were on the ground, their arms linked. Soldiers were trying to pull them apart and they were talking to reporters who were taking pictures. Then I was inside the Peace Center.

* * *

Twenty five days and several prisons later there were only five of us left, Nathan Musselman included, and we spent our last eight hours before being deported in an airport detention facility. While there, we called Georgie to say goodbye. The IDF had left Bethlehem two weeks earlier, but she said they were entering the city again and reoccupying, going after the eighty-five people in the church who were allowed to return to their homes in Bethlehem under the agreement that ended the standoff, and their families too. There was shooting in the background. I looked at Nate and he looked at me, neither of us able to say anything.