By Lauren Costello, Gavel Writer -

Imagine living under a roof occupied by a soldier 24 hours a day, seven days a week. This soldier stands idly by as your house is attacked, as the steel rods over your windows are hit with large rocks, trash is thrown into your yard, and even when your house is invaded by illegal settlers who believe that God is on their side. Imagine this soldier intimidating visitors, listening in with his machine gun clearly visible and reporting their conversations.

This is exactly what life is like for the Palestinian family that I met in the contested city of Hebron/Al Khalil in the occupied West Bank. I was among a group of Boston College students that visited the area at the beginning of January. I was shocked and disturbed by the horrendous conditions in which Palestinians are forced to live.

No amount of reading in class could have prepared me for the experience of going through a checkpoint in the West Bank, for hearing anti-Arab racism casually, unselfconsciously expressed, or for seeing the daily injustices of life in “the world’s largest open air prison,” as one woman described her society.

One night we were abruptly awakened by an Israeli soldier yelling outside, demanding that the family car be moved to accomadate road closings. Seeing the silent exasperation on their faces quickly let me know that this was just another inconvenience that they had to accept.

Before my trip, I could have explained to you the history of the conflict and how the map of Palestine has been steadily decreasing since 1967 due to the checkpoints and the separation wall. I would have been able to argue which sociological framing of the conflict (apartheid, sociocide) made the most sense to me, and I could have made a convincing argument as to why I believe a one-state solution is the only just possibility for the region at this point. While this ‘conflict’ may appear to be a war between people – a war shaped by different religious and cultural beliefs – it is actually about power and control shaped by political interests that use racist ideology to breed hatred among its citizens.

Imagine, however, what it’s like to be a Palestinian child walking to school daily past graffiti that says: “What’s the difference between an Arab and a trampoline? You take off your shoes to jump on a tram¬poline.” Additionally, less than five minutes away a Palestinian market functions as usual, except for the steel mesh overhead designed to protect shoppers from the bricks, trash and sewage-filled plastic bags that Israeli settlers throw down on the market.

I could not have foreseen what we would learn during our home¬stays in the Dheisheh refugee camp in the holy city of Bethlehem. We met families who could not feed their children and had lived in Dheisheh for three generations but still managed to hope that one day their lives would be different.

In my host family, the parents now have two different identification cards, and the father will not be able to see the birth of his third child because he is banned from entering Jerusalem to go to the hospital ten minutes away from his house.

Along with the horror, we also saw enterprise and hope embodied in the Palestinian Fair Trade As¬sociation that brings organic olive oil to a Whole Foods near you. We saw the amazing persistence of a Prisoners’ Rights NGO (Adda¬meer) that continues to fight injustice despite the fact that they are working within a prejudiced court system and 70 percent of Palestinian men will spend time in jail.

Mostly, there is an incredible gallantry of daily non-violent resistance. The attempt to live an ordinary Palestinian life amid the checkpoints, land seizures, road closures, and daily insults is truly admirable. While Palestinians nev¬er get used to the daily assaults on their lives, large or small, they meet these difficulties with “sumud.” This means a mix of forbearance and steadfastness that my host family explained in this way: “You have to just do it and move on with your day, because if you let it get to you all the time, you’d go insane. You can’t stop living.”

In some ways our trip can be viewed much like every other service or immersion trip; we saw poverty, resilience, and the requi¬site number of cute, photogenic children. And like most service trips, we are now challenging ourselves to find ways to put our knowledge and our experience to work in service to the world.

This trip is distinguished by the fact that the injustices we saw were not produced by a natural disaster or the slowly unfolding consequences of our capitalist system. The gross injustice we witnessed is produced by an illegal occupation that is crucially supported by American foreign aid, your tax dollars and mine.

We also found that as Americans of conscience, we have strong partners in both Palestine and Israel. A broad array of Palestinian organizations (representing rural and urban, secular and religious groups, academics, professionals, craftspeople, folks in the West Bank, Gaza and the refugee camps of the diaspora) invite us to join with them in a program of boycotts, sanctions and divestments against Israel that would impose non-violent but real costs on the illegal occupation (with the full support and encouragement of Israeli NGOs and human rights organizations, such as Who Profits and Zochrot). We all left Palestine with a clear message: time is running out, and this issue could not be more urgent. The question now is this: how do we, at BC, take up this call to action?

By Sue Byun, Assoc. News Editor -

This semester, several Boston College students have formed a new student activism group, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). The group, which is still waiting for the administration’s approval of their constitution, plans to work closely with the Student Programs Office, along with other groups such as BC Hillel and the Arab Student Association, toward pursuing a just peace to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Continue Reading