Palestinian Home Stay

Last night we and another couple stayed together in the home of a Palestinian family in the village of Anin, just outside the Palestinian town of Jenin, in the northern West Bank Occupied Territory. This is a unique opportunity that traveling with an IFPB delegation offers, one that not many people from the West ever have and that almost no Israelis experience because they cannot travel in the Occupied Territories.

The family we stayed with was headed by an olive farmer named Hawer. He and his wife, whose name was hard to get, but we think was Khadina, have ten children. We saw eight if them in the house, and interacted with all but the oldest girl who was not introduced to us. The oldest two were away at school.

As a younger man, Hawer had served in the Palestinian Security Forces and was on Yassar Arafat's personal security detail. Our impression was that he had returned to his village and was farming and raising his family since the end of the 90's, before the second intifada began jn 2000.

One of the results of the security matrix of control that Israel has implemented since then has been that the security fence built with the road to a nearby Israeli settlement has cut off Hawer's access to his family's olive trees. The Israelis won't give him a permit to cross the fence to care for and harvest his trees, because of his military history. He is able to continue to farm olives because the Canaan Fair Trade Cooperative's Tree of Life Program has purchased and planted new trees for him to cultivate outside the security zone.

Hawer's family has been in Anin In this house since 1972 when his father began to build it - we weren't certain how much time prior to that. The legendary hospitality of the Palestinians did not surprise us. We were warmly welcomed, and the living and dining rooms on the main floor of the house were converted into private bedrooms for us. The family slept on the upper floors. We had translation from a friend in the neighborhood, an engineer who had studied in Paris and spoke both English and French. In the morning, when no translation was available, we got by with typed conversation on Google's translation program on the I Pad. (The kids were fascinated by the Photo Booth program on the I Pad, by the way.)

When we talked politics, we found that Hawer and his wife didn't always express the same opinions. They are not fans of the current Palestinian Authority President Abbas, but support the two-state solution.

The most powerful thing about our visit was our encounter with the children, and particularly the sixteen year old boy who hung in for all the conversation and was proficient with the I Pad. We wondered about his future, and whether his obvious potential will be locked into his village and culture or whether he will have any other choices available to him. Palestine's average age is young, and there are young men in the streets everywhere, we presume with limited employment prospects. It doesn't surprise us that their frustration is something that the Israelis are very worried about.

Location:Jenin, Palestine