What is it going to take to save Palestine? Everybody realizing that they have a choice. Who has a choice? The soldiers who stand at the roadblock at the entrance to Hares every morning and claim they want peace have a choice. When I ask them why they are standing there with a machine gun if they want peace, they tell me they have no choice. I ask them if they have heard of the soldiers who refuse to serve. Then w e would end up in prison, they tell me. A difficult choice, but still a choice.

Who has a choice? The shops in my village which stock Israeli products because of the popular perception that they are better. The people who buy Israeli milk instead of buying Palestinian milk because they say it lasts longer. Everyone who buys from the Occupier has a choice. The choice to go without the fake Israeli orange juice or mediocre soda that people buy as a status symbol to show they have the extra money to make the purchase.

Who has a choice? The Jewish Israelis who live in settlements because it’s cheaper than living in Israel. I found out today that only about 20,000 Russian Jewish immigrants end up living in the settlements. About 9,000 of them live down the road from me in Ariel. Why do so many of them choose not to live in the settlements despite the enormous subisidies?

Who has a choice? The Palestinians who work for construction companies that are building the wall. The Palestinians who have built settlement after settlement, the Palestinian who is building the wall on top of his very own land that the occupier stole from him. You have a lot of children, you have to feed them. Could there be any other way? Do we sometimes have to invent more choices if it seems like there is only one option?

Who has a choice? The Israelis who sit outside of the Palestinian shops on the settler road, have coffee and talk in Hebrew with the Palestinians. Who insist that the Palestinian pharmacist is their good friend and they go way back, but who also insist that the wall in our district will not be such a big problem and that the Palestinians will be able to get around it. When I ask them if they have ever thought about doing anything on behalf of Palestinians if they really disagree with the Occupation, they say, ‘What can we do? This is a political problem. It’s up to Sharon, not up to us. Afterward I talk to the Palestinian pharmacist about what they said. ‘I’ve told them over and over again that this wall is going to destroy our lives’ he tells me.

Who has a choice? Does the religious zealot have a choice? What are the motivations inside the minds of such people? Should I choose to believe that they are deeply wounded individuals, that there is a way of reasoning with them if it could only be figured out? The religious Jews who push their way through the crowded Arab quarters of the old city of Jerusalem, shouting without saying a word. The settlers from the Itamar outpost who come down into the village of Yanoun with their machine guns and spit in the faces of the international accompaniers. Why do they choose this?

Where is the rest of the world? What about the choices of people who claim to be with the Palestinians? The Arab governments? When it comes to really making a choice in the matter, what do they choose? Why are the wealthy governments of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Quwait, Qatar, not donating funds to buy as much property in Jerusalem as possible for Palestinians to live in, to counteract the Judaization policy going on there? Now the Jewish population of Jerusalem outnumbers the Palestinian population and Palestinians are losing their Jerusalem residency every day.

Why is there no coordinated plan to support families who refuse to work on the wall? Why does Arafat choose not to lead his people in a coordinated way to resist the wall? Why do Palestinians choose to bomb buses at this stage instead of driving explosives directly into the wall, knowing that it costs $2 million per kilometer to build, and if it gets destroyed, Israel will not afford to keep building it.

What is the choice for the USers. Coordinated tax resistance would certainly have an impact on this situation. For this to be effective, however, it relies on the choices of many people. People who cannot be coerced into making a certain choice, but must make it on their own because of their own convictions. Who will be convicted enough to organize the US population in an effective way? Who will make the choice not to try because it doesn’t seem feasible?

I am in the land of finger pointing and shifting of blame. I am in a place where everyone would like to be the absolute victim, where there is little rational thought. The soldier with a gun tells me about how Palestinian children throw stones during Israeli incursions with tanks and armored personnel carriers. ‘It’s really unbelievable’ he says. ‘They tell their children that they must kill the Jews. They are like Nazi’s’. I find what he’s saying truly unbelievable. A Palestinian village that is threatened by settlers is completely fractured internally. Everyone is suspicious of everyone else and especially of the mayor. ‘You must be together’ I offer, ‘if you’re going to defeat the settlers. You’re playing into their hands’. You’re right, you’re absolutely right, they reply. The gossip and ill will continues. Who will decide to stop it? ‘What can we do?’ people repeat over and over.

There is no parity here, no symmetry. As Edward Said said (Allah yerhamu) the Zionists are the oppressors and the Palestinians are the victims. But everyone has their choice, no matter how limited. The choice to flee before the massacre happens or stay to see if it will happen.

There are two heroes I want to mention, Munira and Hani Amer. Their house is about to be enclosed in a literal cage, between the apartheid wall and the fence of a settlement. The army has told them that they will be allowed out of the cage three times a day, but no one can come in to see them. There is no plan for what happens if someone gets sick in the middle of the night, or if one of their children is held up at school and therefore misses his chance to be let back into the cage. Munira and Hani were offered a blank check by the Israeli forces to ‘legitimately’ buy their land so that they would leave their house, it could be demolished and there would be no evidence of the cage or the situation. They refused. That was the choice they made, not to be coerced under any circumstances into selling Palestinian land. Their choice was to learn from their ancestors, the lessons of the past. Maybe you think they are crazy for not taking the money and getting out, as some people do even now in parts of Jerusalem and on land that is wanted for settlements. They are offered money and their transport out of the country is arranged in the middle of the night so no one even knows they are leaving until the neighbors wake up the next morning to see a big Israeli flag flying in the next door window. How tempting that must be. Everyone has a choice to think of their own conditions as separate from those of the rest of their people. Everyone has a choice to make their own situation better in the short term at the expense of the rest of their people. Everyone has the choice to think in terms greater than just their family, in terms of their whole village, their whole nation of millions of people, people they can never know in totality but decide to think on behalf of anyway.

The choice before me now is to keep getting out of bed everyday, and to challenge myself to decide that I have the possibility of having some positive impact on this situation. That is my choice.

Oh I must keep my heart inviolate
Against the potent poison of your hate
-Claude McKay