My father… I didn’t see him. He didn’t have a chance to work in Palestine so he moved away to Germany until he died. I needed to continue with my life so I got married, had a family and God give me something – he gave me five kids.

My kids did well in school and finished High School with high marks and they want to go to universities. I don’t have enough money for the university in my country so I work different kinds of jobs – I work in the olive trees, I work in the almond trees, I work in the factories of Tel Aviv. I also worked as school teacher.

My house is not too far from the place I work – just seven minutes. But to reach my work, it takes 12 hours. I have a family, they have Eid and special days. They want me to stay with them, to laugh with them, to cry with them, but I can’t. Why? I don’t have permission to go there. So I need to go around. It’s the most amazing thing when you can see your house but you can’t talk to anybody for 30 days, 60 days, because if I want to go back home, I can’t come back to work. I need to stay in the job.

Live where? Nobody give us a house or a car. We are living in the mountains, under the trees. It’s not easy to live like this. We can’t move. They don’t have enough jobs so we need to look around, but nobody gives us a chance. Not in Jordan, not in Kuwait – they kicked us out in 1991. Jordan they have enough people. Lebanon, Syria, the area around us? No chance.

This is our situation and we pray to our God to live in peace and to send our kids to school, to give them a new life, not the life we have.

Sometimes my friends ask me ‘why did your face get old so quickly?’ Why? I am working 17, 18, 19… sometimes 21 hours a day under the sun and living in stress. When I go to the doctor and ask him to refresh my face or something like that, he says “You need to rest, not to get nervous!” Not to get nervous! When living this life?

My skin is like the skin of the olive tree, and olive trees are holy for us. They are like part of the family – they suffer with us.

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We live in a place called Efrat, which is mentioned several times in the Old Testament, first in the book of Genesis. The place itself is surrounded by biblical events. When Rachel, Jacob’s wife dies, he buries her on the way to Efrat.

If I look out of my window, I can see a lovely valley where we know that the Patriarchs of the bible would walk. When it says again in Genesis that Abraham took his son Isaac and walked to Mount Moriah where he was meant to sacrifice him – and in the story of the bible it says that he saw that place from far – he walked right through that valley and probably at the place of Efrat is the first place from which you can see the Mount of Moriah (which, today, is the Temple Mount in Jerusalem).

The book of Ruth plays in the fields of Bethlehem that we see outside our window. King David was born in Bethlehem which is about five minutes to our north, and started his rule in Hebron which is 15 minutes to our south. Slowly but surely he moved up and became the King of Jerusalem and Israel.

The story of the Maccabean battles against the Greeks happened right on the hill opposite us in a place called Elazar.

So the place is full of ancient history and I think it’s ancient history that brought us back – us in general as the Jewish people who came back to Israel, and us in particular as a family that came from Europe for many generations, both my wife from England and 10 generations of my family from Switzerland. It brought us back to an area where we can really feel and touch history and make history, and where we feel we belong.

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The Bedouin community originated in the Negev Desert in the southern area of the Dead Sea. In 1948, the Bedouin were dispersed, with some settling in the West Bank. Currently, less than half of the Bedouin community in the Holy Land lives in the Jordan region. Approximately 50 Bedouin, mainly from the Jahalin tribe, live in the area between East Jerusalem and the West Bank.

In 2012, a civil administration order was issued to the community. In 2014 an eviction order followed. Two years later the Jahalin faced a demolition order and, in 2017, a further demolition order. As the land is religious land, the Bedouin refuse to be transferred to a refugee camp. Being enclosed in one space presents complex issues for the Bedouin as they are nomadic peoples.

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I was born into the first 19 years of Israeli normalcy and most of my life I lived in a situation in which my state of Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza – despite the will of the Palestinian people and against their motivation for self-determination. Most of my life is dedicated to changing this reality and to go back to my early childhood and the better years of Israel.

As a matter of fact, I believe that peace will appear one day – deus ex machina. All of a sudden it will be here. Nobody will expect it; nobody will know where it comes from and all of a sudden it will be here.

I witnessed it once when President Sadat [of Egypt] visited Israel. Only four years earlier, I fought against him at Sinai as a young solider. He was feared to death by the Egyptian military and all of a sudden he became a hero.

I saw it happening out of the first intifada – the Palestinian uprising. Out of nowhere Oslo came [the Oslo Accords] as a top-down peace, and 70% of both populations were carried on the wings of euphoria. And I believe the next one will come in the same way.

One day many people will create the critical mass and say “enough is enough – let’s go the other way” – and the other way is peace.

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I did my military service between 2013 and 2015 in the Nablus region; I served in the civil administration. The civil administration is basically the bureaucracy of the occupation, behind the scenes of everything that goes on in the West Bank and my job was specifically in an operations room in the Nablus region.

Maybe I will say one word about where I came from? I grew up in Jerusalem to a religious family, a modern-orthodox, Jewish family, so I wasn’t supposed to go to the military. If you are a religious woman you can abstain from service, but I wanted, well, at least in high school, I wanted very much to serve, and throughout time I learned more about what is happening in the territories and about the occupation, and I decided that the right thing for me to do was to go and serve, especially in the West Bank.

I think, like a lot of soldiers in Breaking the Silence, I had the idea that I would be the good soldier in the bad situation. I think that the reason for me, that I decided to join Breaking the Silence and give testimony is that what I experienced is this very strong clash of values. I was being raised on religious values of respecting other people, and not doing any harm to anyone, and then what I saw throughout my service is the system of occupation and how it controls the every day life aspects of Palestinians. Whether it is movement, whether it is their ability to visit family, their ability to go to work and to have a dignified life. But I think that the most powerful thing for me was to see settlers in the West Bank, and specifically in the Nablus region where there are a lot of very extreme settlers. The violence that they commit against Palestinians or their property is not taken care of, so the law is not enforced on them, definitely not in the way that it is enforced on Palestinians, who are under military law. Also just to see that these are people that define themselves as religious people, who believe, and wear a kippah and who are supposed to respect Shabbat, and all these rituals, but when it comes to harming Palestinians or their property…

Suddenly we will see a situation where we get a complaint from a Palestinian in one of the villages, who in the middle of the night on Friday night, which is Shabbat, hears the sound of an electric saw. So soldiers go out there in the middle of the night and they find a settler, cutting down olive trees with an electric saw on Shabbat, when according to Jewish law, you are not supposed to use electricity. So things like that – or even just children that go out to the junction and throw stones on Shabbat at Palestinian cars.

People who are identifying themselves as religious Jews, and speaking kind of on my behalf as the Jewish people, the Jewish country, all these ideals, but are willing to bend those rules when it comes to harming Palestinians or their property. And I think that my friends and my family, and the place that we come from, we don’t talk about this. We don’t talk about it in Israeli society at large. So I wanted to talk about it and tell people that this is happening in our name.

It’s not just some extremists here are there, it’s a system that allows that to happen and we have to do something about it. This is part of the occupation. It’s not just violent civilians that the police can take care of, it is part of the system, it is part of what the occupation allows.

Because of the occupation we have violence. It is a cycle of violence going back and forth so, of course, Israeli people are also hurt by this. Terrorist attacks, and soldiers having to go and guard these settlements and risk their lives, and go into Gaza every two years and get killed. So of course we are victims, but we are not the ultimate victims.

We are not talking about the conflict at large, we are talking about occupation, and in occupation there is the occupier and the people who are occupied. We are the occupiers and we have the responsibility.

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