What I Witnessed in the Holy Land

Visiting Israel, Palestine, and the Golan Heights on the eve of war

In March and April of 2023, some six months before the October 7 Hamas-led attacks that precipitated Israel’s year-long assault on Gaza, I spent two weeks traveling in the areas which are labeled “Israel,” “the West Bank,” and “the Golan Heights” on current maps. I have made some social media posts about these experiences, but here I have attempted to place them in the context of a longer narrative. The resulting post is too long to fit into the email newsletter format, but I have decided against breaking it into smaller posts in hopes that it will be read as a single essay.

The first difficulty I encountered in attempting to write about my experiences is how I should title my post. Simply saying “Israel” or “Israel and the Occupied Territories” erases the other entities superimposed here, while “Israel/Palestine” inaccurately implies some kind of symmetry, as if these are two opposing nations locked in a struggle for dominance rather than a military superpower and a stateless population. While “Palestine” has historically been applied to the nearly all of the area currently occupied by the state of Israel, it does not include the Golan Heights, a part of Syria which Israel has occupied since 1967.