Welcome to My Journey
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I love parentheses. They reflect how my brain works (thoughts within thoughts within thoughts,) and you’ll be seeing a lot of them.
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I leave for Israel and Palestine on Thursday - it’s crazy how these things sneak up on you! The first few days will be spent with family friends in Tel Aviv before heading to Jerusalem for my Hineinu orientation. While I can’t wait to begin this journey, I am already missing my cats (even if they are snuggling with me as I write this.)
The purpose of this newsletter is to share updates about my experience with the Center for Jewish Nonviolence (CJNV) in the West Bank. I’ll be providing protective presence for Palestinian shepherding communities south of Hebron in Masafer Yatta, an area where communities face constant threat of land dispossession and harassment.
I’ve been asked a lot, “what exactly will you be doing?”
According to CJNV’s website,
“Hineinu activists support local communities, shepherds, and activists in Masafer Yatta resist land dispossession through accompanying shepherds and documenting settler attacks, military violence, home demolitions, and land seizures.”
This means I’lll spend time out in the fields with shepherds and their flocks, walk kids to school, support other activists in the area, and anything else that may be useful to the community.
In the best-case-scenario, I’ll enjoy the outdoors and build meaningful connections with this resilient community. While these moments certainly will happen, the day-to-day challenges are often much darker. Much of my time will likely be spent supporting them as they face harassment from extremist settlers and the Israeli military. There are many ways to offer this support, but I’ll hold off on diving into details until I have some on the ground experience.
I highly recommend watching No Other Land, a documentary about Masafer Yatta that was recently nominated for an Oscar. (Warning: It contains discussions of war, displacement, and graphic depictions of human suffering that may be distressing to some viewers.)
I’m grateful (and a little nervous!) to have this space to share my experiences with you. I hope these updates will shed light on the resilience of the communities I’ll be working alongside. While this trip is grounded in activism, it’s also deeply tied to my commitment to peacebuilding - not just as a goal, but as a guiding principle that shapes how I see the world and my place in it. I’ll share more about how this experience fits into that vision in a future post.
Thank you for your interest, support, and curiosity—it truly means so much to me. I look forward to sharing more with you as this journey unfolds.
More soon,
Jenna