In May 2021, a massive escalation of violence in Israel-Palestine led to Israeli air raids that killed sixty-seven Palestinian children in Gaza and more than 200 adults. That same month, Israeli forces injured thousands of Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem, and there were instances of vigilant violence against Palestinians across the region.
I was the victim of one such incident. While participating in the Hineinu project with the Center for Jewish Non-Violence (CJNV), I was attacked by extremist Israeli settlers. Shortly after helping a young Palestinian boy draw water from a local well, a seventy-three-year-old activist named Bob Subeiri and I were attacked by a group of settlers.
Our attackers, armed with wooden and metal poles, had covered their faces to avoid being identified. One of them hit me in the knee, another tried to choke me, and a third destroyed the windows and mirrors of our car. At some point, I dropped my phone, and a settler tossed it into a nearby valley, destroying it. A pool of blood trickled out from the back of Bob’s head after he’d been pushed over and landed on sharp rocks.
All of this was, surprisingly, not the worst part of my day.
After I called the police to report the incident, an officer arrived and told me, “You’re involved, but you’re also a suspect,” while ordering me to go to the local station for questioning. Eventually, a staff member from CJNV named Oriel Eisener drove me to the station, which is located in a settlement called Kiryat Arba. Once there, Oriel was also brought in for questioning.
“I know you’re full of shit” was the first thing the cop who would eventually interrogate me said. “I know you speak Hebrew. You have an Israeli accent.”
Of course, while I have Israeli citizenship, I was born and raised in New York. And, in fact, I have a thick Long Island accent. This was simply an attempt by the cop to gaslight me and coerce me into being interrogated in my second language.
When I answered “no” to the question “Are you a terrorist?,” the officer responded by saying “That wasn’t a good ‘no.’ ”
The interrogation felt like it lasted several hours. I was still jarred by the attack, so for all I know, it could’ve only been fifteen minutes. I was asked an increasingly absurd series of questions, such as “You were attacked by five people with poles and there’s not a scratch on you?”
In reality, at that moment Bob was in the hospital, and I was limping and bleeding from my knee.
When I answered “no” to the question “Are you a terrorist?,” the officer responded by saying “That wasn’t a good ‘no.’ ” The crime that I was being accused of magically shifted from “shoving a minor” to “assaulting two minors with a club” with no explanation. Never mind that I obviously did neither of those things. The officer also called my T-shirt, which happened to have Arabic writing on it, an “incitement of violence and an act of treason.”
After my interrogation, I was banned from the West Bank for two weeks, and prohibited from speaking to “anyone involved in the incident” for thirty days. Oriel, who was not present during the attack, was also interrogated and received the same treatment. Now banned from the West Bank, we drove back into Israel in our freshly-damaged car. I had entered the police station at about 6 p.m. that night and it was 4 a.m. by the time we arrived back in Jerusalem.
This was still not the worst part of the experience.
About a day and a half later, I had a panic attack. I don’t know if it was because of the sleep deprivation, the emotional whiplash I’d experienced over those few days, a combination of both, or something else entirely.
All I know is that everything felt far away. I broke down crying in the middle of a cafe, and I had to be held by a friend for an indeterminate amount of time. I thought I’d never feel normal again. Sometimes, I still think that way. Every time I become even slightly nervous, I worry that I’m having another panic attack. I am quite literally afraid of fear itself. I’m terrified to even think about what could have happened if I had been alone that afternoon.
Beyond being assaulted and interrogated, this panic attack has had a horrible lasting effect on my activism. While I’m slowly recovering, I’ve spent the past two years being unable to put my body on the line to the extent that is necessary. When I’m confronting extremist settlers or being tear-gassed by the Israeli military, I find myself concerned that my racing heart and my feeling of stress point to an oncoming panic attack. I seem to have forgotten that it would be concerning if I felt any other way in those situations.
Everything I experienced has been designed to keep activists from showing concrete solidarity with Palestinians living under Israeli occupation. The strategy is to attack activists so the threat of physical violence keeps them away. If that doesn’t work, the Israeli police wield the fear of arrest. If even that doesn’t work, make sure an activist’s mental health is so poor that they can’t effectively engage in solidarity work.
The last attempt didn’t work, but it came the closest. I’ve learned that all I can do is keep going forward and understand that it’s okay to not feel okay.