Kristel “Stories from Palestine” - From Netherlands to Palestine/podcast/tourism/life #dianaalshaer

i want to put palestine on the map this is my main aim is that people will start to see that you can actually visit palestine it is a tourist destination people should come to palestine it's beautiful it's not unsafe to come you are as a foreign tourist definitely not the target of any soldier so and people deserve tourism palestinians deserve tourism just as much as anybody in the world does we have a responsibility as europeans and americans to to understand a little bit what we've done around the world and the and how this is now affecting the people of palestine hello my name is yanshar welcome to dialogue today my guest is crystal lectured founder and author of vulcan stories from palestine crystal is originally from netherlands but already for many years lis was her family in palestine and in her podcast she's sharing interesting stories from palestinian people and their culture apart from that crystal finished a tour guide program and is planning to develop herself in touristic business [Music] hello crystal it's really nice to have you finally in this dialogue it's it has been a while that we were planning to do that and uh this is kind of a irony because i am a netherlands in your motherland and you are in palestine so um yeah i'm very happy to have you here welcome thank you and i feel like i know you i mean i've been listening to your podcast and i've been seeing you on social media and i am jealous that you are in holland and i'm not yet yeah i can understand especially in this hard last weeks that you had i mean that's uh this is very stressful yeah absolutely yeah yeah yeah and that will be my first question you are a person who was born in one of the safest probably countries uh in the world in the netherlands um where you have freedom and um and then you actually you know now you're in palestine and you're living there for quite a long time now so how did it happen how did it happen yeah you know when i was very young i i remember hearing about other people traveling to other countries and moving to other countries and i always thought oh no i could never live in another country and i even remember because my parents were going to church and there would be these people that said well i i had a calling to go and i don't know live in africa or live in a completely different part of the world and i was like oh i hope there's no god and that he doesn't have a calling for me and now i sometimes think because i'm not i'm still not religious but i i now sometimes think that this is my path and how i came here the first time was when i was 28 i met some israeli people and they were part of a group called the anarchists against the wall and they were part of a project that i was attending in holland and they invited me to come and since i had been traveling quite a while but always by bus or by hitchhiking i never traveled by a plane i said okay this can be an opportunity for me to fly i had no really clue about israel palestine i for me israel was just a country like a western country in the middle east i maybe learned something in school about jewish people fleeing from the war in europe and going to live in israel that's what i knew and i had a vague idea about palestinians so when i came the first time i was on my way from the airport in tel aviv to this friend in in who lived in tel aviv and i clearly remember looking out of the window and thinking i feel as if i know this place i feel that i'm connected to this place and i couldn't explain it and i had been traveling other parts of europe and i had been in turkey i had been morocco and i i never had that feeling before and later much later in retrospective i thought maybe somehow i already knew that my life will be here or if there is such a thing as reincarnation maybe my soul was in this part of the world before because i've i've kept having these sort of moments throughout the time uh where i because i i went on that holiday for just uh two weeks i went back to the netherlands and i realized that i hadn't really met any palestinians and later on i think maybe i did meet palestinians i just didn't know that they were palestinians since they called them arabs in israel so i came back and i i realized i wanted to see more of palestine and i signed up for an olive harvest program which i did october in the year after and that was the moment where i completely fell in love with palestine with the people with the landscape with the food with the music with the language it was like a warm bath people were so friendly so hospitable and in the same time i saw all this injustice and i saw all this suffering and i saw all this the military occupation the effect it had on people that i felt that wow how is it possible that people under all this pressure and circumstances can be so nice and so welcoming and throughout the time i learned to give that name so resilience for example and rootedness to be rooted somewhere is when you really know you belong somewhere and this is what palestinians know that they really belong to the land so over time i i learned much more i i wanted always to come back so i found a volunteer position then i found a paid job and eventually i met my husband and we started a kind of backpackers cafe that turned out to be more like a local cafe because we have more locals especially during the corona pandemic we have more locals than anything else and we also started a bar and so i yeah i built up my life here in this part of the world and now when i look back and and i think yeah this is this is how it had to be i've had moments where i found it really difficult but i've alway also had a very strong kind of um spiritual experience maybe where i did a whole week of mindfulness meditation and yoga with a group of people and i had this experience where i connected to my what she called inner warrior and the message was very clear it was you are on your path and there are no obstacles and from that moment anything that happened here in palestine to me personally or in palestine i've not seen it as an obstacle on my path i've seen it as something that's happening that is horrible or difficult but it's not made me want to leave back to my safe country yeah but how many years were actually now in palestine the first the very first time i came was in 2005 and we got married in 2013 and since then i've lived here yeah since then i've lived here and i had my daughter in 2014 so since that time i'm i'm a mother of two and i'm growing i'm growing two palestinian children yeah and so for them this is home yes and was it difficult for you to travel to palestine um and um i mean was it difficult also to get permission to stay there yeah you know in general if you come to palestine you always come through the israeli borders so palestine doesn't have its own borders if it had it would not be a problem because for palestinians you know they ah well welcome but because you always have to travel whether you come from jordan or you come through the airport you are on a tourist visa of the israeli authorities that in itself can be difficult when people have an arabic last name for example or even if people are coming like young girls traveling by themselves without a clear purpose when they can't say how long they're going to stay or show a return ticket they may take them for interrogation for a long time it can be quite intimidating i've i've had a few experiences like that in the beginning because of course they at some point wondered what are you doing here all the time you cannot live here on a tourist visa so i got to understand how they think and i made my story accordingly so i always emphasize that i am a tour leader and working which was in a way true but i was leading tours into the west bank to show them the reality of life under military occupation but that part i would not mention you know my husband is from jerusalem and palestinians are divided into different categories by the israeli occupation so my husband has what is called a blue id it's the jerusalem id and that is not citizenship so my husband does not have a passport he does uh when he wants to travel he travels on a travel document a lesser passe and he has residency and in order for me to stay here after we got married i had to apply for family unification and then you get eventually this residency but you have to prove year by year that the center of your life is in jerusalem because once you cannot prove that they will cancel the application and for my husband it could even mean that they will withdraw his residency even though his family is from for generations is already from jerusalem so yeah actually last week they called to check again if i'm here and if we live here and it seems that now my temporary residency will become a more permanent residency good but yeah i asked you this because i also had the problem when i traveled uh to palestine through uh tel aviv uh i mean they kept me for 11 hours uh there so i know what it is and uh for example now when you travel with your kids and with your husband outside palestine or through tel aviv for or i don't know through which airport you have to go to tel aviv right yeah we go to tel aviv yeah and uh do they face the difficulties or it's more or less uh you know i learned one thing sometimes with israelis you have to be really upfront so if you wait and let them figure out who you are then everything is going to take forever so right now i go directly to the security i give them our passports and i say hi this is going to take a while because my husband is palestinian and from this moment they are apologetic actually they become friendly and kind and they are like oh no no it's nothing and i say no well i know it's going to take a while and then in the beginning maybe it doesn't but by that hand luggage check once they figure out that your husband is palestinian yeah they put you to the side and they start to check your bags i think because i'm with my children and my children are also very blonde so they feel themselves a bit awkward the security that they have to do that and yeah i always like to make them feel a little bit uncomfortable also yeah i mean in the end it's not their country so yeah you know i felt really uh heartbroken when when i was traveling to palestine and people told me that i'm not allowed to say that i'm going to the vast bank and i said how come because my grandma grandparents were like you know they they come from jaffa and from bethlehem so and then i see how it can it be possible that i traveled to see the place where they were born and i'm not allowed to say the truth you know and that was somehow the first uh sign for me that this is incredible that this is happening in the 21st century you know yeah and imagine you are on the same plane for example with some jewish family that born in the united states or somewhere in europe and they are coming for the first time to israel with this attitude like okay this is our country and if they decide that they want to live there within weeks they will have a passport they will learn the language because they get it offered they will get a place to stay they will get money they will get a job so you have ancestors from palestine and they make you 11 hours of troubles while people who never even been there who just by the fact that they are jewish they can't come and live here so that makes you feel really the inequality and the injustice that's happening here it's very confronting yeah yes and you know my first feeling when i came back to europe i was like wow we people here do not appreciate what they have that they have this freedom and um i can imagine like for you when you probably talk to your friends i think for european people it's very difficult to understand that this is possible that something like this can be now nowadays and when you talk to them they somehow don't believe you this is also a problem they just yeah sometimes i really especially with people who don't know what's happening here at all i don't tell a lot of things because i know that if i told everything they will find it so overwhelming that they will stop believing me but it's true what you said every time when i come to holland i feel like a heavy blanket that was pressuring on me is is just taken off from me so it's kind of a relief and i can't really say what what it is exactly but it's like when we for example when i go out of my house and i want to go to take my kids to school i have to pass by an israeli settlement and then i have to cross an israeli checkpoint with soldiers on the checkpoint then they did not make an exit from the main road into the palestinian area where our the school of our children is so we have to go all the way to the next place where we can go take a roundabout and return to take a small exit to the school which always takes much extra time and then and this is just one thing but it's a daily routine where you feel constantly that there are people in control of how of your life of course in holland you have also traffic jams but it's different it's like okay a lot of people are going the same time to their work here it's because you are crossing a checkpoint where you have to wait and the check the main checkpoint to bethlehem had been closed from september last year until today today they just opened it again under the pretext of the coronavirus they closed it which meant that my college where i studied for the tour guide program it's just 10 minutes drive from here if i can go straight through that checkpoint that checkpoint shouldn't even be there but if i if i went from that way now because it's been closed i had every time to make a half hour detour to reach bethlehem from another route with another checkpoint and this uh you yeah you can't explain to people how much this affects your daily life this is only one example but yeah yeah and i know that like like uh first of all i wanted to ask you about your podcast of course because uh it's really i mean i absolutely love it and i think that's so great what you do because you share to the world on actually the face of palestine um your story is from palestine when did you start this and what was the main idea of it i started it last august and it is actually a direct outcome of the fact that i was studying the tour guide program at the bethlehem bible college and this is a two years program that helps you to get the diploma that you need in order to later which i still have to do do the exam of the ministry of tourism and then if you if you pass that you get a license to be a tour guide so we were studying for more than a year uh doing also a summer course and i was helping my fellow students because i was a tour guide before i i already studied tour guiding in the netherlands and i was a professional tour guide and i had this experience and i even was teaching them a course in how to be a good tour guide so i was both their fellow student and their teacher and i started recording for them stories to show them how all that information that we got how do you make that into a story that is interesting to listen to and while i had all these voice recordings i thought wouldn't it be nice if i could share these with other people and somehow in that time i also listened to a podcast i was not yet a podcast listener at that time but then i realized oh wow there is a medium that where you can share audio so i started in the summer last year to do all these research youtube and tutorials to see how do you start your own podcast and from yeah within weeks i think i had the whole idea that yeah i need to share the story i want to put palestine on the map this is my main um aim is that people will start to see that you can actually visit palestine it is a tourist destination and you do not have to feel which sometimes i hear from people that oh if i go to palestine i should be an activist or at least i should do volunteer work or i feel awkward because i feel like i'm going to see the misery of people no palestine is a beautiful tourist destination actually for us palestine is everything i mean the state of israel now is created in 1948 on palestine so for palestinians who also still live in what is now the state of israel one and a half million palestinians but many people forget that for them all of that area all of the region is palestine it's been palestine since the 5th century before christ i think not a lot of people realize that but the first to write down that this region is called palestine was the greek historian herodotus and since then in all documents in all the different times we're talking about the persian time the greek time the byzantine time the roman time and then the byzantine time and later on the mamluk time the ultimate time the the area was called palestine only in 1948 did that change do you hear the mosque yes yes but it's nice it gives a charm yeah we have every day five times and it's very close by the house [Laughter] yeah so palestine should be back on the map people should come to palestine it's beautiful it's not unsafe to come you are as a foreign tourist definitely not the target of any soldier so and people deserve tourism palestinians deserve tourism just as much as anybody in the world does yeah that's 100 and you know when i realized because many people think that's dangerous and then when i was crossing the border and coming to palestinian you know like zone i mean there was nobody even to control i mean just like welcome you know it's a big contrast a big contrast i can say you know and actually when i when i uh got into this uh you know like i think to uh when i went to ramallah first and then you know i felt they're much more safe than when i was in the other side you know so this is also also crazy because you go here to any shopping mall and they are walking around not only the security there are settlers walking around with their guns so you oh immediately you feel that there is something weird especially when you come from holland because really nobody walks around with a gun so here it's if you go on a bus you go on the train people are carrying their guns around and now that has in the last weeks it was really um that's why i was very nervous it was getting really dangerous because these settlers that have guns they started to actually use them and my husband was driving to pick up the kids from school and on the way back home a car just in front of him just almost hit another car and the two people go out of the car and one of them turns out to be a settler and the other one was a palestinian and the settler immediately pulled his gun and my husband just he said i was with the kids in the car he jumped out of the car and started speaking in hebrew my husband speaks hebrew to him like what are you doing okay it's just a small accident there's no need to pull your gun for this but then we knew that the tension was so high that people easily start shooting each other yeah so that's why i feel that in these days we are we are going through a new phase um yeah and we have to of course admit that palestinian people are not protected i know that there are so many people being killed even when i was there and it never comes to the news it's just when i show statistics to people they are shocked you know and i think that the only thing you can do is to really show the facts because uh you know we know how the media covers everything so yeah and and of course i know that i followed that during this hard weeks uh when all this happened beginning with um and uh i saw that you were posting a lot about the situation and of course uh yeah um did you feel a big difference from what the media was showing and from what was really going on i mean western media let's say yeah i think that um [Music] i haven't been even able to really follow up what the western media says i think there is a shift um from what i hear from other people and from what i could follow from the dutch news there is a shift in what the mainstream media is bringing compared to the first time i came here 12 years ago so now there is more [Music] or let's say they are less hesitant to write about what israel is doing and they are less hesitant to use certain words like apartheid or war crimes so this is different i don't know if you saw that the new york times the other day posted 60 photos of the children that were killed in gaza i mean this is this is a big difference but obviously i was for example interviewed for a dutch radio station and while i was talking about what was happening and explaining she at some point she stopped me and she said well you know i don't want to make it so political i would just like to to keep it more personal and yeah that story that you that you said about you and your son had to go because the first day when the first rockets came to jerusalem and it was the only time that we had rockets in jerusalem we heard the the the cyrene the air raid alarm and we did i actually took my son into the safe room because you know it's funny because most palestinians go up on their roofs to see where the rockets will land and i'm still that foreigner who's like um i don't know that was like after i heard the third explosion or like the third the third rocket falling down i was like um i think i'm gonna go inside and i'm i'm telling this to the radio uh lady and she that was the story she wanted to hear but then when i wanted to give her context why are the people in gaza shooting rockets what is the political situation she didn't want to hear that and actually they cut out a part of that uh interview because it wasn't live i should never do that again but yeah that when i felt that okay the media has a very big power on what they will show and what they will let people to to hear well now of course we have social media and people who want to know they can know it was very interesting to see all those videos and photos coming out on tiktok and instagram and facebook and a lot of information being shared on the same time we also know that all almost all of these um social medias they have done a lot of effort to stop some accounts from functioning they have also taken away posts i think that the zionist lobby was working very hard to um to how you call it when they um see a post that they don't like they probably report it and then it was taken down so it was like a media war almost a social media war and this is where i was a bit also standing on two legs i think for awareness raising it's a very important tool in the same time i think it's not good when people sit all day behind their computer or their phone just writing hashtags and liking posts and sharing posts thinking that they've done their job in activism because in the end awareness is important but just sitting on your computer is not going to change anything so i think there should be um a mixture between that people should also really get out of the house and protest and here in palestine i understand if people don't because it's really dangerous you go out to speak up for your rights and you get shot or you lose an eye or you lose a knee you know this is what really happens so i understand if people don't do that but if if you live in holland you can i mean to spend one hour to to go to amsterdam and to protest and to to support the call for justice and equality yeah then i think but then you need also the social media to at least to know about it to spread it so love hate yes i was at this protest in utrecht i missed the one in amsterdam but i was in utrecht and i was actually you know surprised that it's not such a big town right but there were quite a lot of people and also a lot of dutch people so uh that was for me a good sign and i think because i was following a bit the media and the first days it was more talking about self-defense of israel you know but i think that this time i've never actually never seen our community so united uh as this time and i think that this time social media managed to make kind of a shift that media had to talk about it you know um but i totally agree with you because i had days when i was completely emotionally empty because i was always there you know and then i was also in contact with the kids in gaza and some that i know in west bank and then you can't sleep neither even when you're here you know because you emotionally are so really into this you know and i totally understand you that we still have to continue and do every each person has to do what it can in this or that moment but uh you know i think giving facts is important and also trying to keep away emotions a bit away but saying the facts because this is something what people believe you know statistics history anthropology and this is what is missing so i think that's the way and what you are doing also with your podcast you are showing what is really happening there so and i think this is precious yeah because we were talking about the podcast yeah and i think that um i started the only the only really more political podcasts i made actually were in the last weeks because there was no way around it i couldn't speak i had an episode ready on olive wood carving it's like this doesn't make any sense now to let people listen about olive wood i mean it's an important heritage but right now other things are going on but generally what i'm trying to do is to have interviews with palestinians who have something important to say about either the history or cultural heritage or food or flora and fauna or just like activities i i joined the right movement when they went for a run in the morning and we spoke about the marathon that they organized every year and that that marathon that can only have two times a 21k stretch they have to do the same 21 kilometers twice because they cannot find 42 kilometers without hitting a wall a checkpoint a bypass road or a settlement so it is right to movement is also something that tells a story and i had an episode about yoga and meditation in palestine to show people that because i think that was maybe also the stereotype idea i had when i came here first time 12 years ago that honestly speaking yeah that people were maybe underdeveloped that they didn't have what we had in the west like i've my husband has said to me something about orientalism quite a few times over the years because yeah of course when you grow up in a white european privileged environment you have certain ideas about arabs or about the middle east and i yeah i had to um to get get back on that point completely because i realized that there are many people here who are much higher educated than i am who are much more up to on any kind of technology than i am and uh who yeah i mean i i admit that i i needed to read edward saeed yes but it's funny what you say because about being um you know about the education uh we did a video now in russia with palestinian students starting in russia and then they explain because you know of course popular jobs among palestinians is doctors engineers and then uh like a couple of the students told me yeah we came to russia because our points or our degree was not good enough to enter the university in palestine and i said oh so you know and then they went to russia and russia accept them so you know and i was also impressed like how do they speak english because many of them speak much better english than i do and um and they learned russian like this you know like in couple of uh of years and my team we were shooting we were doing the video shooting of a video of dapchi dancers and ballerina of the bolsho theater and we were impressed how they speak russian you know so and and like a couple of them are already doctors you know like and they get and they say yeah it's not so difficult to study here so it's incredible how different is the image that we see in the media because most of people think that palestinians are just those people with the stones okay but they have nothing they have only stones but you know exactly when when palestinians are being depicted in the media it's always when they're angry or when they are sad or mourning but there is of course i mean this is not how people are and palestinians are extremely resilient so for me i noticed that when people visited palestine they completely shift they start to understand not only the palestinian case they start to understand how the world works and i i realized that after people came back from a visit here they are much more likely to become active on any like on awareness raising about palestine or supporting the cause but in general i feel that people who've been in palestine they start to have even between them a special connection because they start to realize something about white privilege about colonialism about our own histories i mean i'm from the netherlands do you think that we ever learned anything about slave trade or about how we colonized other countries the word apartheid is a dutch word i didn't even know what it meant until my later 20s when i started reading because i was interested in these topics but we didn't get this in school so i think that we need we have a responsibility as europeans and americans to to understand a little bit what we've done around the world and and how this is now affecting the people of palestine thank you so much i mean i wish you a lot of luck with your podcast that you still have energy and inspiration and interesting guests of course um and of course i wish you also to get safe to your motherland for a rest after these hard weeks and yeah thank you so much for finding time for for dialogue it was really great pleasure to have you thank you diana really thank you for having me and i really hope that we can spend time together either in netherlands or in palestine yes i'm waiting you yes [Music]

2021-09-27 14:35

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