I remember, as if it were yesterday, that moment when I stood on a cobblestoned street, in the old city of Hebron (al Khalil) and raised my eyes toward the sky and saw it – thick metal tubes crafted by skilled Palestinians, perhaps 4 feet long by 2 feet wide hanging suspended a few feet above my 5 foot 1 inch high head, and my Palestinian guide’s a few inches higher. My guide then and friend now said, “Look up. Tell me. What do you see?” To my surprise, I saw
black plastic garbage bags filled with unknowns, empty soda bottles, empty bottles of laundry detergent and more stuck in the metal netting. Turns out this was garbage, yes garbage, and sometimes human waste, thrown down from Avraham Avinu, the illegal settlement on the hill.

Ever since that December day of 2013, that netting has haunted me, provoking dozens of questions, starting with how could anyone, anywhere, think it acceptable to throw garbage and human wastes on the heads of other human beings? What kind of hate fuels such actions? Nothing I did allowed me to either
understand the rationale or even to pretend to feel the same way as those settlers who seemingly cavalierly threw garbage on the heads of other people. I asked many others if they understood, if they could connect with an emotion that allowed them to understand what the settlers were doing. No one could help me to figure it out.

But these moments, dealing with garbage and human wastes, in 2013, 2014 and longer have now been replaced by dozens, if not hundreds of U.S.-provided bombs falling on their heads. No netting is able to protect the Palestinians of Gaza from the 2000-pound bunker busters leaving huge craters in the earth and vaporizing entire families, leaving many others buried “under the rubble,” for days on end. And
nothing yet is protecting Palestinians in places like al Khalil on the West Bank from snipers, from settlers stealing their land, from raids on their towns and other forms of violence designed to push the Palestinian people off their land – yes, their land often granted them by a signed deed.

It may seem like a long stretch to go from garbage to genocide, but unfortunately, it is not. The dehumanization of Palestinians didn’t start on October 7, 2023 – almost 10 years after the visit that transformed me and my point of view forever.

“A Fleeting Glance: How a Brief Glance Across an Apartheid Wall Can Change Lives.”  is a young adults’ novel based heavily on real world conditions for Israeli settlers and Palestinians, learned both from my personal experiences on the West Bank and from on-going conversations with a friend on the West Bank, about himself and his family. It is fictionalized because the reality is that in today’s occupied Palestine, Palestinians and Israeli settlers would never meet.

The book follows the lives of two young girls, one Palestinian and one an illegal settler on the West Bank, from age 8, to age 13, to age 18, and finally to age 23, as world events bring about a genocide in Gaza and student protests on college campuses around the world, including in the U.S.