I was 10 years old and on a school bus in Haifa when our teacher directed us to look out the window. She stood at the front, her voice crackling with patriotic fervor, and pointed to a hill in the distance. “What do you see?” she asked. “Nothing,” a boy shouted. “Exactly!” she said. “You see nothing. That is what the first pioneers saw. A wasteland. A land without a people, for a people without a land.”
The bus turned, and a kibbutz paradise of green lawns and eucalyptus trees came into view. I felt a surge of pride. Later that day, I wandered toward the hill we had seen. On the other side, an Arab village was nestled in a valley. An old man with a face like a weathered map was tending his olive grove. I stood, hidden, and watched him. He was not an obstacle. He was not a historical error. He was a man, farming his land.
When I got back to the bus, I asked my teacher about the village. “Those are old groves,” she said, her voice dismissive. “Remnants. The land was empty. Don’t get confused by things you don’t understand.” Her words were a wall, but the image of the old man was burned into my memory. It was the first crack in the foundation of my world.
I was born in a house in Haifa that my parents told me was “abandoned” by its Arab owners during the war. The city had a mixed population of Jews and Palestinians, but we occupied separate neighborhoods, and we all lived behind that same wall of denial that my teacher had fortified that day on the bus.
The wall held for years, even when I was serving in the I.D.F.’s Golani Brigade. Before my service, at a boarding school, I had become inseparable friends with a Palestinian named Hassan from the village of Teibe. He was not my Arab friend; he was simply my friend. But when I was drafted, he went home to his village, while I went to the army. I wrote to him from my base, but my letters went unanswered.
One afternoon, I was summoned to a Shin Bet office. I was led into a small, windowless room and told to sit. I couldn’t see the face of my interrogator; he was just a silhouette behind a projector that was shining a blinding light into my eyes. He had my letters, and he told me to cease all communication. “We need to know where his sympathies lie,” he said, his voice soft but menacing. “And by writing to him, you are putting yourself in a position to be used.”
A week later, my commanding officer called me in. He wouldn’t look me in the eye. “That friend of yours,” he said, his voice gruff. “Your Arab friend Hassan from Teibe. He was killed in a car accident.”
My heart seized. “How do you know this?” I stammered.
He finally looked at me, his eyes cold. “Careful,” he said. “Leave it alone and don’t ask too many questions. He was an enemy of the State, and the Shin Bet know what they’re doing.”
The world went silent. In that moment, the wall of denial I had lived behind finally crumbled. Hassan wasn’t a “remnant” or an “enemy.” He was a boy. A boy whom my country killed because his existence was inconvenient to our national story. The blinding light of the projector was the same as my teacher’s dismissive voice—a tool of the state designed to keep me from seeing the truth.
A new feeling took root in my soul: guilt. To this day, I am responsible for Hassan’s death. My friendship, my letters, had made him a target. My silence and my inability to defy the man in the room had sealed his fate. I had abandoned him. I have carried that guilt my entire adult life.
The final blow didn’t come until decades later, long after I had left Israel and was living in California. At the San Francisco Public Library, I stumbled upon a book of 19th-century photographs of Palestine. I opened it, and my world tilted on its axis.
There, in stark black and white, was the place I had been taught was a wasteland. A photograph of the Jezreel Valley from the 1880s, a sea of green with farms and villages. Suddenly I saw the ghost of the old man from my childhood. I saw the lie I had been told on that school bus, proven false in exquisite detail. The lie of the empty land wasn’t just an abstract slogan. It was the justification for taking Hassan’s life. It was the justification for the house in Haifa. It was the justification for everything.
This is why I stand with a small group of neighbors every week. We believe in bearing witness. We stand each Sunday from 12 to 2 p.m. by the Green Bridge in Point Reyes Station, and every Saturday at the same time on the Fairfax town parkade. We stand for a free Palestine. We stand for the children of Gaza who have known nothing but bombs and rubble. We stand for the farmers in the West Bank who are violently displaced from their ancestral lands. We stand for the simple, powerful idea that all people, from the river to the sea, deserve to live in freedom, with equal rights and human dignity.
I invite you to join us. You can come to listen, to question, or simply to stand in silent solidarity. In a time of profound polarization, the act of showing up, of seeing humanity in those we are told are enemies, is a radical and powerful act of peace.
The path to justice begins with small acts of moral courage in places like these. It begins with us choosing to see not a land with one people’s story, but a land with two peoples who deserve to live in peace, dignity, and freedom.
Coby Friedman is a 75-year-old Fairfax resident. He will present a talk, “The Debt I Owe to a Lie,” at 7 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 3 at the First Presbyterian Church (72 Kensington Rd.) in San Anselmo.