New Green Horizons is pleased to be able to present an excerpt from a recently-published book of special interest:
A Fleeting Glance: How One Look Across an Apartheid Wall Can Change Lives
By Madelyn Hoffman
(c) 2025 Europe Books, London.
The Prologue and the first two chapters give a sense of what the book conveys. FYI: After the thoughts of Mariam and Miriam at age 8 the book contains diary entries of the girls at ages 13 and 18. It concludes with one more entry when they are young women of age 23.
Our excerpt is being published with the permission of the author. The book is available for purchase on amazon.com or www.europebookstore.com.
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Prologue
In December 2013, I stood underneath the wire netting constructed by Palestinians to protect themselves from garbage and human wastes. The trash would be thrown from the illegal Jewish settlement of Beit Hadassah on top of the hill onto the cobblestoned streets of the old city of Al-Khalil (Hebron). I didn’t notice initially. My friend and guide (I’ll call him MA) asked me to look up and tell him what I saw. When I looked up, I saw a heavy wire netting above my head and many empty plastic bottles for sodas and laundry detergents and black plastic garbage bags, sitting motionless there.
When I described to MA what I saw, he said that the Palestinians from the old city of Al-Khalil built that wire netting. Without it, he said, Palestinian pedestrians and Palestinian shopkeepers would have had to protect themselves with their hands and arms against illegal Israeli settlers throwing garbage and human waste down to the streets below.
From that moment on, I was haunted by the scene and haunted by the psychology behind it. I couldn’t understand how anyone could consider it “OK” to throw garbage onto the heads of another human being. I asked everyone I could to explain it. I wanted to see if there was any way I could empathize with the settlers. I also wanted to know how young children of any nationality would respond to seeing their parents throw human wastes onto the heads of any other human being.
I started writing this story to try to sort out how something like this could happen. I had a first draft completed in 2018 but wanted to add more of the personal experience and inner thoughts of the young Palestinian girl named Mariam. In 2022, Benjamin Netanyahu got reelected by forming a coalition with ultra-right-wing personages like Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir. After this coalition took office, there were frequent stories emerging about armed Jewish settler violence against West Bank communities, including Al-Khalil. These actions motivated me to revisit the story I had begun to write several years earlier. This time, it became clearer to me what went on inside the heads of the settlers, the terror they inflicted on West Bank communities and the communities’ response. The story now took shape and morphed into a story about two girls, one Palestinian and one Israeli settler, who in some ways led parallel lives, but were doomed never to meet one another because of the existence of strict Israeli apartheid laws.
I learned, too, of the way that Israeli settlers and their children, as well as Israeli soldiers, were indoctrinated into hating Palestinians—though all I heard from Palestinians was how they wanted to live in peace. But as MA told me within an hour after I first met him, “We don’t have a centimeter’s worth of room in which to breathe.” Privately, in my mind, I thought he must have been exaggerating, but after a mere day and a half in Al-Khalil, I realized he was telling the truth. Armed Israeli guards and soldiers manned multiple checkpoints and even were situated behind the Youth Against Settlements Center that MA and others had established for the children of their village. There were heavy metal gates erected to protect children going to the elementary school, located halfway down the hill. And there was Israeli graffiti marking stone walls on the way down the hill: “Free Israel from Palestinians.”
Finally, at the bottom, my heart went cold when I saw the armed Israeli guard in front of the Beit Hadassah temple. MA told me if I turned right at the bottom of the hill, because I was Jewish, I could walk on Shuhuda Street, once the main commercial roadway for Palestinians. But if he walked to the right, he could be shot!
In light of the post-October 2023 Gazan genocide, with horrifying images of death and destruction, I felt it even more important to share this story, to show young readers how policies of apartheid and ethnic cleansing can lead to a dehumanization so complete that Israeli soldiers could feel empowered and entitled to shoot children and drop deadly bombs from drones. The genocide will affect the Gazan people and the Palestinians on the West Bank for generations to come. And I, for one, will never forget the role the U.S. played in providing money and weaponry to enable this genocide.
Ultimately, I hope this story will provide a glimmer of hope. What if people weren’t deliberately kept separate by their governments? Would they find a way to meet and learn from each other? “A Fleeting Glance” was all it took in this story to haunt the two young girls for the rest of their lives. Miriam’s constant inner battle with herself reflects the growing number of Refuseniks in today’s Israel. And Mariam’s fears and pleas for the future reflect a growing concern for what will happen to Palestinians in the days and months to come.
“What If?”
— Madelyn Hoffman, March 2025
* * * *
Mariam, Age 8
My name is Mariam. I am a Palestinian.
I live in Al-Khalil with my father and mother, my Abi and Umi. In Arabic or Hebrew, the name of the city I live in means friend. The Israelis call it Hebron. I hear that it once was a friendly place, but it doesn’t feel so friendly anymore.
I’m eight, but I’ve already seen my uncle beaten up in the street by an Israeli soldier. Abi tells me that when he was twelve, he saw another uncle shot and killed by an Israeli soldier. Last week, we celebrated my cousin’s release from prison. He’d been locked up for twelve years. I’m not sure why.
I see Israeli soldiers everywhere. I know they’re soldiers because of their shiny black boots, their green and brown uniforms, and the guns they all carry. Umi and Abi tell me to be careful and to look the other way.
Abi doesn’t like to see the soldier sitting in the guard house outside the back door of the community center on the hilltop behind our house. He gets angry when he sees a different soldier in another guard house at the bottom of the hill in front of the synagogue, Beit Hadassah. I don’t know much about that ancient building except that it’s now a museum. I also know that if I am caught walking in front of it, the soldier by the door can shoot me with his gun. I don’t know why the Israeli soldier would be afraid of me, I’m not even five feet tall. But only Jewish kids and their parents can walk on that section of what was once the main street for Palestinian shops.
Abi tries to act naturally whenever we see a soldier or walk past one, but I can see that he stops smiling and makes a fist out of each hand hanging down by his side.
I’m not allowed to walk on Shuhada Street by myself. I’m not allowed to go too far on any street all by myself. That’s okay because I’m too afraid to walk alone on the nearly empty street. Abi has many videos showing Israeli soldiers arguing with our neighbors and then hurting our neighbors. I must turn my eyes away every time I watch the video.
Abi and Umi like to tell me about the time Shuhada Street was crowded with hundreds of Palestinians visiting hundreds of shops, buying and selling all kinds of food, clothing and other things. Laughing, yelling, and arguing loudly over how much they want to pay for any one item, like a rug or a dress or some dinner plates.
Today, all the shops are boarded up and padlocked. My parents tell me this happened twenty years ago. An Israeli settler, who once lived in Brooklyn, New York in the United States, barged into the Al-Ibrahimi Mosque in Al-Khalil on a February day in 1994. He shot and killed twenty-nine Palestinian Muslims while they were praying. Instead of punishing the man who killed everyone, the Israelis shut down our shops—and made half the mosque into a synagogue. If you look up to the ceiling in the mosque, you can see one camera after another pointing down toward the floor, looking at everything we’re doing. There’s not that much to see, just many rows of men, each kneeling on a prayer rug, reciting Koran.
Sometimes I wish I knew what the street used to look and sound like, but I’m too young. All I’ve seen is a nearly empty street and the checkpoint at each end of it. Sometimes I close my eyes and picture what it might have looked like with people shopping and laughing and yelling—how much fun those days must have been! But then I open my eyes and remember that it’s not that way anymore and I wonder how I can picture so easily a world I’ve never known. When I daydream, I not only feel it in my heart, but I can also see it, too, so vividly. I wish it could be that way again.
Now as I walk to the checkpoint at the end of the street, I see blue and black Stars of David painted right over the center of old doorways. Sometimes I see a Palestinian flag on a rooftop. That means a Palestinian still lives there, up above the street. I feel sad thinking about all the people who once lived here moving away soon after the shops were closed.
I also see brand new signs in Hebrew, pointing the way to places in this part of Al-Khalil, still a mostly Palestinian neighborhood, even though the shops are closed. My parents are teaching me Hebrew so I can speak to the Israeli soldiers and maybe protect myself. I understand what most of the street signs say, but I wish there were some signs in Arabic, too.
I feel comfortable walking by myself down the wide concrete stairs of my house to visit my grandpa and grandma. I call them “jid” and “jida.” They live right next door.
I go to a school built by Abi and other Palestinians that’s halfway up the hill across from Beit Hadassah on Shuhada Street. The path zigs and zags its way up from the street, past many olive trees. The path is sometimes of dirt and sometimes of stones, but always slippery and narrow, without guard rails. Halfway up the hill is the school. I enter through a heavy iron gate. When we play outside at recess our playground and our school is fenced-in and guarded.
After school, I like to stand outside in the front yard of our house. I water all the plants and trees in a bed dug and filled by Abi surrounded by a stone wall. Abi likes to take pictures of me with the hose in my hand. He studied agriculture in college and still wishes we could live or work on a farm.
But he also likes to tell me the story of how he waited to marry my mother until he had enough money to fix up this house we live in. It has a large living room and kitchen, my parents sleep in one of the bedrooms and my younger sister, Sham, and I sleep in another.
I like to stand in front of the picture window that looks out over the valley, especially at night. The valley is all lit up with dozens of lights, lights in people’s kitchens and living rooms and some streetlights, too. It’s so beautiful and looks so peaceful that it almost makes me forget the fear I feel every day when I walk in the streets that are surrounded by Israeli soldiers.
I see that same kind of look of peace and freedom on Abi’s face when he rides my uncle’s horse. I love to watch Abi ride and I love it when he lets me ride. He looks so happy on the high-stepping horse and not so worried, at least for a little while.
My family believes that Friday nights are sacred. We call it “Jummah,” which begins at sundown. We say prayers before we have a meal. Sometimes, after dinner, Abi goes to the mosque to pray. I don’t go with him on “Jummah,” at least not yet.
But Abi has shown me the Al-Ibrahimi Mosque. To get there, we walk about a mile through the old city of Al-Khalil on a cobblestoned road. We get stopped at three checkpoints. We stand in line with other Palestinians waiting for Israeli soldiers to give us permission to continue walking.
At each checkpoint on the way to the mosque, Israeli soldiers order Abi to take off his belt and his shoes and to empty out his pockets onto a table so the soldiers can inspect everything he is carrying. Then the soldiers search Abi with their hands.
I’m old enough now that the soldiers ask me to do the same thing. The first time I got searched at a checkpoint I was terrified. Now I guess I’m used to it.
The soldiers order me to empty everything inside my backpack onto a table, so they can look at what’s inside.
I don’t carry anything too interesting, just some books and a comb and maybe a bottle of water, so I don’t understand why they even need to look. But they do.
Just before we get to the mosque, we walk under some wire netting that Palestinian shop owners built a few years ago. Abi asks me to look up and to tell him what I see.
It’s a little hard for me to see everything, but I can see many plastic bottles. The clear ones were once filled with soda. The yellow and orange ones once contained laundry detergent. I see full black plastic garbage bags, but don’t know what’s inside each one.
Abi tells me that the Israeli settlers who live in Avraham Avinu, a settlement he says was built illegally in Al-Khalil, use our streets as a garbage can and sometimes even as a toilet. The wire netting catches some items, but not all, before they hit the street or a person walking below.
I don’t like walking under that netting. It makes me cry. I don’t understand why anyone would throw garbage at us or dump human waste on our heads. I don’t think it is right, but the settlers must feel it’s okay or they wouldn’t do it. I wonder if they ever think about us at all when they throw their trash down on our street.
One day, when I was walking with my father on the street under the netting, my father stopped holding my hand for a moment and pointed up toward the settlement wall above. As he did so and as I raised my eyes upward, I saw a mother and a child, someone about my size and probably about my age, looking down at us. And for one brief moment, I thought that our paths had crossed for a reason. Our dark brown eyes met, and we caught a brief glance of each other. In that instant, a cloud of guilt also passed over my eyes. I felt like I had done something forbidden, but I also wished I could, one day, talk to that girl.
* * * *
Miriam, Age 8
My name is Miriam Amrami. I’m Jewish and I live with my mother and father, my Ima and Aba. We live in Avraham Avinu, with five hundred other Israelis, in a development on top of a hill in Hebron. If I look to the right or to the left, I see other Israeli settlements on the top of other hills. I also see the Israeli military base on a neighboring hill.
Because we celebrate Hanukah, there’s a very large electronic menorah placed right alongside the military base. You can see it from almost anywhere in the city. The Christians celebrate Christmas. I don’t think the Muslims celebrate anything.
When we look out over the wall that surrounds our neighborhood, we can see the old city of Hebron. There is razor-sharp barbed wire around where we live.
We live most of our lives inside the wall. I know I can’t wander off by myself to play or to explore. My parents say the wall protects us from those Palestinians who, they tell me, hate the Jewish people and want to kill us like Hitler and the Nazis did back during the Holocaust! My parents told me all about the Holocaust and how so many of our family were killed by the Nazis. They say that never again will Jewish people allow such a thing to happen to us.
If we need to go someplace by car, we drive on new roads built just for us. We drive past many Palestinian villages, but never go in. There are big signs with red lettering at the entrance to these villages. The signs read: “Driving in this neighborhood is dangerous and illegal for Israeli citizens.”
My parents showed me what to look for on the license plates of cars that we pass—to see if the driver is permitted to be in or near our settlement. Some license plates are yellow and some are white—and there’s a number in the lower left-hand corner of each one. Once you memorize the numbers you can tell in less than a minute if the car is where it belongs.
My parents tell me we live in Hebron because it is a place sacred to all Jews. After we Jews won the war of 1967, the Palestinians had to move. I know the Palestinians claim that this is their land, too, but my parents and our neighbors don’t agree with them. My parents say this is our land—and they’re my parents so I don’t question them.
I love my parents very much. I like to be with them when they’re home. Whatever they’re doing, I want to do, too.
I celebrated my 8th birthday just about a month ago.
Our home is built out of stone like so many of the buildings in Hebron. If you walk on our streets, you might not even know that anyone lives here. We don’t like to call attention to ourselves.
I go to school inside the settlement. Of course, we can’t walk down the hill to a school in the Palestinian neighborhood, so everything we need is right here in our settlement.
Our Friday nights are sacred. That’s when we celebrate the Sabbath. My parents light the candles and serve special food on special plates. We chant songs in Hebrew and stop doing work until Saturday at sundown.
My parents and all the settlers fear the Palestinians who live near us in Hebron. I don’t know any Palestinians. I’ve never even met one. Sometimes I wonder what would happen if I did. Would they have anything in common with me or would they hate me just because I’m Jewish?
My parents will never buy fruit or vegetables from the Palestinian merchants on the streets below. We don’t buy olives or oranges or okra or anything from the Palestinian shops.
To hear my parents tell it, it’s a good thing that we never meet Palestinians. Ima and Aba agree with everyone else in the settlement that the Palestinians need to leave so that all of us can enjoy our new homes free from fear.
Fear or not we love our new home and don’t want to move. My parents are proud to finally “own” something, even if we’ve only lived in Avraham Avinu for a couple years.
Beit Hadassah, the synagogue in Hebron, is an ancient sacred place for Jews. It was built in 1893 and destroyed by Palestinian terrorists in 1980 and now it’s guarded by an Israeli soldier carrying a gun. Only Jews are allowed to walk in the street in front of the building. I’m told that if a Palestinian walks in front of it, he or she could be shot.
Five times each day, all the mosques in Hebron sound a call to prayer. My Aba told me that there are around 100 mosques in the city. That sounds about right because we all cringe every time we hear the call—the wall of sound makes it impossible for us to watch TV or talk with each other—it’s so loud. My parents have joined with their neighbors to see if there is a way to make the noise stop, but their complaints haven’t worked yet.
I met a Palestinian family in the street one day. Well, we didn’t exactly meet, but our paths crossed that day. I saw a young girl, standing side by side with a man who was probably her father. I’ll bet she was just about my age, too. She was slim and came up no higher than the middle of her father’s stomach. Father and daughter stood under the netting built across the street of the Old City and looked up toward me. It looked like the man gestured at the girl by his side, asking her to look up at the crisscrossed wire. I was looking down. We were too far away from each other for our eyes to meet for long, but I watched as my mother threw an empty laundry detergent bottle over the wall and into the netting below. And then I saw my mother throw a clear soda bottle over the wall.
I wanted to ask my mother why she didn’t use the garbage can underneath the sink, but I was afraid she would get angry at me and say something like what she always says when I ask her about the Palestinians: “Well, wait until you’re older. Then you’ll understand. The Palestinians don’t care about us. They hate us and would make us disappear if they could. We have a right to live here, so we should do whatever we can to get them to leave. We must make them feel unwanted.”
My mother’s answer didn’t help me understand. My mother and father are always kind to our neighbors and their children. They are kind to me and my sister Rivka They never throw garbage across the room or over the table at any of us. They only throw garbage over the wall onto the old city streets of Hebron. They don’t seem to feel bad about it either. I wish I could ask them why. But what do I know and what could I say?
When I returned home with my mother, my mother put on some music. Such a rich sound, with the musicians gathered and playing to no one in particular but to all who would listen. The notes carried across the small kitchen and living room, causing me to dream of a place I had never seen but that I could try to imagine. My parents liked songs without words, music that sometimes brought my mind to a place without walls, without fences, without borders, without constant stomach and headaches. I am only eight, but I know how much better I feel after listening to music like this. Perhaps one day I’ll learn to play an instrument to help me escape from my thoughts.
I often see the curtains of our new, small and tidy house blowing into our living room, sometimes even coordinated with the music’s rhythms. As for the melodies, well, I am used to sounds that didn’t make sense together at first—sounds of children playing, swinging in the playground, but heavy trucks, even military vehicles, going round and round our settlement, making sure we are safe.
I often want to ride away on the curtains or ride away on the long breaths of the musicians—taking me some place, any place, a place away from where I have spent my whole life, taking me to some place where I can feel safe, some place where I can feel at peace, far away from this place that can make me feel trapped.
I can’t walk down the hill alone and I can’t walk down the street below even if I hold my mother’s hand. Play more music, I think. Please play more music. Take me away from the thoughts that occupy my mind—I have such appreciation for those men playing those shiny instruments with all those sounds, some familiar and some unfamiliar, all jumbled up into a piece of music that takes me to places I am not always prepared to visit.
