‘We all have (the same) hidden superpower’

Michael Friedrich recalls a journalist from German TV channel ZDF, who interviewed him and his wife Sabine while in the West Bank. The journalist (or at least his channel) took the usual ‘fair-minded’, rather mealy-mouthed approach of equating the two sides in the conflict – which he, Michael, doesn’t agree with. Still, he’s philosophical.

“It’s clear,” he tells me in his accented English, sitting beside Sabine at the Home for Cooperation in the buffer zone: “I’m an activist, he’s a journalist. If we would have completely the same mindset, one of us wouldn’t be doing his job!”. He expects what I write to be “fair”, he adds – meaning me personally – “but I don’t expect you to have my point of view… It’s your job to be critical.”

Absolutely – but it’s hard to be too critical. What’s happening to the Palestinians, especially in Gaza, seems so horrible (and is horrible, even if you choose to blame Hamas or invoke Israel’s ‘right to self-defence’) above all because of the feeling of helplessness it stirs in us. All this violence, all this death and suffering, right next door to Cyprus – and what can we do about it? Nothing.

Say what you like, but this ordinary middle-aged German couple prove that there is something to be done, even beyond chanting slogans and waiting for the government to act (fat chance). Michael and Sabine (55 and 60, respectively) spent three months in Hebron, 30km south of Jerusalem, from October to December last year, their mission being to witness and document – but also to protect, by their very presence.

“You and your readers have a superpower,” explains Michael. “We all have a superpower there. We have civil rights.

“So, in the West Bank, the Palestinians are under military law… And, for example, the army can detain them without a charge. It’s called ‘administrative detention’ – and they just put you in jail for half a year.” What he calls “the internationals,” however, have a different legal status.

“We are under civil law,” explains Sabine. “We have civil rights. Officially, only the police can arrest us.”

Couldn’t a soldier shoot them, for instance, and claim self-defence?

“But then you have an embassy behind you, so there is a price,” replies Michael. “If a soldier kills a Palestinian and says he’s a terrorist, no questions asked. But if they kill a German teacher and a nurse – or a Cypriot journalist – there will be questions… Even if your government is pro-Israel,” he points out, noting my dubious expression, “they don’t like their own citizens to be killed.”

Michael is indeed a teacher (physics and maths, to be precise), and Sabine is indeed a nurse, specialising as a home caretaker for elderly people. They live just outside Hamburg. They have an adopted daughter. They’ve known each other since 2003, and got married in 2012.

They do have a background in activism, having flirted with anarchism in their 20s and supported various causes over the years – “My history is mainly anti-nuclear stuff,” says Michael; “Bina’s history is mostly anti-fascist stuff” – but are otherwise a liberal, middle-class couple with unglamorous jobs and no special resources.

Fortunately, the system in Germany is generous. Michael and Sabine worked a lot of overtime, saving money and accumulating extra hours, then cashed it in by taking a year’s sabbatical, starting last July: “Other people would buy a car. We bought a year”. They left Hamburg – lending their house to a Syrian refugee family – came to Cyprus then on to the West Bank, staying for three months in the home of Issa Amro.

Amro is a prominent activist, the coordinator of a non-violent group called Youth Against Settlements (YAS). Michael used his contacts in Germany to do a check before approaching YAS – “Is it real that they are fighting for democracy, or are they just a kind of front for a terrorist organisation?” – and his friends also recommended him and Sabine to Amro. Even if it hadn’t worked out with YAS, he says, there are other human-rights groups one could contact, including Israeli ones like Torat Tzetek, Jordan Valley Activists, and Rabbis for Human Rights. There’s a whole ecosystem, collectively known as the protective presence network.

Getting in was easy enough. Gaza remains sealed off, of course – staying with friends in Tel Aviv before the ceasefire, “we could hear, like, thunder in the distance, and then our host said: ‘Yeah, that’s Gaza’” – but Hebron is a city of 200,000 with tourist attractions like the Tomb of the Patriarchs. They took a bus, “a so-called settler bus” from Jerusalem, posing as tourists, and made it to Amro’s fortified house in Tel Rumeida.

The house is fortified for good reason. Michael and Sabine actually stayed once before in Hebron, in 2017 (that was when he first contacted YAS) – but things were more relaxed then, the house was behind a low wall and the couple could take photos and talk to IDF soldiers at checkpoints.

This time was different. The wall was higher, the doors newly bulletproof, the soldiers silent. They arrived on October 3. On the next evening, “suddenly four or more soldiers are at the front door, saying ‘We want the Germans’… And they take us with them.”

The soldiers took them to the border of ‘H2’, the military-controlled area – “and they said, ‘OK, go, here are your passports’,” says Sabine. “’Never come back, otherwise we will shoot you on sight’.” A young soldier took down his face-mask, she recalls, as if trying to ingratiate himself with this older European couple: “‘And I don’t want to kill you. So do me a favour, and never come back!’”. She and Michael walked away, spent the night in a safe house, “and the next day they smuggled us in again”.

‘Protective presence’ is a slight misnomer. Yes, their presence was vital – but the couple also put themselves in peril, and shared in the daily fears of the Palestinians.

They did night shifts (usually 1am to 5am), staying awake to alert the house in case something happened. They walked down the road with an AI-controlled machine gun at their back, wondering if the gun would think they were walking too fast and decide to shoot them. (It’s “not even run by the army,” says Michael, “it was a Tel Aviv start-up”.) And they also documented violence on a regular basis.

“We had attacks on the house in October and November, basically daily,” says Michael. “If you count a single stone and an insult as an attack, we had daily attacks.” There were also IDF raids and over a dozen serious attacks, including four “very serious” ones which they’ve documented.

The Friedrichs’ website has videos and full details of the attacks, carried out by a combination of settlers and soldiers.  

In one, three settlers – abetted by a soldier – climbed on the roof with a canister of fuel and tried to burn down the house. Another time (the next day, in fact), settlers let fly with a barrage of rocks. Another incident, on the anniversary of the Hamas attacks of October 7, had Mohammad Natschi, one of the people in the house, detained without charge and beaten so badly he ended up in hospital.

It’s a lot of action for a middle-aged couple from Hamburg – though, again, they had a superpower. “Don’t let what we write here scare you,” they note, presumably to reassure friends reading the website. “We are German citizens. Unlike Mohammad, we have rights and consular assistance.”

Still, it wasn’t easy. “To be honest, I was very happy to be able to finish these three months and to be free now!” laughs Sabine when I ask if leaving the house was emotional. “But yes, a big part of my heart is in Tel Rumeida.”

“We’re exhausted,” adds her husband. “I don’t know how they can do it for years. After three months, we’re exhausted.”

Almost everyone they met there has psychosomatic issues, especially “problems with their stomach” from the constant stress – yet Hebron is probably less stressful than the rural West Bank seen in films like No Other Land, where settlers are actively trying to drive Palestinians out.

“Sometimes I broke down during those three months,” admits Sabine, “and said to Issa: ‘I can’t anymore, how do you stand this? How should we manage this?’… And he just said: ‘Welcome to the occupation’.”

How long can people go on like that, though? How do Sabine and Michael see the future for the Palestinians? This, however, is where it gets interesting.

“In the short run, it’s bleak,” says Michael – especially for Gaza, where “I don’t see a solution. I just think we have to call out the evil, and fight beyond hope…

“In the long run,” however, “I actually fear more for my Israeli friends than for my Palestinian friends.”

That’s an unexpected answer, but it shouldn’t be. It’s often forgotten that Israeli society isn’t monolithic – though he did lose a lot of Jewish Israeli friends “after we named the Gaza genocide a genocide,” says Michael. (The friends would quickly change the subject on Skype, then “we were simply ghosted”.) The few that remain, however, are “very frightened about their country becoming a theocracy, or fascist, like the Jewish version of Iran… They live in a society that’s completely in denial”.

Some denial is par for the course. We’re sitting, after all, in the buffer zone – and both sides in the Cyprus problem routinely indulge in selective memory, he points out, trumpeting the other side’s crimes while forgetting their own. But “it’s nothing compared to the scale of denial that’s happening there… I haven’t met a Greek Cypriot who completely denies the existence of Turkish Cypriots”.

Michael and Sabine went to Israel for the first time in 2011 – initially on holiday, coming to the place with “a very pro-Zionist point of view”, then they had what he calls “an eye-opening” – again in 2017, and again last year. “One thing we learned, in all three times we’ve been there… [is that] there are typical sentences you’ll hear from nearly all Israelis – even those who think of themselves as left-wing or peacenik or whatever. One is ‘We came to an empty land’. ‘There was no-one here’.”

There’s denial about 1948. There’s denial about Gaza too. Just last week, “there was a mostly Israeli group here at the Home, and I talked to a few of them. And they were like, ‘No, there’s no genocide, and there is enough food’.

“And when you asked: ‘But then is Doctors Without Borders lying? Is the UN lying? Is Amnesty International lying? Is the Red Cross lying? Are they all lying?’ – ‘Yeah, they’re all lying’.”

Do they really believe that, though? Or have they just convinced themselves it’s true?

Michael smiles: “What’s the difference?”.

If I’m going to be critical (it’s my job, after all), I might question some of the myriad inequalities he cites in Israeli society, belying the famous claim that Arabs are equal citizens in a full democracy.

“If you’re Palestinian in East Jerusalem, you’re not allowed to renovate schools,” he claims. “In the West Bank, Palestinians are not allowed to have more than 3G phones.” In ‘Israel proper’, you can always tell the Arab houses because they have several big water tanks on the roof – because in summer, when water is scarce, they’re the ones who get their water cut off. “So, even in Israel proper, if you get water in the summer depends on your religion. It’s not an official rule, it’s just happening.”

‘Not an official rule’ does sound like he may be exaggerating – then again, it’s easy enough to know from the actual roofs, and indeed Michael and Sabine just show side-by-side shots of Arab and Israeli houses when they talk to audiences in Germany, describing “what we have witnessed” without ever uttering words like ‘apartheid’.

Above all, it’s unlikely that Germans, with their dark history – especially Germans of that generation, who spent their schooldays learning endlessly about the Holocaust – would set out to smear Israel unless they’d indeed had “an eye-opening”. Even now, Sabine doesn’t talk about two states (much less dispute Israel’s right to exist), lamenting that her dream solution – that “every Palestinian gets his Israeli passport with the same human rights and the same possibilities for education, for work” – has become impossible.

Michael and Sabine do seem genuine – and fairly moderate, despite their heroics in Hebron. They lent the locals their protective presence – and they try to be present in general, trying to change public opinion (which is indeed rapidly changing) in Germany, talking to people about what they’ve witnessed and documented.

Sometimes there’s no point, admits Sabine. Sometimes, their minds are made up. “But sometimes it’s possible to put a little seed in the soil of their mind. And perhaps it grows someday.”