BY FELIX WIECZOREX
For five weeks-from the end of September through October, 2025- Brenna Cussen Anglada and a team of five members of the Meta Peace Team stayed at the West Bank in Gaza, working with 60 volunteers of the International Solidarity Movement to support the people of the West Bank in a time of violent Israeli occupation.
Brenna is a founding member of St. Isidore Catholic Worker, a community in Cuba City, WI, living on the ancestral homeland of the Ho-Chunk, Ioway, Meskwaki, and Sauk. Their community lives with the values of “spirituality, community, right relationship with the earth, nonviolent action, hospitality, and education,” and works to return land to Indigenous people as an act of ecological and racial healing. This was Brenna’s fifth time visiting the West Bank, but her first time since 2009. This time she spent five weeks in the West Bank, living with Palestinians as every aspect of daily life is affected and controlled by Israel’s military occupation.
Brenna’s team focused their efforts on Al Khalil, also known as Hebron: the largest Palestinian city in the West Bank. Their task was to monitor the over 1,000 Israeli checkpoints that blocked off roads and villages, taking note of how often Israeli soldiers inhibited Palestinian activities at those checkpoints. They monitored how often children on their way to school or Palestinians on their way to pray at the mosque were harassed, as well as how often the checkpoints were closed, reporting their findings back to the United Nations.
The extent of Israeli control is absolute- Brenna said, “On a daily basis, the actions of the Israeli military determine whether a Palestinian can go to work, go to school, visit their family, shop for food, harvest their own olives, or even build a house on their own land.” Israelionly roads and road closures prevent Palestinian movement and access to their own cities and villages, and Israeli curfews often lock Palestinians in their homes.
In addition to monitoring checkpoints, Brenna’s team reported on the weekly “settler incursion.” During these times, nearly fifty heavily armed Israeli soldiers clear Palestinians from the streets of their home to make way for Israeli settlers and international Jewish visitors seeking to tour and stake claim to Hebron. Brenna’s team documented particular violence on the part of the Israeli soldiers through video and writing to enable the horrific events to become public and spread the truth of life in the West Bank.
Brenna’s team and other international volunteers also accompanied Palestinians to their olive groves to help them harvest, providing what she called a “protective presence” to the Palestinians. Brenna said that Palestinian nonviolent resistance leaders “told us over and over that they are safer and less vulnerable when internationals are with them,” and “though the olive groves were on their own land, Palestinians were almost always stopped by the Israeli military from harvesting their olives.” Random declarations of “closed military zones” pre- vented Palestinians from harvesting on their own land.
In addition to dealing with the Israeli military, Palestinians and international volunteers were attacked by illegal Israeli settlers. Spiked clubs, live fire, and live gunfire were targeted at the peaceful pickers, including Brenna herself. Outright violence is the normso common that one day Brenna was served hot sandwiches after witnessing an old woman being savagely beaten with a metal rod. In October alone there were 2,350 Israeli attacks on peaceful olive pickers, many resulting in Palestinian hospitalizations before eight o’clock in the morning each day.
The most gut-wrenching part of her trip, Brenna said, was visiting a Palestinian mother of five named Alia, ten days after her-nine-year old son Mohammed was shot and killed by an Israeli sniper. when the man had kneeled, aimed, and shot him, all on camera. Alia was devastated, but she wanted to share Mohammed’s story with the world, to make people understand the unprovoked atrocities that take place in Gaza each day. “Mohammed was a butterfly,” Alia said. He never got a chance to fully grow his wings and fly. Nonviolent movement Palestinian leaders are urging the world to recognize and name what is happening in Gaza and the West Bank as genocide, and to stop pretending that the conflict is two-sided. Brenna said that if people want to make a difference, “It is important to let your congressional representatives and senators know that you do not want your tax dollars to pay for this genocide.” The United States gives 3.8 billion dollars per year (more than 14 billion dollars in the past several years) to Israel in money and weapons, all paid for by United States citizen tax dollars. Palestinians also urge everyone to join the movement for boycott, divestment, and sanctions of organizations that profit from the genocidal occupation.
Palestinians are some of the most highly educated people, per capita, on Earth. Brenna said that she “noticed how informed they were, as well as how hospitable and gracious they were.” They affirmed to her that they had no problem with Jewish people living in their home in the West Bankthey are upset that Israel is taking their land in a brutal and violent way. They just want to be able to live peacefully in their homes, with their people, the same as everyone does.
Though they are brutalized and constantly under threat, one phrase that Brenna heard over and over again keeps Palestinians defiant in the face of genocide and horror, and rings with the hope and strength of a people filled with love for their home. It is a phrase that reverberates through the West Bank and Gaza, holding steadfast in the chaos and death of violence and murder. It is a phrase spoken in peaceful defiance by the Palestinian resistance, echoing in the hearts of each of the millions of Palestinian souls and in those who send their hearts and love to them. In response to hate and genocide, Palestine replies with three simple yet powerful words: “We will remain.”