After our three days clearing roadblocks we packed up and made tracks to Nablus. The plan was to go on solidarity visits with families of recent martyrs.

The sharing of, and in, the 40 days and nights of grief is a cultural tradition in Palestine, and when we walked into Jawal Abdel Latif's home it had been less than two weeks since an undercover Israeli death squad forced him to lie face down in the red Salfit mud before assassinating him. His father sat in the center of the room and tried to tell us about Jawal, the young man. The police officer. But he could only get a sentence out before his eyes broke and tears navigated his face. A relative poured out tiny cups of bitter coffee and passed them around to all of us, and we swallowed it hard.

Next was the family of Diab Al-Sawari, who'd been assassinated just three days earlier. His wife had prepared a great meal because the tanks were pulling out of Nablus and Diab could return home after a week's absence. Just before sitting down they heard the unmistakable crushing of concrete outside. Tanks were pulverizing the road outside their home, and when Diab stepped out on his terrace to see what was going on, a sniper shot him cold. Three times in the head.

His cousins passed the disfigured bullets around the room, and I held in my hand what my taxes have paid for all these years.

His wife, in her ninth month of pregnancy, called out to the Americans before we left her on the very terrace Diab died on, "What are you going to do about this? How come your people kill us? How come your people give Israel guns and tanks and Apache and F16 to kill us? What are you going to do about this?"

"Does anybody see us?"

Her questions and her pain were more bitter than any coffee I've ever drank. And harder to swallow. And in that moment all that ran through my head was a line from a June Jordan poem that says, simply, "How do I negotiate my shame?"

Indeed.

Our next mission was a trip to Gaza with the French and Italian delegations of the Grassroots International Protection for the Palestinian People (GIPP). A full schedule had been arranged, including a tour of Khan Younis, more solidarity visits with families of martyrs, and general observation condition of human rights in this forsaken strip of land. A familiar refrain from many Palestinians in the West Bank goes like this, "it's bad here, but nowhere near as bad as Gaza."

The night before, Apache helicopters launched missiles into residential areas, wounding two teenagers, which is getting to be a pretty common occurrence. So common that it barely broke the Arab news.

At any rate, we were all trying to prepare ourselves for this place called Gaza when we met Captain Joseph Levy at Erez Crossing. Levy is the head of the Israeli "International Organization Department," a dubious sounding place that I'm not altogether sure even exists. He kindly told us, the US and UK delegation, that he couldn't let us in "for security reasons." The French/Italian bus was already through, and when we explained to him that we were together, he reunited us by escorting our European partners back to Erez.

After listening to Levy's half-hearted assertions that he was concerned about our safety, we decided to put his humanitarian good will to the test. So we walked away from Levy and toward the gates. What ensued was a surrealistic rampage. Indeed, no other word can describe how Levy stalked from woman to woman, choked and then threw them to the ground. It made no difference how old or young they were, as long as they were women Levy was after them.

I've seen this tactic before. In the US police generally single out women, under the false and misogynist belief that women are weaker and therefore should be subject to terror. But all the women bounced back up and we kept on, showing Levy and his bevy of soldierboys that we would not be moved.

Then one soldier began shouting, "I'm going to shoot you in your leg," repeatedly, while Levy loaded his handgun and said, "You know what I'm thinking, so I'm not going to say it out loud." We decided to stop, sit down, and occupy the occupied crossing. And we did sit until Border Police dragged us off and into a bus and instructed the driver not to stop until we got to Jerusalem.

And so we saw up close how afraid Israel is of international human rights observers in the most densely populated area of the world.