It was impossible for him to know it at the time, but it was a spot of bad weather that launched Whistlerite Keith Reynolds’ 35-year connection to Palestine.
On a globetrotting backpack trip in 1985, he was enjoying some uzo with friends on a rainy day in Greece, when a plan was hatched. “Somebody said, ‘It’s been raining here for too long. If it rains tomorrow, let’s go to Tel Aviv.’ And that was it,” Reynolds recalled. “I had no idea that that little side trip was going to impact the rest of my life.”
Reynolds admits his initial window into Palestinian life was limited, at best. Like so many Westerners, he saw the Palestinian people as something of an abstraction, a symbol of a geopolitical conflict too long and complicated for any outsider to truly grasp. “At that time, part of it was that I was misled,” he said.
Reading Israeli and Western news, Reynolds said he was fed a narrative that has largely persisted since the end of the Second World War “creating Israel as this wonderful place [representing] the struggle of a nation.” The Palestinian perspective was much harder to find, until, that is, he met a young Palestinian man named Sami at a hostel who invited him to his hometown in the West Bank. “A big impression was when we went by some Israelis in Hebron. He said, ‘I think these people will cause trouble.’ That stuck with me to this day. He was correct,” Reynolds recalled.
“I came back to Canada and [realized] it wasn’t quite the narrative that I had been told and taught about.”
In the years since, Reynolds has visited the Palestinian territories more than a dozen times, first as a private citizen eager to learn more about the situation on the ground, and later as the founder of Playground Builders, a Whistler-based non-profit that builds playgrounds in war-affected areas of the Middle East, including 31 in Palestine. He has been a guest of the Knesset, Israel’s national legislature, met with Palestinian leaders, and has had a sitdown with Israel’s consul general.
Through the years, the ever-curious Reynolds has always sought a deeper understanding of the plight of the Palestinian people, and as he has watched the latest tensions unfold, which, until last month’s ceasefire, had resulted in the deaths of at least 254 Palestinians and 13 Israelis, he saw it as his responsibility to speak up to counter the common prevailing narrative in the media.
Stacked on a coffee table at his home overlooking Green Lake is a pile of journals, each representing a different trip to Palestine. “It’s not easy for me to go back there,” he says, looking over his notes, “but it’s something I feel I need to do.”
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Pique: You said you first noticed the differences in how Israelis and Palestinians lived on your initial trip in 1985, but when did the realization fully set in that the narrative you had heard about the State of Israel was misguided?
Reynolds: 1987 was the first intifada, and that was shocking when I was listening to our local radio station say that an eight year old and an 80-year-old were killed in violence in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. How does an eight-year-old and an 80-year-old get killed in a war? I started looking at it a little bit more, and I was a lot more curious, followed it and followed it, and then went back. Then I really started to see some changes even from that period. In 2000, big changes. In 2002, the separation barrier was built, which, if you’re gonna put a fence up between neighbours, you’d probably put it on the property line, but 85 per cent of this wall is on Palestinian land. So little things like this and you’d see all of the differences between people.
I think that sometimes the public is perhaps naive or hasn’t done enough research themselves to see what it’s about. There was even one time I was so curious about suicide bombers. I thought, ‘Wow, who would want to be a suicide bomber?’ I’d go and talk to families and I would gain an understanding of the hardship … You know, somebody said to me, ‘It’s easier to get to heaven than it is to get to the end of the street.’ That struck me.
Pique: I think that’s one of the things people don’t often get about life as a Palestinian: so many aspects of their lives are out of their control. Can you give me a sense of the day-to-day controls they live under?
KR: [There are roughly 60 checkpoints and multiple “flying,” or temporary, checkpoints] inside the West Bank. You don’t just say, ‘I’m going to Jerusalem to pray.’ You get up really early in the morning; people will get up at three or four in the morning and start the journey to hopefully get there by 10, 11, noon, which, normally if you drove, would be an hour and a half max from, say, Jenin … Almost always there are restrictions on who can enter. It is always changing. Then you talk about water rights: if a Palestinian can obtain a well permit from the Israeli military it comes with restrictions. Meanwhile the Israeli settlements that are illegal under international law, I’ve been in them, and some of them have swimming pools. It’s very frustrating.
It’s also got to be very difficult to be a Palestinian living in a home, wondering if you’re going to be able to live here. What’s been happening in this whole last conflict seems to stem from this area called Sheikh Jarrah, which is in Jerusalem, and people are being tossed out of their homes. That’s just one incident. There’s been multiple times where people had their homes destroyed. I’ve witnessed it. I’ve seen it. Fifteen minutes to get all your belongings and go, and you could have been there for generations—and it’s gone. You have nothing. So, what’s it like to be a Palestinian? Wow. A lot of them are obviously displaced internally or in neighbouring countries. When I meet Palestinians in the street, they know the best way for them would be to have another passport from someplace else, and still maintain their identity. How long are they going to fight for?
Pique: Often in conversations about this, criticisms of Israel are conflated with racism. How do you counter that perception?
KR: It’s really difficult sometimes to talk about Israel because people are immediately tossed under the same bus that you’re being anti-Semitic. I was baptized Catholic. I don’t agree with the Catholic stance on lots of issues. It doesn’t mean I’m anti-Christian. I will criticize Saudi Arabia or Iran, or you will, over human-rights issues that are happening, and it doesn’t mean that I’m anti-Muslim. We’re just doing the correct thing and saying, ‘You guys should have a look at this.’ … We definitely have to be aware and every news media should be balanced. We’re seeing deaths on both sides, but if it’s wrong to kill Israelis then it’s got to be wrong to kill Palestinians.
Pique: What do you think the average Canadian gets wrong about Palestinians?
KR: Well, there’s this division, thinking that all Muslims want to kill all Jews and all Muslims want to kill all Christians. There are [nearly 2] billion Muslims in the world. If they wanted to kill us, we’d all be dead by now. So I don’t think we really have to fear them. I really enjoy staying in the Palestinian territories; these people are incredibly kind. If you say something like, ‘I really like that coffee cup,’ they’ll say, ‘Here, you can have it.’ And there’s nothing in their fridge. They’re very kind people. But I do get the frustration. You can imagine being a youth with no employment possibilities … Palestinians want hope. Going back to a line somebody said: ‘Yesterday was better than today and tomorrow will be worse than today.’ This is their belief, so there’s really nothing optimistic in their lives. It’s very frustrating. Everybody wants the same thing as everybody else does: stability, they want a car in the driveway in a secure house. It’s pretty difficult for them to achieve that. Building permits in the West Bank alone are almost non-existent; the permits are controlled by the Israeli authorities in certain areas. Gaza is called the largest open-air prison in the world. There are people who’ve gone through four wars in the last little bit, so by the age of 13, you’ve already been through four wars?
Pique: What advice do you have for people wanting to gain a better understanding of the situation?
KR: Like I say to people, ‘Go and you’ll know.’ Take every bit of information you can gather, throw it in the blender, push it on and see what you get. Don’t just read one newspaper, read ‘em all, read as many as you can, and then you can get a good balance. Look at the facts. It’s very misguided. I was just looking at my notes and some of my quotes that I wrote from the last 25 years, and they’re pretty shocking. I just saw something that I wrote: ‘If the UN knew in 1947 what Israel is doing today, the vote would never have passed.’ From what is going on, the way the UN is having to step in now, I think that’s true.
