I am also outraged at the Israeli tanks rolling into West Bank towns, at the army's seizure of the Palestinian epicenter in East Jerusalem, Orient House, and of reports of soldiers' kicking nonviolent Palestinian protesters in the face, chest and groin.

I just returned from a trip to Israel and Palestine. I went to support actions by the Israeli peace movement, and I wanted to let my Palestinian friends know that neither I nor the American people had forgotten them. I had not been there since 1993, and I needed to see for myself the changing face of the occupation.

The faces of those I saw will not leave my mind.

I remember the bright spirit of Manal, 27, who spent four years as a Palestinian political prisoner. Though she is now "free," she said Gaza feels like one large prison. For three hours in the boiling sun, she kept me laughing as we waited in an endless line of cars trying to get through an Israeli checkpoint.

In Rafah refugee camp, Manal showed me where, only hours before, Israeli tanks and bulldozers had demolished 18 Palestinian homes, leaving more than 100 people homeless in the middle of the night. In one remaining house, I saw eight fist-sized holes where artillery shells had ripped through the children's bedroom. When I left, Manal slipped a bracelet off her wrist and pressed it into my hand, asking me not to forget her.

I think of my friend, Terry, who directs the Israeli women's peace organization, Bat Shalom. Recently, she went with other women to monitor any human rights abuses by Israeli soldiers interrogating Palestinians at a checkpoint outside Jerusalem.

"I was scared," she admitted. But she explained that she wanted "to be able to look our children in the eyes, without shame, and tell them that injustice was committed in our name, and we did our best to stop it."

I remember Wafa, a woman in Dheisheh refugee camp near Bethlehem, where 10, 000 people lived together; their camp was shelled last week by the Israeli military and is surrounded by Israeli settlements. She said: "I don't want to push the Jews into the sea. All I want is a safe place for my children to live. "

I think of Hava, a 70-year-old Polish Holocaust survivor who advocates for Palestinian women prisoners, who has been beaten by Israeli counterdemonstrators at peace vigils; and of Rabbi Arik Ascherman, director of Rabbis for Human Rights, who lies down in front of Israeli bulldozers to try to stop them from demolishing Palestinian homes. A Zionist, he said he has moved "from protest to resistance."

I also remember the open, inquisitive faces of the children I met at the Palestinian Counseling Center, where therapists help them process the emotional trauma of losing a brother or father to Israeli bullets. When I asked them what they wanted, they chorused: "Peace!," "To not be occupied," "No violence from Israel or America" and "To make a new future for the children."

And I think of 29-year-old Israeli activist Netta Golan, whose open- heartedness deeply touched me. She has been chaining herself to Palestinian farmers' olive trees in an effort to keep the Israeli army from uprooting them.

These trees are like family to Palestinians and were planted by their grandparents; the trees take 50 years to mature and provide desperately needed income.

The Israeli army and settlers have destroyed more than 150,000 of these trees, and now 50 percent of Palestinians live below the poverty line. When I met Netta, her arm was in a cast after being broken by Israeli police during a nonviolent demonstration. As we walked home one night, after interrupting Ariel Sharon's speech at the Maccabia Games to protest his policies, we confided how scared we had felt.

"It's so good that you can feel the fear," she said, "and then not let it stop you from doing what you think is right."

I also spoke with the highly respected Dr. Hayder Abd al-Shafi, chief Palestinian negotiator in Madrid in 1993. He opposes the bombings inside Israel, and wants an "equitable" peace.

"The American people are fair-minded," he told me. "They have a natural readiness to support what's right, but they don't know."

As Americans, I believe we must stop turning our faces away. Like the open hearts of both Israeli activists who put their bodies on the line, trying to stop their government's human rights abuses -- and of Palestinians who hold a vision of peace despite the brutality, terror and daily humiliation of occupation -- we also need to move from discomfort to protest to resistance, and in the words of Dr. al-Shafi, to "support what's right."

We must call on our government to bring an international peacekeeping force into this region immediately, to end the occupation, and to pressure for peace that gives both peoples the land, resources, security and dignity they deserve.

Penny Rosenwasser is a peace activist in Oakland. She is the author of ''Voices from a 'Promised Land': Palestinian and Israeli Peace Activists Speak Their Hearts'' (Curbstone Press, 1992).

©2001 San Francisco Chronicle

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