‘Where Is the Palestinian Gandhi?’

The simplest acts of defiance can be seen as a threat: Amro once organized and videotaped an effort by a Palestinian man to pass through an Israeli checkpoint while balancing on his shoulder a large watermelon — a longtime symbol of Palestinian nationalism because its colors are those of the Palestinian flag. In the video, soldiers confiscate the watermelon and, as the camera zooms in, eye it warily as though it might explode. But Amro’s protests often offer a more direct challenge to Israeli authority. He has repeatedly filmed Israeli soldiers at close range and been beaten and grabbed by the throat when he refused to stop. When armed settlers eyed new sites in the city on which to raise the Israeli flag, Amro organized local Palestinians to “occupy” the land first, often in the dead of night. Using the same tactics, Amro helped start a kindergarten, tried to open a cinema in an abandoned factory and persuaded multiple Palestinians to move into homes after residents had fled. Amro himself lives in one such home, surrounded by some of the West Bank’s most violent settlers. “He’s trying to do to settlers what the settlers are doing to Palestinians,” Yehuda Shaul, a left-wing Israeli activist who has known Amro for nearly 20 years, told me. “He is an extremely stubborn person.”