Editor’s note: Robyn McBurney is a Roaring Fork Valley local who recently visited Palestine. In October and November of 2025, she spent 40 days in the occupied West Bank with the International Solidarity Movement, witnessing and documenting the conditions Palestinians face. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Middle Eastern and North African studies and shared this reflection with The Sopris Sun.
The most important lesson I learned volunteering in Palestine wasn’t about politics. It wasn’t about history or diplomacy or “conflict resolution.” It was about a quality of resilience so profound it has its own word: sumud. Steadfastness.
I visited Palestine with a degree in Middle Eastern studies, fairly confident that I understood the situation. I knew the statistics, the history, the vocabulary of occupation. But nothing prepared me for the reality of living under a system designed not just to control territory, but to erode human dignity through calculated uncertainty.
My journey began with a three-hour interrogation and a strip-search at the Israeli border. My offense? Soldiers suspected I spoke Arabic. These days, a solo traveler without family receiving them in Israel is a red flag that you might, gasp, be there to volunteer in Palestine.
This calculated humiliation is not an anomaly; it is the architecture of daily life under military occupation. In Al-Khalil (Hebron), I saw a city carved in two. In the historic center, Palestinian families live under the boots of soldiers and the harassment of illegal settlers who occupy the apartments above their homes and shops. Nets and wire mesh stretch over market streets to catch the trash, wastewater and sometimes boiling liquid dumped on shopkeepers and passersby below. The goal is not subtle: Make life so unbearable that people leave.
Every Saturday, I witnessed what locals call “settler tours.” Armed soldiers would clear Palestinian families, journalists and even children playing soccer from their own streets. Then, groups of tourists — often Americans if the accents were anything to go by — would be escorted through, viewing shuttered Palestinian shops and homes as potential real estate. It was displacement as a spectator sport, a chilling performance of power meant to showcase who controls the narrative and the land.
Yet, amidst this grinding pressure, I witnessed a profound and transformative force: sumud. This Arabic word translates to “steadfastness,” but it means something deeper. It is the disciplined, daily choice to live with dignity when every system is designed to strip it away.
I saw sumud in the teachers who educate children in schools, now open only three days a week because tax revenues have been withheld for years. I saw it in the farmers who harvest their olives, knowing masked settlers might attack and that the army and police will only make the situation worse if they’re called to intervene; in the shopkeepers who open their doors each morning under wire nets, often without seeing a single customer all day. I saw it in families who, after a meager harvest, offered us meals and endless coffee, expressing sincere gratitude for our mere presence.
This is where the lesson for America lies.
In the United States, we often confuse activism with aesthetics. We champion resistance that is dramatic, photo-worthy and finite. We show up for a protest, sign a petition and then log off. We expect progress to be linear and responsive to our effort. When it isn’t, we risk frustration, burnout or distraction.
Palestinians do not have that luxury. For them, politics is not abstract. It is a soldier at a checkpoint turning a 10-minute school run into a two-hour ordeal with lives at stake. It is a permit denied, a home demolished, a body withheld from a grieving family. Their resistance is not a moment; it is a continuum. It is the stubborn, unglamorous, and essential work of enduring — of going to school, tending the land and preserving community as the world looks away.
This steadfastness exposes our fragility. We are conditioned to believe that if a problem doesn’t yield to a quick fix, it is unsolvable. We often mistake discomfort for danger. Palestine teaches that freedom is not won in a single, heroic showdown. It is built through thousands of small, unyielding acts of refusal: Refusing to abandon a home, refusing to stop working, refusing to let joy be extinguished.
So, what can Americans do? We must move beyond symbolic solidarity. Palestinians do not need our hashtags as much as they need us to stop fueling the machinery that oppresses them. This means demanding our government reasonably condition military aid on human rights, challenging media narratives that obscure apartheid and holding corporations — especially those here in Colorado, like Palantir and Lockheed Martin — accountable for profiting from occupation.
Most importantly, we must learn from their discipline. This means staying engaged when the headlines fade. It means consistent political pressure, not just outraged reactions to crisis after crisis. It means rejecting false equivalences between occupying powers and occupied peoples. It means recognizing that our comfort here in the imperial core is built on the suffering of others — out of sight and out of mind — and that silence in the face of injustice that you’re funding is an endorsement.
I returned from Palestine changed. I saw a people practicing life as an act of defiance. They have shown that the most powerful force against a system designed to dehumanize is an unwavering commitment to one’s own humanity.
The least we can do, with all our privilege and safety, is to refuse to look away. We must match their steadfastness with our own sustained action. Palestinian resilience is a lesson for the world.