Earlier this month, President Barack Obama was honored by the American civil rights movement’s Freedom Riders at the National Women’s Law Center 50 years after their historic, peaceful protest against segregation on interstate buses. 

Officers responded by beating and jailing the demonstrators, but the demonstrators’ sacrifice helped propel the movement to the next stage as African Americans in the United States were able to overcome oppression and secure their rights.

Many people are unaware that a similar thing is happening right now in Palestine, where buses linking internationally-illegal Israeli settlements on confiscated land with Jerusalem and other cities in Israel are just one of the many loud and clear examples of the extreme inequality Palestinians face in their homeland. 

University of Michigan graduate Huwaida Arraf, a longtime Palestinian activist with the Free Gaza and International Solidarity Movement organizations, was among those who participated in a similar “Palestine Freedom Riders” protest on November 15. 

“Being a Palestinian American girl growing up in the U.S., I definitely learned of the civil rights movement and the struggle for freedom, dignity, and civil rights,” Arraf said, speaking from Ramallah. “At the same time it’s frustrating because I don’t see the U.S. standing up for these same rights when Palestinians are pursuing them.”

Arraf said that in Palestine, many residents study the lessons learned from civil rights movements around the world in order to plan peaceful protests to raise awareness. 

The day of the Freedom Riders protest, six Palestinians supported by dozens of activists and flanked by an impressive media presence boarded buses in the settlement town known as Kochav Yaakov in an attempt to pass the dehumanizing military checkpoints Palestinians are subjected to in order to reach Jerusalem. 

Arraf, who has Israeli citizenship through her father, was among them, toting a Palestinian ID card along with five others to show to officers.

The mission was a dangerous one, considering that many Israeli settlers are heavily armed and not afraid to respond violently to Palestinian protesters. The particular bus route chosen was one in a less-armed area and the number of riders was kept small because of the potential consequences.

By 3:30 p.m. local time on November 15, the six Freedom Riders boarded buses headed for Jerusalem after about an hour of others driving right past them, Arraf said. 

The first three riders were able to board without a problem, but the driver caught a glimpse of the fourth’s green Palestinian ID card and tried to deny him from entering. He defied their orders and kept going, however, before a large group of journalists followed the group onto the bus and took their seats. 

The bus driver decided to keep going as Israeli settlers told Arraf they were “making a big deal out of nothing,” saying Palestinians can ride all the time and playing up that angle to the press.

“That’s obviously not true,” Arraf said. 

A while later, the bus reached a military checkpoint, which they normally cruise right through after nodding to soldiers. 

But this time around, things were different. The soldiers board the bus and demanded ID cards and permits to go to Jerusalem. The Freedom Riders refused, asking why the settlers didn’t need them. 

“Our side should not need permits to travel in its own land and to go to Jerusalem,” Arraf said. 

The soldiers tried to remove one of the riders but he refused, and the other five held strong for almost two hours.

Settlers, tired of waiting, left after 15 minutes before offering snide remarks. 

“You can’t wait 15 minutes when soldiers make us wait ten times as long every single day?” Arraf said about the incident.

With so many journalists on board, Arraf believes the riders were spared from the most brutal treatments on the day. She believes that the soldiers were waiting for the journalists to leave, but they stuck around.

Later on, the bus lights were turned off and soldiers threatened to use violence according to Arraf before grabbing and dragging off one of the young men. 

Arraf sat next to another young man to make it more difficult for the soldiers, who usually target young men first, but she was dragged off on her own along with the others and taken into a military jeep to an interrogation station in the occupied territories, where they were subjected to six hours of questioning for their attempted ride, and finally released after 11 p.m.

“The treatment was fairly mild compared to what could have happened because we had a lot of journalists with us,” Arraf said. She said it was likely that a political decision from above was made to release them because of the media scrutiny. Arraf had experienced stronger violence against herself and other protesters as part of the deadly Freedom Flotilla raids last year. 

The unusually mild treatment by Israeli standards is still unacceptable to Palestinians who’ve watched more and more illegal settlements creep in on their homelands through government planning and bulldozing of Palestinian homes. 

Arraf and others will continue to draw inspiration from every imaginable source to raise awareness, however.

“Freedom Riders was meant to expose the apartheid policies and crimes against humanity that so many have been silent about,” she said. “We wanted to expose that and inspire people to take action.”

More than 60,000 signatures were collected in support of the Freedom Riders movement in Palestine and more than 100,000 people watched an online stream of the events across the world. 

“We were grateful for the tremendous support we received, it goes to show the power of what people can do when they’re watching what Israel does and placing pressure so that they cannot commit the atrocities they do on a regular basis,” she said. 

“Putting this kind of pressure on in the short term can lead to a long-term change..we respect and admire those in the civil rights movement; in Palestine the people are always looking for ways to counter the massive Israeli propaganda machine out there and to make people understand what’s really going on.”