Zoharah Simmons’ first trip to Israel and its occupied territories in 1994 got off to an inauspicious start. Born Gwen Robinson in Memphis, Tennessee, the great granddaughter of a slave and a former organizer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee who volunteered to work in Mississippi during Freedom Summer, Simmons was hardly unfamiliar with European settler colonialism or the violence that is its motor.

She was, however, caught off guard by what she experienced upon her arrival in Tel Aviv as part of a peace delegation with the American Friends Service Committee, a social justice organization founded by the Quakers.

First, there was the matter of getting past Israel’s immigration and customs agents.

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