The past few days have been a whirlwind of joy and sorrow, freedom and captivity. Passover, my favorite Jewish holiday because it’s a celebration of freedom and a commitment to struggling for justice, has framed these days. At the same time, the story of Jaber Dalany, a sick Palestinian man who was arrested at a checkpoint on his way out of the hospital Thursday night, has also framed these days. I was encouraged at a Passover seder last night to reflect on what “my community” (however defined) has done to break apart other communities, what we must take responsibility for. Suddenly I was outside my role as an international. Suddenly the soldiers guarding Jaber’s hospital room were my community (the Jewish community), and the shackles on his legs were my doing. I started to cry, and then shared his story.
On Thursday afternoon, 31-year-old Jaber was leaving a hospital in Nablus where he had spent 5 days and been diagnosed with viral meningitis. He was stopped at Huwara checkpoint and detained from 12:30 pm – 10 pm, when the checkpoint closed and the soldiers officially arrested him. Jaber’s health deteriorated during that time. His wife, who is pregnant with their fourth child, was with him and reports that he became delirious after so many hours in the sun with no food or water. The army reports that after arriving at Salem detention center, he was given water through an IV. We heard nothing else for a couple days – no reason for his arrest, and only vague medical reports from the army whose doctors diagnosed him with everything from a stomach ulcer to heart disease, always with the same conclusion: “Medical condition does not bar arrest.” Finally after many phone calls from organizations and individuals around the world, they admitted he had something more serious and took him to Ha’emek Hospital in Afula. I called the hospital, and the first English-speaking doctor I found was also Palestinian. All the Jewish doctors had gone home for Passover, he told me, so the family could call the emergency room and speak Arabic with any of the doctors if they wanted to find more information. He was extremely helpful, calling me back twice to tell me as much as he knew.
Meanwhile, I kept getting phone calls from the family and friends, saying his wife was not doing well, the family was worried because he hadn’t seemed fully recovered when leaving the hospital in Nablus, etc. Everyone who heard about his arrest was shocked – he has no political ties, people kept saying. The family asked us to try to visit him, so Susy (an Israeli activist) and I went to Afula yesterday. We drove north through Israel, but not far from the Green Line. We passed countless Palestinian Muslim villages (I saw mosques everywhere) and Palestinians walking along the roads. I marveled over the fact that even after Israel’s destruction of over 400 Palestinian towns and villages, so many still remain. This drive made it seem like the 20% of Israel’s population that is Palestinian was more like 80%. For the first time inside Israel, I really felt, “This is Palestine. Some European tourists moved in and formed a state 57 years ago, and are still here, but the land still knows that it is Palestine, and the people still know...” Maybe that’s part of what makes Israelis so uncomfortable. They can build all the shopping malls they want, but Palestine isn’t going anywhere. There was something comforting about the drive, about this thought, about the land.
We arrived at the hospital and went directly to the ward where Jaber was being treated. His room was not difficult to find, since it was the only one with a closed door and two armed soldiers sitting outside. Susy tried to walk in and was stopped by the soldiers. They would not let us enter, but we were able to talk to the doctor, who had not yet received any information about Jaber’s prior medical situation. He seemed frustrated with the army’s lack of sharing information. We gave him the phone number of the doctor who had treated Jaber in Nablus, and just at that moment the faxed medical report from Nablus came from friends of the family. The doctor told us he had just done a spinal tap and would soon determine Jaber’s illness. The viral meningitis diagnosis was confirmed an hour later.
We paced back and forth in front of Jaber’s door a few times, knowing it was unlocked and we could just walk in, but that that probably would not be good for anyone. The soldiers became agitated when we got too close, and were disturbed by our presence. The hospital security guard, however, was somewhat more friendly, and called the DCO to see if we could go into Jaber’s room. Finally an answer came: “No, you can’t go in right now. Maybe after many hours you’ll be allowed in.” So we left the hospital and ran another errand, and came back an hour or two later. We were almost sure we would not be allowed in, but thought it was worth a try, another argument, whatever it would take. It didn’t take anything. We showed up at the entrance of the hospital and the guard said, “You have permission now.” It was surprising, but not unheard of – the army rules and decisions never cease to amaze me in their arbitrariness.
We returned to Jaber’s ward, and the soldiers let us in, but said one of them had to stay with us the whole time. When we entered Jaber was sleeping. I said his name softly and he opened his eyes and gave a little moan. I introduced myself, and even in his delirium, illness, and lack of control over his circumstances, he greeted me with the customary, “Ahlan w’sahlan” (welcome). He started to come to his senses a bit as he realized this was an opportunity to notify the outside world of his situation. He was so tired, and so sick, he told us. He kept saying “Biddi amoot” which could be translated as “I want to die” or “I’m going to die.” I’m not sure which he meant. Maybe both. He said the doctor was good, the hospital was good, but if he’s taken back to Salem detention center they might as well shoot him. He was in tears, half from pain and half from terror, as he told us he hadn’t eaten, drunk, or slept in three days. In Salem, he said, they threw him in a small cell with 9 other people, and did not let anyone out to go to the bathroom from 9pm – 8:30am. He spent the next two days on the floor in pain (there were no beds), where he said it was extremely cold at night. He told us he lost consciousness four times, but didn’t sleep at all. Nobody spoke with him while he was there, so if there is to be any interrogation, it has not yet begun. He still hasn’t had anything to eat or drink, he said, only the occasional IV to keep him from deadly dehydration. I had seen a full tray of food leave his room earlier, and asked him about it. “The doctor told me not to eat for a half hour after the spinal tap,” he said. The soldier argued, “The food came two hours later.” Jaber disagreed. I don’t know who was telling the truth. Possibly both of them. Jaber did not seem to be thinking clearly, so it’s possible he was not aware of the time, or he slept through it, or he was not strong enough to feed himself (he asked us to feed him when they brought more food, which is not something I would expect from a 30-year-old man unless he really was too weak to feed himself). Or maybe he didn’t eat because they served him matzah, which would have been disastrous for his throat. He told us to lift up the blanket covering his feet, and we saw the metal cuffs on his ankles, which seemed totally ridiculous. He was too weak to sit up or feed himself, and two armed guards sat outside his room, but he had to be shackled? One of the soldiers said, “It’s not our decision, we’re only the escorts. We don’t even have the key.”
Susy distracted the soldier for a minute while I dialed Jaber’s wife’s number. She picked up and I quickly said, “Hi Khulud, I’m with Jaber, hold on...” and handed him the phone. They talked for a minute before the soldiers noticed and then another minute while Susy argued with the soldier about why he should be allowed to talk on the phone. When he hung up, Jaber handed me the phone, thanked me, and smiled for the only time all day.
The doctor pulled me aside at one point to ask about my organization. When I told him about IWPS and what we do, he asked why. It was a personal question: Why do you come from America to do this? I told him I’m American and my tax dollars go to support Israel’s occupation of Palestine, and I’m Jewish and my name gets used to oppress Palestinians as well. “You’re Palestinian, right?” I asked. He smiled and said, “I’m nothing. I’m just me.” He was a nice guy, a good doctor, and obviously concerned about Jaber. He said if he were releasing him to his house he would do it almost immediately, but that he wasn’t sure about releasing him to prison. He seemed uncomfortable with the whole situation. Palestinians with Israeli citizenship are already in a peculiar position, and I think he was caught inside that, saying it’s none of his business what happens to Jaber after he’s released, but at the same time it was his responsibility to make sure Jaber was okay. At the end of the conversation he gave me his cell phone number and said, “Don’t give it out, I don’t want any trouble. But feel free to contact me if I can help with anything... that is, anything that’s not political.” I didn’t think it was a good time to get into a discussion about how everything is political, especially everything here.
We stayed with Jaber for over an hour, feeding him pudding, water, and juice (when I asked for a second cup for the juice, one of the soldiers said, “This is a hospital, not a restaurant”). Jaber asked for another blanket and pillow, which the nurses brought. He asked me what day it was, and I told him – Sunday, April 24. He begged us to go to the Finance Ministry in Ramallah, where he works, and see if they can do anything to help. He also stressed the importance of sending the photos that Anna had taken of him being arrested at Huwara to the newspapers, and giving them to his family. I told him people from all over the world already knew about the situation, that the army and hospital had been getting calls all night, that he had to hang in there for his family, etc. “Just don’t let them send me back to Salem,” he kept saying, “or I’ll die.”
I felt guilty leaving him, especially since there didn’t seem to be any time limit on our visit and I knew he may not see another person outside of prison for months. But it was getting late, I already knew I would be at least an hour late to the seder I was going to in Jerusalem, and I wasn’t sure there was anything else we could specifically do for Jaber at the moment.
We left, made our way through the holiday traffic to Tel Aviv, and I took a shared taxi to Jerusalem. It was nice to arrive at the seder to a group of progressive Jews, to meet new people, to sing. But I couldn’t get Jaber out of my mind. I was too tired to think critically about the meaning of celebrating freedom while Jaber’s legs were cuffed together in his hospital bed. I could only feel it, and share it, and try to be proud of what the Jewish tradition could mean if applied more compassionately.
At the end of the seder I read a paragraph I had written for the seder we hosted at our house on Friday night. Twenty Palestinians, Israelis, internationals, and people who cross all those identities had come together to tell the story of Exodus (which is almost exactly the same in the Torah and the Koran, we discovered), to sing songs of freedom, and to express solidarity with and gratitude for each other. We ate taboun (huge wonderful Palestinian bread) instead of matzah, drank grape juice from Bethlehem instead of wine, and covered our seder plate with a Palestinian flag. We ate maklube and sat on mattresses on the floor, the way so many Palestinians do during meals. The cultures, symbols, and people blended beautifully and naturally.
My closing paragraph follows:
“At the end of the seder, Jews have always promised each other: ‘L’shana haba-a bi-Y’rushalayim - Next Year in Jerusalem!’ This year, as we sit here in the West Bank with Palestinians who are not permitted to go to Jerusalem, the phrase ‘Next year in Jerusalem’ has new meaning. What was a dream for Jews and a reality for Palestinians has become a reality for Jews and a dream for Palestinians. This year, in a measure of solidarity with Palestinians, let us all say ‘Next year in Jerusalem – Il’sane il’jayye fil Quds.’”
For those of you who want and are able to do something for Jaber, please call Israeli authorities and demand to know why they continue to hold a sick man with no charges.
Israeli Army phone numbers (these numbers are what you dial from the US – those of you outside can hopefully figure out which number to dial from where you are):
DCO in Jenin: (011-972) 4-640-7312 or (011-972) 4-617-9207
DCO "Humanitarian Office": (011-972) 2-997-7733
Monday, April 25, 2005
Thursday, April 21, 2005
The Real Terrorists
I never know when to send out a report, or when my next moment will be something I desperately want to tell people about right away. The day after I forced myself to sit down and write something to you all last week, I witnessed my first settler attack. “It was nothing,” my friend Arafat told me afterwards, and I know that he was speaking in comparison to other attacks, when people have been injured and even killed. Here, the Palestinian farmers were simply forced off their land. Too simply. Too easily. But what can they do? They don’t have any weapons (unless you count their farming tools, as one woman joked to me); only the Israeli settlers and soldiers have real weapons.
We went to AsSawiya (not to be confused with AzZawiya) because the farmers needed to plow their land that they haven’t been able to plow for four years, and they had permission from the army to go on Sunday. The entire situation is absurd. The village has been here for centuries, and in the past couple decades they’ve seen Israeli settlers move onto their land, destroying or stealing it and preventing farmers from continuing with their lives. In the past three years they’ve seen this new outpost from the settlement of Eli encroach even more upon their land, with the help of the Israeli government who, even according to their own expansionist laws, should stop new outposts from being built. When Palestinian farmers try to go to their land that is anywhere near any settlements or outposts, they are attacked, beaten, and forced off their land by settlers. No settler from this area has been prosecuted, and the police consistently refuse to accept statements and evidence, or to follow up on cases.
Now the Israeli army has decided to “protect” the Palestinian farmers. The way they do this is to give them permits to reach their land for a few days a year (why do people need permits to go to their own land, and what about the rest of the year?), and they promise to protect the farmers while they are plowing (why don’t they remove the settlers from their illegal dwelling place instead of trying to minimize the effects of the predictable settler violence against Palestinians?). Even the army’s protection is questionable. What happened to us on Sunday is similar, apparently, to what usually happens: settlers come and threaten or attack Palestinians, and the army responds by telling the Palestinians that they should leave their land in order to avoid being attacked.
But let me start at the beginning. We (four people from Rabbis for Human Rights and I) arrived in AsSawiya and met my friend Arafat, his mother, and a few other farmers. We walked up the mountain to the land, with Arafat pointing out their new water pipes that carry water to the village, and also pointing at the fresh water spring that the settlers had contaminated a few years ago by bathing and swimming in it. We reached the place where people wanted to work and could see the outpost in the distance. The army was nowhere to be seen (even though it was a designated army protection day). The farmers spread out and plowed for about 20 minutes before two armed settlers approached and began yelling at the families to stop working, to go down, to leave their land. Most of the farmers, knowing the danger, began to pack up right away. It wasn’t quick enough for the settlers, who kept yelling and running from family to family. A couple minutes later two more settlers approached, and more followed. These settlers were armed only with binoculars, not rifles, but their behavior was more aggressive and violent than that of the settlers with guns (who were apparently some sort of outpost security force, though they had no uniforms and were clearly self-appointed security guards). Some of the settlers began pushing the farmers. I saw one of them kick a donkey pretty hard, but the donkey seemed unperturbed. One man later showed me his ripped shirt and told me a settler had hit him on the shoulder. There were no witnesses, so the police would not take a report.
The farmers began walking down the hill, followed (chased) by the settlers. Finally, an army jeep pulled up. Most of the settlers temporarily left (although some came back later), and the Palestinians were relieved. The armed settlers approached the soldiers and began chatting. Their arms were on each other’s shoulders as one soldier asked where another settler was; clearly they knew each other. Arafat tried to talk with the soldiers, to say, “Where were you? This is our designated day to plow, and we were on our land plowing. Can we go back now and continue work?” The response was truly baffling: “You have to wait for the army to get here.” Weren’t they the army? Apparently there were other soldiers and commanders assigned to this task and they hadn’t yet arrived, so the Palestinians had to continue moving down off their land, because God forbid these soldiers would actually ask the settlers to walk up back towards their (illegal) homes.
When “the army” and police finally arrived, the settlers, Palestinian farmers, and Israeli accompaniers began negotiating. I sat with the women and talked, and time passed. We must have sat there for an hour before the army finally announced (or rather, asked Arafat to announce) that they would be allowed back to their land to plow for what was left of the day. Two catches: 1) They could not go to the land they wanted to plow, the land they had begun working earlier. They had to stay in the lower area, even further from the outpost. 2) All men (except children and old men) had to have their IDs checked. One soldier stepped forward and said he would check IDs, but the job was immediately taken over by a settler. That’s right, an armed Israeli settler from an illegal outpost of an illegal settlement held a notepad in his hand and proceeded to write down the ID numbers of every Palestinian man who had come to plow that day. Other settlers began taking pictures of the farmers. All of this was probably just a way to scare them, but who knows what they could try to do if they wanted to hurt the people – they have connections, and there are generally no repercussions to their actions.
Finally the farmers were able to plow on some of their land. I chatted for several hours with a couple Palestinian boys, one of whom told me he spoke fluent Hebrew. Usually only the Palestinian men who have worked in Israel speak Hebrew, so I asked him about it. “My brother is married to a Jewish Israeli,” he said, “and she taught me.”
One army jeep drove up to the outpost, and soldiers patrolled there for the next several hours, making sure settlers did not come down again. The farmers were relieved, and it was a minor victory, but I was disgusted that the ability to hurriedly and frightfully plow land, in a place that is not the place that most needs the work, is a “victory” in the context of occupation.
Perhaps the most difficult part of the day for me, on a personal level, was listening to attitudes of some of the Israeli accompaniers and watching one of them interact with all the parties there. Most people who come with Rabbis for Human Rights (RHR) are fine, but not everyone has the same political analysis or familiarity with the land and the people as Arik, the RHR director. At one point, after the men had all packed up their equipment and gone to where the army told them to go, a few women were still trying to stay on their land and argue with settlers and soldiers. One of the Israeli accompaniers (a man) said to me, “The women don’t understand the situation. The most important thing today is to plow the land, not make a political statement. If they don’t plow for three years, an old Ottoman law says that the land is not theirs anymore.” “I think the women understand better than everyone else,” I responded, “that playing by the rules doesn’t get Palestinians anywhere. Just because they work their land does not mean the settlers won’t build another outpost and steal it.” I heard the man talking with someone on the phone later, probably a man, and speaking in a condescending and amused tone about the women.
In a far worse example, another Israeli accompanier was acting exactly like the army – telling Palestinians not to go to the land where they wanted to go because that would be “provoking” an attack; stepping in the middle of an attack by facing Palestinians and yelling at them to move down the hill, rather than asking the settlers to move up; ordering farmers to go to certain places for their “protection” – even pushing Arafat at one point in the direction this man wanted him to go. I told him I thought he was being completely inappropriate, that Arafat knew exactly what he was doing and had far more experience with settler attacks than this man did, etc. He did not change his behavior. He came to me later and said, “I have seen too much death and tragedy in my own family, so I’m here to stop violent confrontations no matter what it takes.” “That’s fine,” I said, “and a completely appropriate attitude when you’re in Israel. But when you’re here, your job is to follow the lead of the Palestinians and do what they ask you to do, not push them around and tell them what to do. If you don’t want to listen to Palestinians, you should continue your work at home, not here.” I don’t think he had any idea that the farmers would perceive him as more of an oppressor than an accompanier. And honestly, I don’t think he really cared. His work had nothing to do with Palestinians; it was for himself. It’s the same thing that happens in so many situations of oppression, when a member of the oppressor group comes in and tries to dictate to the oppressed how they should act, to tell them what’s best for them. People can’t or won’t step out of their own heads. It reminds me of an e-mail I read last week that is more amusing than offensive. Someone had sent a message to an activist Israeli list serve entitled “Israeli presence needed in Yanoun on Sunday” (Yanoun is a small village that has been consistently terrorized by settlers from Itamar settlement). One Israeli responded to the whole list saying, “That e-mail title was a bit ironic, and almost funny. In fact, Israeli presence is absolutely what is NOT needed in Yanoun on Sunday.”
Where does all this leave us? More and more I’ve been hearing about settler attacks recently – rounding up men and threatening to kill them, poisoning land, unleashing wild boars in Palestinian gardens, and more. “And they call us the terrorists,” so many Palestinians have said to me recently.
I didn’t realize I would write so much about the settler attack, so I’ll stop now, but I hope to write again soon. Anna and I went to Jenin on Monday to meet with Palestinian women, a cultural center, and a nonviolence club at the American University of Jenin. I would love to write more about that experience, at the university in particular – it was interesting to hang out with middle class Palestinians my age whom I relate to socially better than most of the people I know here, but whose political views, academic and somewhat removed ways of thinking about the situation, and feeling that “we can’t do anything, we have to wait for others to make peace” were frustrating for me. But perhaps it could also be enlightening.
More later. For all of you celebrating Passover this weekend, Hag Sameach! It’s my favorite holiday, one I feel I don’t need to stretch at all to fit my political and human beliefs. We’re having a seder here at our house tomorrow night, and inviting Palestinians, Israelis, and internationals to participate. More about that later as well.
Love Hannah
We went to AsSawiya (not to be confused with AzZawiya) because the farmers needed to plow their land that they haven’t been able to plow for four years, and they had permission from the army to go on Sunday. The entire situation is absurd. The village has been here for centuries, and in the past couple decades they’ve seen Israeli settlers move onto their land, destroying or stealing it and preventing farmers from continuing with their lives. In the past three years they’ve seen this new outpost from the settlement of Eli encroach even more upon their land, with the help of the Israeli government who, even according to their own expansionist laws, should stop new outposts from being built. When Palestinian farmers try to go to their land that is anywhere near any settlements or outposts, they are attacked, beaten, and forced off their land by settlers. No settler from this area has been prosecuted, and the police consistently refuse to accept statements and evidence, or to follow up on cases.
Now the Israeli army has decided to “protect” the Palestinian farmers. The way they do this is to give them permits to reach their land for a few days a year (why do people need permits to go to their own land, and what about the rest of the year?), and they promise to protect the farmers while they are plowing (why don’t they remove the settlers from their illegal dwelling place instead of trying to minimize the effects of the predictable settler violence against Palestinians?). Even the army’s protection is questionable. What happened to us on Sunday is similar, apparently, to what usually happens: settlers come and threaten or attack Palestinians, and the army responds by telling the Palestinians that they should leave their land in order to avoid being attacked.
But let me start at the beginning. We (four people from Rabbis for Human Rights and I) arrived in AsSawiya and met my friend Arafat, his mother, and a few other farmers. We walked up the mountain to the land, with Arafat pointing out their new water pipes that carry water to the village, and also pointing at the fresh water spring that the settlers had contaminated a few years ago by bathing and swimming in it. We reached the place where people wanted to work and could see the outpost in the distance. The army was nowhere to be seen (even though it was a designated army protection day). The farmers spread out and plowed for about 20 minutes before two armed settlers approached and began yelling at the families to stop working, to go down, to leave their land. Most of the farmers, knowing the danger, began to pack up right away. It wasn’t quick enough for the settlers, who kept yelling and running from family to family. A couple minutes later two more settlers approached, and more followed. These settlers were armed only with binoculars, not rifles, but their behavior was more aggressive and violent than that of the settlers with guns (who were apparently some sort of outpost security force, though they had no uniforms and were clearly self-appointed security guards). Some of the settlers began pushing the farmers. I saw one of them kick a donkey pretty hard, but the donkey seemed unperturbed. One man later showed me his ripped shirt and told me a settler had hit him on the shoulder. There were no witnesses, so the police would not take a report.
The farmers began walking down the hill, followed (chased) by the settlers. Finally, an army jeep pulled up. Most of the settlers temporarily left (although some came back later), and the Palestinians were relieved. The armed settlers approached the soldiers and began chatting. Their arms were on each other’s shoulders as one soldier asked where another settler was; clearly they knew each other. Arafat tried to talk with the soldiers, to say, “Where were you? This is our designated day to plow, and we were on our land plowing. Can we go back now and continue work?” The response was truly baffling: “You have to wait for the army to get here.” Weren’t they the army? Apparently there were other soldiers and commanders assigned to this task and they hadn’t yet arrived, so the Palestinians had to continue moving down off their land, because God forbid these soldiers would actually ask the settlers to walk up back towards their (illegal) homes.
When “the army” and police finally arrived, the settlers, Palestinian farmers, and Israeli accompaniers began negotiating. I sat with the women and talked, and time passed. We must have sat there for an hour before the army finally announced (or rather, asked Arafat to announce) that they would be allowed back to their land to plow for what was left of the day. Two catches: 1) They could not go to the land they wanted to plow, the land they had begun working earlier. They had to stay in the lower area, even further from the outpost. 2) All men (except children and old men) had to have their IDs checked. One soldier stepped forward and said he would check IDs, but the job was immediately taken over by a settler. That’s right, an armed Israeli settler from an illegal outpost of an illegal settlement held a notepad in his hand and proceeded to write down the ID numbers of every Palestinian man who had come to plow that day. Other settlers began taking pictures of the farmers. All of this was probably just a way to scare them, but who knows what they could try to do if they wanted to hurt the people – they have connections, and there are generally no repercussions to their actions.
Finally the farmers were able to plow on some of their land. I chatted for several hours with a couple Palestinian boys, one of whom told me he spoke fluent Hebrew. Usually only the Palestinian men who have worked in Israel speak Hebrew, so I asked him about it. “My brother is married to a Jewish Israeli,” he said, “and she taught me.”
One army jeep drove up to the outpost, and soldiers patrolled there for the next several hours, making sure settlers did not come down again. The farmers were relieved, and it was a minor victory, but I was disgusted that the ability to hurriedly and frightfully plow land, in a place that is not the place that most needs the work, is a “victory” in the context of occupation.
Perhaps the most difficult part of the day for me, on a personal level, was listening to attitudes of some of the Israeli accompaniers and watching one of them interact with all the parties there. Most people who come with Rabbis for Human Rights (RHR) are fine, but not everyone has the same political analysis or familiarity with the land and the people as Arik, the RHR director. At one point, after the men had all packed up their equipment and gone to where the army told them to go, a few women were still trying to stay on their land and argue with settlers and soldiers. One of the Israeli accompaniers (a man) said to me, “The women don’t understand the situation. The most important thing today is to plow the land, not make a political statement. If they don’t plow for three years, an old Ottoman law says that the land is not theirs anymore.” “I think the women understand better than everyone else,” I responded, “that playing by the rules doesn’t get Palestinians anywhere. Just because they work their land does not mean the settlers won’t build another outpost and steal it.” I heard the man talking with someone on the phone later, probably a man, and speaking in a condescending and amused tone about the women.
In a far worse example, another Israeli accompanier was acting exactly like the army – telling Palestinians not to go to the land where they wanted to go because that would be “provoking” an attack; stepping in the middle of an attack by facing Palestinians and yelling at them to move down the hill, rather than asking the settlers to move up; ordering farmers to go to certain places for their “protection” – even pushing Arafat at one point in the direction this man wanted him to go. I told him I thought he was being completely inappropriate, that Arafat knew exactly what he was doing and had far more experience with settler attacks than this man did, etc. He did not change his behavior. He came to me later and said, “I have seen too much death and tragedy in my own family, so I’m here to stop violent confrontations no matter what it takes.” “That’s fine,” I said, “and a completely appropriate attitude when you’re in Israel. But when you’re here, your job is to follow the lead of the Palestinians and do what they ask you to do, not push them around and tell them what to do. If you don’t want to listen to Palestinians, you should continue your work at home, not here.” I don’t think he had any idea that the farmers would perceive him as more of an oppressor than an accompanier. And honestly, I don’t think he really cared. His work had nothing to do with Palestinians; it was for himself. It’s the same thing that happens in so many situations of oppression, when a member of the oppressor group comes in and tries to dictate to the oppressed how they should act, to tell them what’s best for them. People can’t or won’t step out of their own heads. It reminds me of an e-mail I read last week that is more amusing than offensive. Someone had sent a message to an activist Israeli list serve entitled “Israeli presence needed in Yanoun on Sunday” (Yanoun is a small village that has been consistently terrorized by settlers from Itamar settlement). One Israeli responded to the whole list saying, “That e-mail title was a bit ironic, and almost funny. In fact, Israeli presence is absolutely what is NOT needed in Yanoun on Sunday.”
Where does all this leave us? More and more I’ve been hearing about settler attacks recently – rounding up men and threatening to kill them, poisoning land, unleashing wild boars in Palestinian gardens, and more. “And they call us the terrorists,” so many Palestinians have said to me recently.
I didn’t realize I would write so much about the settler attack, so I’ll stop now, but I hope to write again soon. Anna and I went to Jenin on Monday to meet with Palestinian women, a cultural center, and a nonviolence club at the American University of Jenin. I would love to write more about that experience, at the university in particular – it was interesting to hang out with middle class Palestinians my age whom I relate to socially better than most of the people I know here, but whose political views, academic and somewhat removed ways of thinking about the situation, and feeling that “we can’t do anything, we have to wait for others to make peace” were frustrating for me. But perhaps it could also be enlightening.
More later. For all of you celebrating Passover this weekend, Hag Sameach! It’s my favorite holiday, one I feel I don’t need to stretch at all to fit my political and human beliefs. We’re having a seder here at our house tomorrow night, and inviting Palestinians, Israelis, and internationals to participate. More about that later as well.
Love Hannah
Saturday, April 16, 2005
Living More Than Working
Dear friends,
I realize I haven’t written in over a week, and while some of you may be enjoying a break from my reports, others may be wondering where I’ve gone. I’m still here, still in Palestine, still living and working with people under occupation. I think I’ve done more of the living this week than the working, though, and it’s been nice. I don’t know if it’s a result of last week’s tragedies, but this week I have found myself sitting and drinking tea with friends more than usual. I decided at some point that when I don’t have work outside the house, it’s better to hang out with people than to sit behind a computer (like I am now) looking for another task to do in the list of endless tasks.
And so I’ve been spending time with people. Issa was in the hospital for a few days this week, and came home today. It was wonderful to see him, although he says his infection is not completely gone and he’s not sure he’ll ever fully recover from this last sickness. He and his wife Faisa asked about our friend Karin’s wedding, which happened a couple weeks ago in Bethlehem. I told them it was beautiful, and that Karin and her husband made a nice speech afterwards thanking everyone for coming and saying, “The people who came from furthest are not necessarily the people from Austria and Germany, but those from Salfit and Gaza and even Jerusalem.” “That’s right,” said Faisa sadly, “because of the checkpoints and the soldiers. It’s all because of Israel. If it weren’t for Israel there would be no problem.” She paused, and then added, “But if it weren’t for Israel, we wouldn’t know you.” I cringe to hear this, knowing it’s true. What a strange relationship we have with people. What a strange situation, where people get to know us and want to see us, but know they’re likeliest to see us if there is a problem in their village.
Like the village of Yasouf. I haven’t visited Yasouf yet since I’ve been back, and when my friend Abu Srur found out I had been here for a month without calling and visiting, he was hurt. Tomorrow I’ll go, and I’ll see him, but I’m only going because doctors from Bir Zeit University will be there to talk with the villagers about safety precautions on their land. I wrote in my last report about poison that ideological Jewish settlers had placed on Palestinian land in the south Hebron hills, killing many of their sheep. Well, this same poison has shown up in Yasouf now. Small orange pellets of death. Announcements have been made on mosques throughout the region, but that cannot remove the poison or the system that refuses to prosecute those responsible for planting the poison.
Tomorrow’s visit may not help me change our image from people who show up in problem situations to people who show up because it’s nice to see people, but I’ve been working on it at least in this small part of Hares. Last night my friend Amal dyed my hair with henna. I slept with the dried mud on my head, covered in a head scarf and looking like any other woman in the village. Today I went to return the head scarf and she told me to keep it, that it looked nice on me. I told her she’d get more use out of it than I would, but that next time we dye my hair I’ll wear it again.
Yesterday I took my friend Fatima’s two oldest daughters to the Ibdaa Cultural Center in Bethlehem to record them singing for a project I’m working on. They were amazing, and had a blast. At the ages of 17 and 15, it was their first time traveling without their mother (except for school trips). I picked them up at the roadblock outside the village, where they were waiting hidden away in a car so nobody else in the village would see them leave without their mother. We snuck into another service taxi on the other side of the roadblock, only to find that the two men sitting in front of us were from the same village. We arrived at Zatara checkpoint and Shams noticed the posters plastered all over the bus stops by the settlers in the area. “Sharon,” she said, pointing at his picture. “Yes, it’s against Sharon,” I replied. She was surprised. I told her that many settlers now agree with many Palestinians, but for much different reasons, when they say Sharon is like Hitler. This sign was against the settler evacuation from Gaza. “They will put all the settlers here in the West Bank,” I said. Shams asked, “And the settlers don’t want to be in the West Bank?” “They want to be in the West Bank,” I replied, “but they also want to be in Gaza.” Shams sighed, “They want everything.”
The girls started to relax as we got further south, and we arrived at Dheisheh refugee camp three cars later with no problems. The people at Ibdaa’s radio station / studio thought they were simply doing me a favor by letting me record the girls there, but after the first song, one of them came into the room and asked the girls, “Where are you from?” He was clearly impressed. They opened up completely in the studio – they were in their element, for sure. We recorded five songs, and then one of the men asked if they wanted to read a couple excerpts in English from personal testimonies for the radio program. Shams played a young girl, and Mayisa an old woman. As they were reading, the producer said, “Damn, I wish they lived closer to here.” Apparently it takes some kids an hour to get a good version of just a few lines in English. Shams and Mayisa did everything almost perfectly on their first try.
After finishing and copying CDs, we went to visit the host family that I lived with for a month last summer. The girls had a great conversation with my host mother, Najah. They asked her about life in Dheisheh, how often the army invades, whether all the girls and women in the camp have to wear head scarves or not, and more. She asked them about their parents’ work, life in the village, what kinds of songs they sing, and more. They talked about resistance against the Wall (the girls argued it was necessary, Najah argued it was futile, they didn’t necessarily disagree with each other).
We returned the same roundabout way we came – through Wadi Nar. It would be much quicker, more direct, and less expensive to go through Jerusalem, but Jerusalem is forbidden for West Bank Palestinians, save for a lucky few with special permits. So we went through Wadi Nar, and I remembered the one spot in the turn where it is possible to see the Dome of the Rock – a tiny gold dot in the distance. I pointed it out to the girls, who looked at it in awe and with sadness. “We can’t go there,” said Shams. The whole way there and back we saw pieces of the Wall snaking through the land. In Abu Dis we watched the Dome of the Rock, slightly closer now, disappear like a sunset behind the Wall as we descended a hill.
We went through Ramallah, though it wasn’t the most direct way home, because the girls were in no rush to get back to their village and I thought it would be nice to extend our trip and return home as close to dark as possible. We arrived in Ramallah and Shams wanted to try to find the dabke (Palestinian folk dance) instructor she had taken a couple lessons from last summer. We stopped to ask someone for directions and Shams said, “I love asking people where things are.” “Why?” I asked. “Because it makes me think people are good,” she replied. “My mother always says people in this century are not good, not honest, and don’t help each other. But when I ask someone where something is, and he gets out of his car and walks me to the next street corner to show me, it makes me feel good about people.”
The cultural center that we were looking for was closed, so we headed back to the center of Ramallah to catch a bus north. Shams and Mayisa stopped at a flower and plant shop to find a gift for their mother. “We cleaned the house on Mother’s Day and cooked,” they said, “but we didn’t really get her a gift.” (Mother’s Day in Palestine was a few weeks ago.) So they went into the shop, and asked about a few things. Fifty shekels, thirty shekels, all too much. “I have 10 shekels,” Shams finally said, “and I want a bouquet.” So the man made her a nice bouquet, and off we went to catch a service taxi home. I crossed the Qarawa roadblock with the girls and we took a taxi towards their house, picking up Fatima on the way. She was so happy to see the girls (I forgot to mention that she called 3 times during the day to see where we were and how we were). So the day ended beautifully.
I don’t have much more to write myself right now, but I can share a couple links and a joke:
1. For those of you planning a Passover seder this year who haven’t yet seen the wonderful Love and Justice in Times of War Haggadah (written a couple years ago), check it out at http://colours.mahost.org/events/haggadah.html.
2. Shministim, the high school refusenik movement, continues to grow, and the number of high school seniors imprisoned for refusing to serve in the Israeli army continues to grow as well. For updates on the kids in prison and their statements to the court before being sentenced, visit http://www.newprofile.org/.
3. If you really want to read depressing and insightful reports about the occupation, since this one is probably neither, you can visit my co-worker Anna’s website at http://annainpalestine.blogspot.com.
4. The joke:
An old Arab lives close to New York City for more than 40 years. He would love to plant potatoes in his garden, but he is alone, old and weak. His son is in college in Paris, so the old man sends him an e-mail.
He explains the problem:
Beloved son, I am very sad, because I can't plant potatoes in my garden. I am sure, if only you were here; you helped me and dug up the garden for me.
I love you,
Your father
The following day, the old man receives a response e-mail from his son:
Beloved father,
Please don't touch the garden. It's there that I have hidden 'the THING'.
I love you too,
Ahmed
At 4pm the US Army, the Marines, the FBI, the CIA and the Rangers visit the house of the old man, take the whole garden apart, search every inch, but can't find anything. Disappointed they leave the house.
Another day later, the old man receives another e-mail from his son.
Beloved father, I hope the garden is dug up by now and you can plant your potatoes.
That's all I could do for you from here.
I love you,
Ahmed
I realize I haven’t written in over a week, and while some of you may be enjoying a break from my reports, others may be wondering where I’ve gone. I’m still here, still in Palestine, still living and working with people under occupation. I think I’ve done more of the living this week than the working, though, and it’s been nice. I don’t know if it’s a result of last week’s tragedies, but this week I have found myself sitting and drinking tea with friends more than usual. I decided at some point that when I don’t have work outside the house, it’s better to hang out with people than to sit behind a computer (like I am now) looking for another task to do in the list of endless tasks.
And so I’ve been spending time with people. Issa was in the hospital for a few days this week, and came home today. It was wonderful to see him, although he says his infection is not completely gone and he’s not sure he’ll ever fully recover from this last sickness. He and his wife Faisa asked about our friend Karin’s wedding, which happened a couple weeks ago in Bethlehem. I told them it was beautiful, and that Karin and her husband made a nice speech afterwards thanking everyone for coming and saying, “The people who came from furthest are not necessarily the people from Austria and Germany, but those from Salfit and Gaza and even Jerusalem.” “That’s right,” said Faisa sadly, “because of the checkpoints and the soldiers. It’s all because of Israel. If it weren’t for Israel there would be no problem.” She paused, and then added, “But if it weren’t for Israel, we wouldn’t know you.” I cringe to hear this, knowing it’s true. What a strange relationship we have with people. What a strange situation, where people get to know us and want to see us, but know they’re likeliest to see us if there is a problem in their village.
Like the village of Yasouf. I haven’t visited Yasouf yet since I’ve been back, and when my friend Abu Srur found out I had been here for a month without calling and visiting, he was hurt. Tomorrow I’ll go, and I’ll see him, but I’m only going because doctors from Bir Zeit University will be there to talk with the villagers about safety precautions on their land. I wrote in my last report about poison that ideological Jewish settlers had placed on Palestinian land in the south Hebron hills, killing many of their sheep. Well, this same poison has shown up in Yasouf now. Small orange pellets of death. Announcements have been made on mosques throughout the region, but that cannot remove the poison or the system that refuses to prosecute those responsible for planting the poison.
Tomorrow’s visit may not help me change our image from people who show up in problem situations to people who show up because it’s nice to see people, but I’ve been working on it at least in this small part of Hares. Last night my friend Amal dyed my hair with henna. I slept with the dried mud on my head, covered in a head scarf and looking like any other woman in the village. Today I went to return the head scarf and she told me to keep it, that it looked nice on me. I told her she’d get more use out of it than I would, but that next time we dye my hair I’ll wear it again.
Yesterday I took my friend Fatima’s two oldest daughters to the Ibdaa Cultural Center in Bethlehem to record them singing for a project I’m working on. They were amazing, and had a blast. At the ages of 17 and 15, it was their first time traveling without their mother (except for school trips). I picked them up at the roadblock outside the village, where they were waiting hidden away in a car so nobody else in the village would see them leave without their mother. We snuck into another service taxi on the other side of the roadblock, only to find that the two men sitting in front of us were from the same village. We arrived at Zatara checkpoint and Shams noticed the posters plastered all over the bus stops by the settlers in the area. “Sharon,” she said, pointing at his picture. “Yes, it’s against Sharon,” I replied. She was surprised. I told her that many settlers now agree with many Palestinians, but for much different reasons, when they say Sharon is like Hitler. This sign was against the settler evacuation from Gaza. “They will put all the settlers here in the West Bank,” I said. Shams asked, “And the settlers don’t want to be in the West Bank?” “They want to be in the West Bank,” I replied, “but they also want to be in Gaza.” Shams sighed, “They want everything.”
The girls started to relax as we got further south, and we arrived at Dheisheh refugee camp three cars later with no problems. The people at Ibdaa’s radio station / studio thought they were simply doing me a favor by letting me record the girls there, but after the first song, one of them came into the room and asked the girls, “Where are you from?” He was clearly impressed. They opened up completely in the studio – they were in their element, for sure. We recorded five songs, and then one of the men asked if they wanted to read a couple excerpts in English from personal testimonies for the radio program. Shams played a young girl, and Mayisa an old woman. As they were reading, the producer said, “Damn, I wish they lived closer to here.” Apparently it takes some kids an hour to get a good version of just a few lines in English. Shams and Mayisa did everything almost perfectly on their first try.
After finishing and copying CDs, we went to visit the host family that I lived with for a month last summer. The girls had a great conversation with my host mother, Najah. They asked her about life in Dheisheh, how often the army invades, whether all the girls and women in the camp have to wear head scarves or not, and more. She asked them about their parents’ work, life in the village, what kinds of songs they sing, and more. They talked about resistance against the Wall (the girls argued it was necessary, Najah argued it was futile, they didn’t necessarily disagree with each other).
We returned the same roundabout way we came – through Wadi Nar. It would be much quicker, more direct, and less expensive to go through Jerusalem, but Jerusalem is forbidden for West Bank Palestinians, save for a lucky few with special permits. So we went through Wadi Nar, and I remembered the one spot in the turn where it is possible to see the Dome of the Rock – a tiny gold dot in the distance. I pointed it out to the girls, who looked at it in awe and with sadness. “We can’t go there,” said Shams. The whole way there and back we saw pieces of the Wall snaking through the land. In Abu Dis we watched the Dome of the Rock, slightly closer now, disappear like a sunset behind the Wall as we descended a hill.
We went through Ramallah, though it wasn’t the most direct way home, because the girls were in no rush to get back to their village and I thought it would be nice to extend our trip and return home as close to dark as possible. We arrived in Ramallah and Shams wanted to try to find the dabke (Palestinian folk dance) instructor she had taken a couple lessons from last summer. We stopped to ask someone for directions and Shams said, “I love asking people where things are.” “Why?” I asked. “Because it makes me think people are good,” she replied. “My mother always says people in this century are not good, not honest, and don’t help each other. But when I ask someone where something is, and he gets out of his car and walks me to the next street corner to show me, it makes me feel good about people.”
The cultural center that we were looking for was closed, so we headed back to the center of Ramallah to catch a bus north. Shams and Mayisa stopped at a flower and plant shop to find a gift for their mother. “We cleaned the house on Mother’s Day and cooked,” they said, “but we didn’t really get her a gift.” (Mother’s Day in Palestine was a few weeks ago.) So they went into the shop, and asked about a few things. Fifty shekels, thirty shekels, all too much. “I have 10 shekels,” Shams finally said, “and I want a bouquet.” So the man made her a nice bouquet, and off we went to catch a service taxi home. I crossed the Qarawa roadblock with the girls and we took a taxi towards their house, picking up Fatima on the way. She was so happy to see the girls (I forgot to mention that she called 3 times during the day to see where we were and how we were). So the day ended beautifully.
I don’t have much more to write myself right now, but I can share a couple links and a joke:
1. For those of you planning a Passover seder this year who haven’t yet seen the wonderful Love and Justice in Times of War Haggadah (written a couple years ago), check it out at http://colours.mahost.org/events/haggadah.html.
2. Shministim, the high school refusenik movement, continues to grow, and the number of high school seniors imprisoned for refusing to serve in the Israeli army continues to grow as well. For updates on the kids in prison and their statements to the court before being sentenced, visit http://www.newprofile.org/.
3. If you really want to read depressing and insightful reports about the occupation, since this one is probably neither, you can visit my co-worker Anna’s website at http://annainpalestine.blogspot.com.
4. The joke:
An old Arab lives close to New York City for more than 40 years. He would love to plant potatoes in his garden, but he is alone, old and weak. His son is in college in Paris, so the old man sends him an e-mail.
He explains the problem:
Beloved son, I am very sad, because I can't plant potatoes in my garden. I am sure, if only you were here; you helped me and dug up the garden for me.
I love you,
Your father
The following day, the old man receives a response e-mail from his son:
Beloved father,
Please don't touch the garden. It's there that I have hidden 'the THING'.
I love you too,
Ahmed
At 4pm the US Army, the Marines, the FBI, the CIA and the Rangers visit the house of the old man, take the whole garden apart, search every inch, but can't find anything. Disappointed they leave the house.
Another day later, the old man receives another e-mail from his son.
Beloved father, I hope the garden is dug up by now and you can plant your potatoes.
That's all I could do for you from here.
I love you,
Ahmed
Friday, April 08, 2005
Holding Back Tears
I tend to say I’m the most stable person I know, I tend to stay emotionally separated from the situations I’m involved in, at least in the moment that they’re happening. This week has made that more difficult. This week has seen tragedies, frustrations, and discussions of past tragedies and frustrations. There are only two of us in the house at IWPS now, so the stress level is high and neither of us really has the option to check out and choose not to participate. All week I’ve been holding back tears of sorrow and anger, and all week I’ve been wondering how Palestinians continue to live this way, tragedy on top of tragedy, and remain calm, collected, and on top of everything, nonviolent. Where does the anger go?
Last week I had a conversation with Abu Rabia (our landlord) in which, for the first time, I heard a complete account of the story of his brother Issa’s shooting and paralysis. For the first time I heard about the tear gas the army was constantly throwing into that part of the village during those weeks. For the first time I heard about the system of gathering the people and taking them to safety when the army showed up, and despite that, about Um Rabia’s 8-month pregnancy that she lost. For the first time I heard that Abu Rabia had slept on the roof the night before Issa was shot, and that another brother of his had called him to say, “Don’t sit up, the soldiers are pointing guns at you.” For the first time I heard about how Abu Rabia climbed down the side of the house in the morning and went to work in Salfit, only to get a call a few hours later that his brother had been shot and that soldiers would not let anyone (including cars or ambulances) approach him. For the first time I heard that Abu Rabia thinks the bullets may have been meant for him.
The soldiers had been scattered in the olive groves, and Issa was trying to help the kids get out of the street so no trouble would arise. Suddenly two soldiers came walking down a different street on foot and shot directly at Issa. He fell, and the soldiers essentially left him to die, not letting anyone approach him. He lived, but was paralyzed from the waist down, unable to continue his career as a strength trainer. He remembers going to the doctor once or twice in his life before his injury, and now goes a few times a month. His wife has been transformed into a nurse, his son who was born only a few months before is now 4 years old and does not remember nor will he ever remember seeing his father walk.
I sat on Abu Rabia’s couch listening to him speak, unable to open my mouth for fear the tears would just start flowing. I wanted to ask how they’re able to continue with their lives. I didn’t have to.
The next sentence out of his mouth was, “When I think back about that time, I don’t know how we continued with our lives and with our nonviolence.” And yet they continue. The next day I went down to visit Abu and Um Rabia again, only to find a tearful woman in their house asking Abu Rabia for help. Her husband has been dead for years, and the older of her two sons (who had some mental disabilities) was shot and killed by an Israeli soldier in 2002. Last week, on the day I saw her in Abu Rabia’s house, her younger son, who also has mental disabilities, had gone to his older brother’s tomb to visit. When he reached down to place a flower on the spot, a dumdum bullet that had presumably been left there by soldiers (intentionally or not) exploded and entered his hand and his leg. He was rushed to a hospital in Qalqilya, where the doctors began operations that are going to cost far more money than this woman has. She had come to Abu Rabia for help because of his connections with the Palestinian Authority.
A few more days pass, and we come to the biggest tragedy of the week. I was outside our house, saying goodbye to Issa as he was getting ready to leave for an appointment at the hospital, and trying to understand as a woman took me aside and told me a member of the family had just been arrested at the entrance of Hares. And then Abu Rabia called: “There were people shot in Deir Ballut,” he said. Deir Ballut is a beautiful village in the Salfit district, widely known for its variety of crops and its wonderful people. The Wall is currently being built through their land, and they’ve held demonstrations against the Wall, but there had been no demonstration that morning. “People were shot?” I asked. Through phone calls and a visit, we began to piece together the story, at least from the perspective of the Palestinian witnesses: Apparently, several families (all part of the same larger family) were working on their land. Five of the men walked down a few meters from where their families were, and they could see the bulldozers destroying their land below, as they do everyday. The men yelled up to the guards, who were standing on a hill at least 300 meters away, something along the lines of, “This is our land, why are you destroying it?” The private security guards opened fire, and four of the five men were hit – in the chest, shoulder, butt, and leg. They range in age from 24-58. Everyone swears there was not one stone thrown (not that it could have reached so far anyway), and people were completely in shock that these guards, most of whom they knew from previous days, had fired directly at them. There were no soldiers or police present at the time. [As I write, two days later, the village is demonstrating, and as far as I know, all four men are still alive, two in hospitals in Israel, and two in hospitals in Ramallah. The fact that two were taken to Israel means that Israeli authorities know they did something wrong.]
We showed up on the scene to find a few of the older women wailing, others trying to comfort them (or, at times, force them to stop – it seemed they didn’t want to show any weakness in front of the soldiers who were now there). Some of the women had made it to the rocks below, or hadn’t left since the incident happened a few hours earlier, but the soldiers were blocking everyone else from going down to that group. They were playing games, telling people to move back from one rock to the next, to be 5 meters away, 10 meters away, and so on. If someone wanted to go down below, the soldier in charge would say, “If you get one person to come back, you can go down.” One of the women said, “What are you doing here? This is our land.” One of the soldiers, who seemed to be having a good time and was actually laughing most of the time the women were crying, responded, “No, this is our land.” “The government says it’s our land, so it’s our land,” said the soldier in charge. “I do what my government tells me.” “You can think for yourself,” I replied. “When I take off this uniform and put down this gun, I can think for myself,” he responded. “Not now.”
“What will you say to your wives and children when you go home?” screamed one woman in desperation. Another yelled, “If our sons die, they will be martyrs, they will go to heaven! If you die you will go to hell!” Most of the soldiers didn’t speak Arabic, and most of the villagers didn’t speak Hebrew, so when the soldiers wanted to communicate with the people they would pull aside one of the Hebrew-speaking men and ask him to translate for the group. This man, the brother of one of the people shot, was himself covered in blood from having carried his brother to the ambulance. He looked dazed and exhausted, and when the soldiers told him, “If you care about these people, tell them to move back,” he did as told.
When I finally made my way down to the scene of the shooting, I found women praying, kissing the ground, sitting and crying. At first I didn’t see the blood. Then Anna pointed to a rock, and then another one, and suddenly everywhere I looked I saw drops of blood, or puddles of blood on the scarves and jackets the women were clutching. I started to feel sick, wanting desperately to know where the security guards were now, what they were thinking, what they had been thinking as they opened fire on the small group of unarmed Palestinian men.
A few minutes later the press showed up – people from Reuters, AP, and French Press. All the journalists were Palestinian, and apparently they had been held up for a few minutes at the top of the hill by soldiers who told them, “You’re Palestinians first, then you’re journalists.” They were finally allowed down, and the women picked up the blood-soaked clothing one more time for the photographs. We headed back to the village, people still waiting to hear news from their family members, and Anna promised she’d be back later to sleep in the village that night.
If there’s any positive story I can tell this week, it’s a bittersweet one. It is positive in its current implications, but a commemoration of a tragedy: the massacre at Deir Yassin. On April 9, 1948, members of two different Jewish Zionist terrorist groups broke into Palestinians’ homes in the middle of the night and killed between 110-140 people. This was not the only massacre of the time, and probably not the biggest, but it was the one people heard about, the one that caused so many thousands of Palestinians to flee their homes in fear, not realizing that 57 years later, they still would not be allowed to return.
Zochrot, one of my favorite Israeli organizations, planned this trip to Deir Yassin with a group of refugees called Deir Yassin Remembered. Most of the village’s land has been taken by the modern Jewish religious neighborhood Har Nof, and the remaining buildings have become part of a hospital in the neighborhood. We walked towards the land, with survivors, organizers from the sponsoring groups, and Mordecai Vanunu (the Israeli who disclosed Israel’s nuclear weapons program and spent almost 20 years in jail) leading the crowd. We carried white flowers, one to represent each of the 93 victims’ names that are known. The names were written in Arabic and Hebrew on placards. At first I thought there were only a few Palestinians in the crowd, but as I started hearing Arabic spoken all around me, I realized I had only been counting head scarves. The crowd was a mix of Israeli citizens and internationals, and the Israeli citizens were a mix of Jews and Palestinians.
We were watched by the young orthodox Jewish children from their playground as we approached the area set aside for us. Speeches began, and singing – mostly songs whose lyrics were Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry. Translation was constant, Arabic to Hebrew and vice versa on stage, and then Hebrew to English in the audience for a small group of us sitting in the back. One survivor of the massacre was there, and she began to tell stories, personal stories about many of the killings. She talked about the good relations the Palestinians and Jews had previously, how they had been friends, how she doesn’t know what the Palestinians could have done to the Jews to make them do this to her family. She talked about pregnant women being sliced through the stomach and killed; old men thrown off the roofs of houses; seven young boys sleeping in bed who were rounded up, taken outside, lined up, and shot; a few members of her family (herself included) who were given the choice of whether they wanted to be shot or stabbed to death, only to be saved at the last minute by one soldier who said, “Don’t kill them, let them go.” This is how she escaped, along with the other survivors of the village who were put on a truck and shipped out, away from their village where they’d been for so many centuries. Still they cannot go back. Even as we looked down towards what was Deir Yassin, the modern-day hospital was enclosed by a fence that we could not go through.
The survivor sang a song, and the lyrics went something like this: “They put a mountain between us… I wish it could become sand and disappear…” Between whom? I wondered. Jews and Palestinians? Palestinians and their family members? Both? “We need everyone in the world to know what happened in Deir Yassin,” she closed by saying, and added that she still had the newspaper articles from the time about her family members who were killed. She said this with such urgency, trying to convince a world that has deliberately remembered certain massacres and forgotten others, that we can forget none. That the way to peace is not to forget the past and move on, but to acknowledge the past and move on. As if to spite her, the group of Israeli kids from Har Nof, instructed by an adult, had begun to tear up the booklets that said “Remember Deir Yassin.” I tried to take a picture and one said, “Are you going to put this in the paper?” He then covered his face with a torn booklet, put his middle finger up in front of it, and said, “Put this in the paper.” [It’s not in the paper, but you can see it with my other photos online.]
I was sad to see the boys’ reaction, to see them laughing at others’ pain, to see them denying the biggest catastrophe that has ever happened to the Palestinian people. At the same time, I think it’s good that they were exposed to this, good that they saw Palestinians who were from the place where they now lived, who not so long ago were kicked off their land by some of these kids’ grandparents. As disappointing and disgusting as the boys’ reaction was, the fact that so many Jewish Israelis were there to remember and acknowledge the sordid history of Zionism was just as incredible. First the tragedy needs to be exposed, then acknowledged, and then hopefully, someday, dealt with justly. If any people should know the importance of this, it is certainly we Jews.
Last week I had a conversation with Abu Rabia (our landlord) in which, for the first time, I heard a complete account of the story of his brother Issa’s shooting and paralysis. For the first time I heard about the tear gas the army was constantly throwing into that part of the village during those weeks. For the first time I heard about the system of gathering the people and taking them to safety when the army showed up, and despite that, about Um Rabia’s 8-month pregnancy that she lost. For the first time I heard that Abu Rabia had slept on the roof the night before Issa was shot, and that another brother of his had called him to say, “Don’t sit up, the soldiers are pointing guns at you.” For the first time I heard about how Abu Rabia climbed down the side of the house in the morning and went to work in Salfit, only to get a call a few hours later that his brother had been shot and that soldiers would not let anyone (including cars or ambulances) approach him. For the first time I heard that Abu Rabia thinks the bullets may have been meant for him.
The soldiers had been scattered in the olive groves, and Issa was trying to help the kids get out of the street so no trouble would arise. Suddenly two soldiers came walking down a different street on foot and shot directly at Issa. He fell, and the soldiers essentially left him to die, not letting anyone approach him. He lived, but was paralyzed from the waist down, unable to continue his career as a strength trainer. He remembers going to the doctor once or twice in his life before his injury, and now goes a few times a month. His wife has been transformed into a nurse, his son who was born only a few months before is now 4 years old and does not remember nor will he ever remember seeing his father walk.
I sat on Abu Rabia’s couch listening to him speak, unable to open my mouth for fear the tears would just start flowing. I wanted to ask how they’re able to continue with their lives. I didn’t have to.
The next sentence out of his mouth was, “When I think back about that time, I don’t know how we continued with our lives and with our nonviolence.” And yet they continue. The next day I went down to visit Abu and Um Rabia again, only to find a tearful woman in their house asking Abu Rabia for help. Her husband has been dead for years, and the older of her two sons (who had some mental disabilities) was shot and killed by an Israeli soldier in 2002. Last week, on the day I saw her in Abu Rabia’s house, her younger son, who also has mental disabilities, had gone to his older brother’s tomb to visit. When he reached down to place a flower on the spot, a dumdum bullet that had presumably been left there by soldiers (intentionally or not) exploded and entered his hand and his leg. He was rushed to a hospital in Qalqilya, where the doctors began operations that are going to cost far more money than this woman has. She had come to Abu Rabia for help because of his connections with the Palestinian Authority.
A few more days pass, and we come to the biggest tragedy of the week. I was outside our house, saying goodbye to Issa as he was getting ready to leave for an appointment at the hospital, and trying to understand as a woman took me aside and told me a member of the family had just been arrested at the entrance of Hares. And then Abu Rabia called: “There were people shot in Deir Ballut,” he said. Deir Ballut is a beautiful village in the Salfit district, widely known for its variety of crops and its wonderful people. The Wall is currently being built through their land, and they’ve held demonstrations against the Wall, but there had been no demonstration that morning. “People were shot?” I asked. Through phone calls and a visit, we began to piece together the story, at least from the perspective of the Palestinian witnesses: Apparently, several families (all part of the same larger family) were working on their land. Five of the men walked down a few meters from where their families were, and they could see the bulldozers destroying their land below, as they do everyday. The men yelled up to the guards, who were standing on a hill at least 300 meters away, something along the lines of, “This is our land, why are you destroying it?” The private security guards opened fire, and four of the five men were hit – in the chest, shoulder, butt, and leg. They range in age from 24-58. Everyone swears there was not one stone thrown (not that it could have reached so far anyway), and people were completely in shock that these guards, most of whom they knew from previous days, had fired directly at them. There were no soldiers or police present at the time. [As I write, two days later, the village is demonstrating, and as far as I know, all four men are still alive, two in hospitals in Israel, and two in hospitals in Ramallah. The fact that two were taken to Israel means that Israeli authorities know they did something wrong.]
We showed up on the scene to find a few of the older women wailing, others trying to comfort them (or, at times, force them to stop – it seemed they didn’t want to show any weakness in front of the soldiers who were now there). Some of the women had made it to the rocks below, or hadn’t left since the incident happened a few hours earlier, but the soldiers were blocking everyone else from going down to that group. They were playing games, telling people to move back from one rock to the next, to be 5 meters away, 10 meters away, and so on. If someone wanted to go down below, the soldier in charge would say, “If you get one person to come back, you can go down.” One of the women said, “What are you doing here? This is our land.” One of the soldiers, who seemed to be having a good time and was actually laughing most of the time the women were crying, responded, “No, this is our land.” “The government says it’s our land, so it’s our land,” said the soldier in charge. “I do what my government tells me.” “You can think for yourself,” I replied. “When I take off this uniform and put down this gun, I can think for myself,” he responded. “Not now.”
“What will you say to your wives and children when you go home?” screamed one woman in desperation. Another yelled, “If our sons die, they will be martyrs, they will go to heaven! If you die you will go to hell!” Most of the soldiers didn’t speak Arabic, and most of the villagers didn’t speak Hebrew, so when the soldiers wanted to communicate with the people they would pull aside one of the Hebrew-speaking men and ask him to translate for the group. This man, the brother of one of the people shot, was himself covered in blood from having carried his brother to the ambulance. He looked dazed and exhausted, and when the soldiers told him, “If you care about these people, tell them to move back,” he did as told.
When I finally made my way down to the scene of the shooting, I found women praying, kissing the ground, sitting and crying. At first I didn’t see the blood. Then Anna pointed to a rock, and then another one, and suddenly everywhere I looked I saw drops of blood, or puddles of blood on the scarves and jackets the women were clutching. I started to feel sick, wanting desperately to know where the security guards were now, what they were thinking, what they had been thinking as they opened fire on the small group of unarmed Palestinian men.
A few minutes later the press showed up – people from Reuters, AP, and French Press. All the journalists were Palestinian, and apparently they had been held up for a few minutes at the top of the hill by soldiers who told them, “You’re Palestinians first, then you’re journalists.” They were finally allowed down, and the women picked up the blood-soaked clothing one more time for the photographs. We headed back to the village, people still waiting to hear news from their family members, and Anna promised she’d be back later to sleep in the village that night.
If there’s any positive story I can tell this week, it’s a bittersweet one. It is positive in its current implications, but a commemoration of a tragedy: the massacre at Deir Yassin. On April 9, 1948, members of two different Jewish Zionist terrorist groups broke into Palestinians’ homes in the middle of the night and killed between 110-140 people. This was not the only massacre of the time, and probably not the biggest, but it was the one people heard about, the one that caused so many thousands of Palestinians to flee their homes in fear, not realizing that 57 years later, they still would not be allowed to return.
Zochrot, one of my favorite Israeli organizations, planned this trip to Deir Yassin with a group of refugees called Deir Yassin Remembered. Most of the village’s land has been taken by the modern Jewish religious neighborhood Har Nof, and the remaining buildings have become part of a hospital in the neighborhood. We walked towards the land, with survivors, organizers from the sponsoring groups, and Mordecai Vanunu (the Israeli who disclosed Israel’s nuclear weapons program and spent almost 20 years in jail) leading the crowd. We carried white flowers, one to represent each of the 93 victims’ names that are known. The names were written in Arabic and Hebrew on placards. At first I thought there were only a few Palestinians in the crowd, but as I started hearing Arabic spoken all around me, I realized I had only been counting head scarves. The crowd was a mix of Israeli citizens and internationals, and the Israeli citizens were a mix of Jews and Palestinians.
We were watched by the young orthodox Jewish children from their playground as we approached the area set aside for us. Speeches began, and singing – mostly songs whose lyrics were Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry. Translation was constant, Arabic to Hebrew and vice versa on stage, and then Hebrew to English in the audience for a small group of us sitting in the back. One survivor of the massacre was there, and she began to tell stories, personal stories about many of the killings. She talked about the good relations the Palestinians and Jews had previously, how they had been friends, how she doesn’t know what the Palestinians could have done to the Jews to make them do this to her family. She talked about pregnant women being sliced through the stomach and killed; old men thrown off the roofs of houses; seven young boys sleeping in bed who were rounded up, taken outside, lined up, and shot; a few members of her family (herself included) who were given the choice of whether they wanted to be shot or stabbed to death, only to be saved at the last minute by one soldier who said, “Don’t kill them, let them go.” This is how she escaped, along with the other survivors of the village who were put on a truck and shipped out, away from their village where they’d been for so many centuries. Still they cannot go back. Even as we looked down towards what was Deir Yassin, the modern-day hospital was enclosed by a fence that we could not go through.
The survivor sang a song, and the lyrics went something like this: “They put a mountain between us… I wish it could become sand and disappear…” Between whom? I wondered. Jews and Palestinians? Palestinians and their family members? Both? “We need everyone in the world to know what happened in Deir Yassin,” she closed by saying, and added that she still had the newspaper articles from the time about her family members who were killed. She said this with such urgency, trying to convince a world that has deliberately remembered certain massacres and forgotten others, that we can forget none. That the way to peace is not to forget the past and move on, but to acknowledge the past and move on. As if to spite her, the group of Israeli kids from Har Nof, instructed by an adult, had begun to tear up the booklets that said “Remember Deir Yassin.” I tried to take a picture and one said, “Are you going to put this in the paper?” He then covered his face with a torn booklet, put his middle finger up in front of it, and said, “Put this in the paper.” [It’s not in the paper, but you can see it with my other photos online.]
I was sad to see the boys’ reaction, to see them laughing at others’ pain, to see them denying the biggest catastrophe that has ever happened to the Palestinian people. At the same time, I think it’s good that they were exposed to this, good that they saw Palestinians who were from the place where they now lived, who not so long ago were kicked off their land by some of these kids’ grandparents. As disappointing and disgusting as the boys’ reaction was, the fact that so many Jewish Israelis were there to remember and acknowledge the sordid history of Zionism was just as incredible. First the tragedy needs to be exposed, then acknowledged, and then hopefully, someday, dealt with justly. If any people should know the importance of this, it is certainly we Jews.
Saturday, April 02, 2005
Tidbits of Creativity
Things have been somewhat calm around us this week, and the creative energy continues to flow. I wonder if the slight lightening of the occupation in this area gives people the space to be more creative and hopeful. I used to think only desperation would breed the kind of resistance needed to end the occupation, but it seemed to me last year that as bad as things got, the people in the West Bank continued to repeat the mantra, “At least it isn’t Gaza,” or sometimes, “At least it isn’t Iraq.” There was always the fear of losing even more. It’s probably impossible to analyze social change in the present and with such limited experience as I have, but whatever the reason, I myself am seeing more creativity than I have in the past.
The situation has not improved everywhere. In Hebron and the surrounding areas, fanatical settlers continue to hold the city hostage with their presence and their violence. Last Wednesday, Palestinians discovered poison pellets spread around their land adjacent to an Israeli settlement. Several sheep and other animals have died, and dozens more are sick. The police took a report, but it is unlikely that they will actually try to find the people who did this. The next day, international workers who are in the Hebron region to provide a protective presence for villagers were attacked by a gang of settlers, one of whom was sporting a Halloween mask with a cranium on it. The internationals were subsequently arrested for being attacked, while the settlers went home. The upshot is that the following day in court, the judge let the internationals go and stated that international presence in the region is especially important because of the settler violence.
Moving north into the Ramallah area, the village of Bil’in continues to struggle against the Wall, and continues to be terrorized by the Israeli army. My favorite example of creativity this week comes from Bil’in: A few nights ago, villagers decided they were tired of the nightly army incursions, and called for a volleyball game from 11pm – 3am. Almost 20 internationals and Israelis joined a much larger group of villagers as they reclaimed control of their village and their land. I only wish I had been there.
My next piece of exciting news from this week comes from Jenin. I ran into a Palestinian from Tulkarem whom I had met last year. He’s studying and living in Jenin now, and has started a group at his university that deals with issues of nonviolence and conflict resolution. They’re currently working on a campaign to get the university to boycott Israeli products, particularly Tapuzina, the Israeli juice that apparently has a preservative in it that is banned in many countries. So it’s a focused campaign, and is both political and environmental. The group is working on setting up meetings with young Israeli activists, and is happy to receive internationals as well. I’m sure I’ll write more about this once I see them in action.
And then we come to Salfit. Wednesday was Palestinian Land Day, which commemorates the March 30, 1976 Israeli army killing of 6 Palestinians with Israeli citizenship who were protesting the theft of their land. Consequently, Wednesday saw at least 5 or 6 demonstrations in the West Bank and Israel (and possibly Gaza, though I didn’t hear anything specifically about Gaza). We marched with Women for Life, a Salfit women’s group that formed in part to oppose the impending Wall in this region, to a polluted valley called Wadi Qana. Surrounded by settlements and outposts, this village was evacuated in the 1980s and most of the land and water has been stolen or completely contaminated by sewage from the settlements. The group of women was small, but the number of girls made me happy. When the army came to see what we were doing and parked at the top of the valley, it was the girls who faced them and began to chant and sing in their direction. Learning from their mothers.
Friday, in another Land Day demonstration, the village of AzZawiya hosted a march and prayers on their land. The old path of the Wall would have seen AzZawiya lose 90% of their land – it’s now somewhere between 50 and 70%. The villagers, through demonstrations and court decisions, are trying to get that number to approach zero, although hundreds of trees have already been destroyed to create the Wall’s path.
When we began to march on Friday, we fully expected the army to stop us with tear gas and sound bombs before we reached the land. But as we continued to march, flags of all political parties waving in the breeze, we saw the village of Kufr Qassem getting closer and closer. [Kufr Qassem is a Palestinian village just over the Green Line, technically part of Israel since 1948. Families in AzZawiya/Kufr Qassem were split by the 1948 war, and all the land between the villages is AzZawiya’s land.]
We reached the path of the Wall, the flattened rocky dirt that had previously been an olive grove. Villagers scattered for a few minutes to place flags on the tops of hills of cleared land (reminding me of Sharon’s message to the settlers last year to “claim every hilltop” before it was too late and Israel was forced to make some concessions). The sense of triumph was palpable as one of the leaders picked up a megaphone and began calling the group back together for prayer. The tone became serious, somber, sincere. I had seen pictures of prayer actions before, but I’d never attended one, and it was simply amazing. The call and response, the ritual, the chanting: all were both mesmerizing and familiar to me, being not unlike Jewish prayer I grew up with. Before Friday, I had thought that the idea of praying on the land was partially a media event, but when it actually began, I felt almost ashamed to photograph the men in prayer. As they put their faces to the earth, I wondered whether this would be the last time they would do so in this spot.
The prayer ended as quickly as it began, and people once again began to march, this time towards a couple trailers that were apparently brought there by settlers a few years ago after the army training base in the same spot closed down. Suddenly there was a lot of noise, and 11-year-old Andaleeb grabbed my arm in fear, whispering “jeysh, jeysh” (army, army). On my other side, an older Palestinian woman began to wail: this was her land, she cried. She had planted it, watched it grow, tended to it over so many years, and now it’s gone, just like that. I didn’t understand all of her words, but her gestures and emotions were unmistakable. Another villager explained that last year right after the construction began, this woman had dreamt that something was happening to her land, and walked several kilometers in the middle of the night to find that the bulldozers had started all-night work in AzZawiya. She slept on her land.
After a minute of confusion, we realized the noise was not coming from the army, who still hadn’t made a presence at the demonstration, but from Palestinians who had begun pounding on the metal trailers. Andaleeb calmed down, and we approached just in time to see one of the trailers tip over onto its side. A cheer rose from the crowd, and just as excitement began to sweep me away, the older woman, still next to me, cried “fadi!” (empty). They can knock over all the trailers they want, she said, but it won’t bring back the destroyed land. I felt slightly guilty for leaving her a minute later, but I didn’t want to miss what came next: The villagers quickly worked together to gather olive branches (probably from their destroyed trees) to use as kindling as they tried to set one of the trailers on fire. While they didn’t completely burn down the trailers, the damage was done, and people marched on along the path of the Wall.
Only at the very end, as we stood at the top of a small mountain, did several jeeps enter the area from below. Boys stood on a cliff, stones in hand, but as the jeeps drove past without stopping, the boys put their stones down and we began to walk back into the village, exhausted and delighted.
We were shuttled back to a Palestinian’s house with Israeli activists, the mayor of AzZawiya, and several other villagers. A few minutes after entering, someone asked if anyone spoke Spanish, and I immediately began chatting with the woman who lived there in a mix of broken Spanish and broken Arabic (broken on my end, that is – she’s fluent in both). She’s from Brazil, she explained, but speaks Spanish as well as Portuguese because she lived on the border with Uruguay. She returned to Palestine in 2000, after most of the Latin American Palestinians I know who came back during the Oslo period with hope that Palestinians would soon have an autonomous state. I asked her if she had Palestinian ID, familiar with the plight of so many who cannot get this ID and are technically living “illegally” in their villages, having come to Palestine (through Israel) with a foreign passport and a visa that expired about 10 years ago. No, she answered, she doesn’t have Palestinian ID, she has Israeli ID. Now I was thoroughly confused. Apparently she was living and studying (or working?) in Kufr Qassem for a while after returning. I love stories like this, stories that cross national boundaries and render Israeli ethnic-based law meaningless.
As we were leaving the house, all the Palestinian leaders were talking about the upcoming local elections (May 5). We asked Nada, a wonderful older woman who says she lives alone and has never been married because she loves her freedom, if she had registered to run for the village council. No, she replied, I’m too smart for that. I’ll work for the Palestinian secret police, the Shabak, the CIA.
One of our female friends here in the village of Hares has just registered to run for office. Um Fadi is a crucial member of Women for Life, and is currently the IWPS Arabic teacher. Our conversation during our last lesson ranged from the upcoming elections, to an analysis of Wednesday’s women’s demonstration, to Um Fadi’s history and travels. She spent many years teaching in Saudi Arabia because her husband had to be there for his job, and she gave birth to her children there. “Do they have Saudi citizenship?” I asked. “No,” she replied, “it’s mamnua” (forbidden). I asked her what she thought of this law, that Palestinians cannot get citizenship in most Arab countries. “It’s good,” she replied. “Palestine is our land, I was only a guest in Saudi Arabia.” “But shouldn’t you have the choice to get citizenship elsewhere,” I asked, “without having to give up your claim to Palestine?” She answered emphatically: “If they offered me citizenship elsewhere, I wouldn’t take it. I’m Palestinian.” I pressed once more: “But shouldn’t that be your choice, and not the government’s?” We talked about the political reason for the law, that if other Arab countries gave Palestinians citizenship, Israel would use it to say, “Look, Palestinians can go there, they don’t need to be here.” On the other hand, I pointed out, now Israel uses the argument, “Look, the other Arab countries don’t treat the Palestinians well, so why should we have to?” At this Um Fadi became more animated than I’ve ever seen her as she answered, “Because this is our land!” She then added with a smile, but probably only half-jokingly, “If someone said that to me, I’d choke them.”
Sometimes I think it’s humor that keeps people going here. I’ll close with a story from today: We went with a couple Israelis to meet a Palestinian activist in a nearby village. It was raining slightly, and our shoes were muddy as we hesitantly approached his house, trying to wipe our feet as much as possible before entering. “Don’t worry about it,” he said in Hebrew, “come in.” Smiling, he added, “It’s not only in my house that Jews are dirty, it’s all over the territories.” We shared a laugh, followed by tea, coffee, and conversation.
Let the humor, camaraderie, and creativity continue, and let the occupation fall apart at its seams.
The situation has not improved everywhere. In Hebron and the surrounding areas, fanatical settlers continue to hold the city hostage with their presence and their violence. Last Wednesday, Palestinians discovered poison pellets spread around their land adjacent to an Israeli settlement. Several sheep and other animals have died, and dozens more are sick. The police took a report, but it is unlikely that they will actually try to find the people who did this. The next day, international workers who are in the Hebron region to provide a protective presence for villagers were attacked by a gang of settlers, one of whom was sporting a Halloween mask with a cranium on it. The internationals were subsequently arrested for being attacked, while the settlers went home. The upshot is that the following day in court, the judge let the internationals go and stated that international presence in the region is especially important because of the settler violence.
Moving north into the Ramallah area, the village of Bil’in continues to struggle against the Wall, and continues to be terrorized by the Israeli army. My favorite example of creativity this week comes from Bil’in: A few nights ago, villagers decided they were tired of the nightly army incursions, and called for a volleyball game from 11pm – 3am. Almost 20 internationals and Israelis joined a much larger group of villagers as they reclaimed control of their village and their land. I only wish I had been there.
My next piece of exciting news from this week comes from Jenin. I ran into a Palestinian from Tulkarem whom I had met last year. He’s studying and living in Jenin now, and has started a group at his university that deals with issues of nonviolence and conflict resolution. They’re currently working on a campaign to get the university to boycott Israeli products, particularly Tapuzina, the Israeli juice that apparently has a preservative in it that is banned in many countries. So it’s a focused campaign, and is both political and environmental. The group is working on setting up meetings with young Israeli activists, and is happy to receive internationals as well. I’m sure I’ll write more about this once I see them in action.
And then we come to Salfit. Wednesday was Palestinian Land Day, which commemorates the March 30, 1976 Israeli army killing of 6 Palestinians with Israeli citizenship who were protesting the theft of their land. Consequently, Wednesday saw at least 5 or 6 demonstrations in the West Bank and Israel (and possibly Gaza, though I didn’t hear anything specifically about Gaza). We marched with Women for Life, a Salfit women’s group that formed in part to oppose the impending Wall in this region, to a polluted valley called Wadi Qana. Surrounded by settlements and outposts, this village was evacuated in the 1980s and most of the land and water has been stolen or completely contaminated by sewage from the settlements. The group of women was small, but the number of girls made me happy. When the army came to see what we were doing and parked at the top of the valley, it was the girls who faced them and began to chant and sing in their direction. Learning from their mothers.
Friday, in another Land Day demonstration, the village of AzZawiya hosted a march and prayers on their land. The old path of the Wall would have seen AzZawiya lose 90% of their land – it’s now somewhere between 50 and 70%. The villagers, through demonstrations and court decisions, are trying to get that number to approach zero, although hundreds of trees have already been destroyed to create the Wall’s path.
When we began to march on Friday, we fully expected the army to stop us with tear gas and sound bombs before we reached the land. But as we continued to march, flags of all political parties waving in the breeze, we saw the village of Kufr Qassem getting closer and closer. [Kufr Qassem is a Palestinian village just over the Green Line, technically part of Israel since 1948. Families in AzZawiya/Kufr Qassem were split by the 1948 war, and all the land between the villages is AzZawiya’s land.]
We reached the path of the Wall, the flattened rocky dirt that had previously been an olive grove. Villagers scattered for a few minutes to place flags on the tops of hills of cleared land (reminding me of Sharon’s message to the settlers last year to “claim every hilltop” before it was too late and Israel was forced to make some concessions). The sense of triumph was palpable as one of the leaders picked up a megaphone and began calling the group back together for prayer. The tone became serious, somber, sincere. I had seen pictures of prayer actions before, but I’d never attended one, and it was simply amazing. The call and response, the ritual, the chanting: all were both mesmerizing and familiar to me, being not unlike Jewish prayer I grew up with. Before Friday, I had thought that the idea of praying on the land was partially a media event, but when it actually began, I felt almost ashamed to photograph the men in prayer. As they put their faces to the earth, I wondered whether this would be the last time they would do so in this spot.
The prayer ended as quickly as it began, and people once again began to march, this time towards a couple trailers that were apparently brought there by settlers a few years ago after the army training base in the same spot closed down. Suddenly there was a lot of noise, and 11-year-old Andaleeb grabbed my arm in fear, whispering “jeysh, jeysh” (army, army). On my other side, an older Palestinian woman began to wail: this was her land, she cried. She had planted it, watched it grow, tended to it over so many years, and now it’s gone, just like that. I didn’t understand all of her words, but her gestures and emotions were unmistakable. Another villager explained that last year right after the construction began, this woman had dreamt that something was happening to her land, and walked several kilometers in the middle of the night to find that the bulldozers had started all-night work in AzZawiya. She slept on her land.
After a minute of confusion, we realized the noise was not coming from the army, who still hadn’t made a presence at the demonstration, but from Palestinians who had begun pounding on the metal trailers. Andaleeb calmed down, and we approached just in time to see one of the trailers tip over onto its side. A cheer rose from the crowd, and just as excitement began to sweep me away, the older woman, still next to me, cried “fadi!” (empty). They can knock over all the trailers they want, she said, but it won’t bring back the destroyed land. I felt slightly guilty for leaving her a minute later, but I didn’t want to miss what came next: The villagers quickly worked together to gather olive branches (probably from their destroyed trees) to use as kindling as they tried to set one of the trailers on fire. While they didn’t completely burn down the trailers, the damage was done, and people marched on along the path of the Wall.
Only at the very end, as we stood at the top of a small mountain, did several jeeps enter the area from below. Boys stood on a cliff, stones in hand, but as the jeeps drove past without stopping, the boys put their stones down and we began to walk back into the village, exhausted and delighted.
We were shuttled back to a Palestinian’s house with Israeli activists, the mayor of AzZawiya, and several other villagers. A few minutes after entering, someone asked if anyone spoke Spanish, and I immediately began chatting with the woman who lived there in a mix of broken Spanish and broken Arabic (broken on my end, that is – she’s fluent in both). She’s from Brazil, she explained, but speaks Spanish as well as Portuguese because she lived on the border with Uruguay. She returned to Palestine in 2000, after most of the Latin American Palestinians I know who came back during the Oslo period with hope that Palestinians would soon have an autonomous state. I asked her if she had Palestinian ID, familiar with the plight of so many who cannot get this ID and are technically living “illegally” in their villages, having come to Palestine (through Israel) with a foreign passport and a visa that expired about 10 years ago. No, she answered, she doesn’t have Palestinian ID, she has Israeli ID. Now I was thoroughly confused. Apparently she was living and studying (or working?) in Kufr Qassem for a while after returning. I love stories like this, stories that cross national boundaries and render Israeli ethnic-based law meaningless.
As we were leaving the house, all the Palestinian leaders were talking about the upcoming local elections (May 5). We asked Nada, a wonderful older woman who says she lives alone and has never been married because she loves her freedom, if she had registered to run for the village council. No, she replied, I’m too smart for that. I’ll work for the Palestinian secret police, the Shabak, the CIA.
One of our female friends here in the village of Hares has just registered to run for office. Um Fadi is a crucial member of Women for Life, and is currently the IWPS Arabic teacher. Our conversation during our last lesson ranged from the upcoming elections, to an analysis of Wednesday’s women’s demonstration, to Um Fadi’s history and travels. She spent many years teaching in Saudi Arabia because her husband had to be there for his job, and she gave birth to her children there. “Do they have Saudi citizenship?” I asked. “No,” she replied, “it’s mamnua” (forbidden). I asked her what she thought of this law, that Palestinians cannot get citizenship in most Arab countries. “It’s good,” she replied. “Palestine is our land, I was only a guest in Saudi Arabia.” “But shouldn’t you have the choice to get citizenship elsewhere,” I asked, “without having to give up your claim to Palestine?” She answered emphatically: “If they offered me citizenship elsewhere, I wouldn’t take it. I’m Palestinian.” I pressed once more: “But shouldn’t that be your choice, and not the government’s?” We talked about the political reason for the law, that if other Arab countries gave Palestinians citizenship, Israel would use it to say, “Look, Palestinians can go there, they don’t need to be here.” On the other hand, I pointed out, now Israel uses the argument, “Look, the other Arab countries don’t treat the Palestinians well, so why should we have to?” At this Um Fadi became more animated than I’ve ever seen her as she answered, “Because this is our land!” She then added with a smile, but probably only half-jokingly, “If someone said that to me, I’d choke them.”
Sometimes I think it’s humor that keeps people going here. I’ll close with a story from today: We went with a couple Israelis to meet a Palestinian activist in a nearby village. It was raining slightly, and our shoes were muddy as we hesitantly approached his house, trying to wipe our feet as much as possible before entering. “Don’t worry about it,” he said in Hebrew, “come in.” Smiling, he added, “It’s not only in my house that Jews are dirty, it’s all over the territories.” We shared a laugh, followed by tea, coffee, and conversation.
Let the humor, camaraderie, and creativity continue, and let the occupation fall apart at its seams.
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