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.
