Volunteers with the International Solidarity Movement are encouraged to write personal reflections about the work they engage in with Palestinian communities, the events they experience, and the people they meet. These journals offer the human context often missing in traditional reports or journalism. These articles represent the author’s thoughts and feelings and not necessarily those of the International Solidarity Movement.
I’ve been working with Mohammad Mansour, a Palestinian activist in the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), since I began work here one month ago. He is to face a trial tomorrow. If found guilty, he could go to jail and quite possibly be tortured. What is his crime? He is an organiser in the non-violent resistance. He was charged with assaulting a soldier, throwing stones and encouraging kids to throw stones. But there is no evidence of this. He was at a demonstration where soldiers were filming and taking high resolution photographs, yet they have no evidence of this.
He is now being charged with involvement in an “illegal demonstration.” This so called “illegal” demonstration occurred in the Occupied Territories. Several times he has fronted to the Israeli Peace Court (actual name) in Jerusalem. Just getting to court is difficult; soldiers at Qalandia checkpoint have tried to stop him from attending his own hearings in the past, calling him a “security risk.”
Despite this, each time he goes to court the prosecution offers him a less unfair deal, with the judge encouraging him to accept it. He was offered to sign a piece of paper saying he wouldn’t be involved in any demonstrations for 2 years, and he refused. The prosecution even offered to drop the entire court case if he paid a small amount of money and despite having the money, he refused. Monsour told me he “refuses to pay one shekel to support the occupation. My friend is in a wheel chair after being shot at a demonstration and I am not going to fund a bullet so they can do that to someone else. I also don’t want to pay because I’m not guilty.”
These words come from a man who is in his mid-thirties, has 5 children, and has been in jail before. The longest he has been incarcerated for is three years, and despite describing to me personal experiences as chilling as Abu Graib prisoners’, he is prepared to go back. Some torture techniques were outlawed several years ago, but torture is still legal. Even those techniques that were banned may be reintroduced if they can prove the suspect is “a ticking time bomb.”
Asking Monsour why he doesn’t drop out of the movement he said, “It is my duty. We are living under occupation and I want to be free. And I will tell you something else: I and many [other] Palestinians have promised ourselves when we get our freedom we will go and help other occupied people, wherever they are.”
I would like to be writing about nonviolent struggle in Palestine. I want to be shedding light on the many injustices of Occupation. I am irate that astounding daily stories of creative and courageous resistance are trampled under this issue in the news: however, it is important to address the proliferation of anti-Muslim cartoons and the resulting commotion.
Many people in the West are flabbergasted by the intensity of the Arab and Muslim worlds’ reaction and cannot understand how a few drawings caused such an uproar. The reasons and the response are far deeper than Western news corporations care to dig.
The issue is not a question of free speech versus censorship, but moving past band-aid explanations to the root of the problem. The cartoons released a pressure valve for accumulated outrage. Muslim populations have withstood colonization, occupation, and imperialism for centuries, from Napoleon’s occupation and culture theft in Egypt to victims of the war in Iraq. Themes from the months following 9/11 are resurfacing in Western news: a mosque accused of manufacturing terrorists in London; anger in the Middle East once again boiled down to a hatred of American and European liberties. Presenting the story as primarily a free speech debate frames the situation as cultural, not political in nature. It reveals a bias, an initiative, by choosing to ignore the historical context. But it is also disingenuous. Western media outlets are not really defending free speech, but the West’s use of free speech. Arabs and Muslims exercising their freedom to assemble in demonstrations united across national and cultural borders are represented as extremist.
Many international activists groups operating in the Middle East are attempting to patch long-built trusts. In Palestine, solidarity groups recently issued a collective public condemnation of anti-Muslim cartoons, and called for the newspapers responsible to apologize.
Still, we must be careful not to exercise double standards while reproaching the West for doing the same. Concerns have been raised about the threat of kidnappings, for example – an unlikely but not unrealistic possibility. In many ways, international activists can become apologists for the ugly parts of Palestinian society. We want to show the cause in a favorable light, and sometimes fear fueling anti-Palestinian sentiments by critically discussing existing problems. It’s a disservice to this society, these people, however, to paint issues as black and white.
Many Muslim societies otherize darker ethnicities. I am from a culture that prefers fair skinned girls to the darker variety. Bleaching creams and SPF 150 sunblock abound. Globally, racism is the result of hundreds of years of colonization based on racist assumptions – which are now transmitted through popular media and race politics.
My experience is that Palestinians are much more capable of discerning my ethnicity from my features than Americans- I am often greeted by “Hello, India!” or “Pakistan!” Yet, the ever present, irritating question Where are you from? still haunts me. When I say “Ana Amrikiye buss Hindeya” (‘I am American BUT Indian’ – this qualifier drives me insane, as if the two identities are fundamentally incompatible) I am asked which one of my parents are Indian. When I say both, they are surprised. When I am occasionally invited to Islam and I say I had accepted that invitation at birth, they are surprised. “Wallah!” (‘Well! By God!’) Ironically though, having brown skin lately carries its own benefits.
Danish, Scandinavian, European, and any other light-skinned people face the risk of daily harassment and, yes, the vague possibility of abduction. This is a form of collective punishment. Many verbal threats have been made against Danes. A group of French nationals were recently subject to stone throwing in Hebron.
But let’s keep things in perspective. Palestinians are constantly threatened with imprisonment, death, and theft of land and livelihood under Israeli Occupation. The moment race discrimination refocuses on those with the privilege to remove themselves from the situation, they often do just that. The distinction here is between systematic racism and incidental discrimination. Even conservative-militaristic organizations operating in Palestine – ones considered “terrorist” by the West, such as the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas – have begun espousing nonviolence. However, institutions such as the World Bank and many governments are pulling funding from the Occupied Territories. Some NGOs with hierarchical decision making structures are removing volunteers.
The primary risk posed toward international activists is from the Israeli Occupation Forces. Yet once a threat from Palestinians is detected, people on the outside become much more concerned for our safety. Our work in Palestine functions on the assumption that whether internationals are exercising skin privilege or passport privilege or both, the Israelis see us as their “own” – as possessing “Western” culture. Soldiers (and sometimes settlers) are less prone to harm us than Palestinians, who are perceived as the “Other.” Internal divisions are united against an external enemy. It is a system of institutionalized racism that roars when an international is killed in Palestine, but looks the other way when thousands of Palestinians are murdered every year.
Israel is hailed as the only “democracy” in the Middle East. Democracy in this sense means capitalistic industrialized nations that share European cultural ideals. “Democratic nations” have and continue to commit some of the world’s greatest atrocities.
Recently two 15 year old boys in the Salfit region were taken in the night by the Israeli Occupation forces. One was returned, but the other, with a reported mental disability, is still being held at Huwara prison. In the past, Israeli soldiers beat the boy’s older brother to deafness and his mother to miscarriage. These news stories are drowned out in the din of the West’s “clash of civilizations” jargon.
Going through Israeli checkpoints, I am often asked whether I speak Arabic. There is no room in the soldiers’ worldview for Muslims who are not Arab. During a recent experience through the checkpoint I decided to see what would happen if I didn’t flash my passport, my blue and gold ticket to unlimited destinations, immediately. The soldier barked loudly, “HAWIYYE! WAYN HAWIYYE?” (Arabic for ‘Where is your ID?’) I produced it. She relaxed immediately and in a surprised and mellow tone said, “Oh. Go ahead.” Entering the country, I was immediately taken aside by an Israeli border police agent, and asked if I had a second passport. The question more accurately stated would be, “Are you Arab?” or, “Why are you brown?” A woman of South Asian ancestry, primarily raised as Muslim, however bred with the innate tendencies (and passport) of Americans, living in Palestine, completely upsets the system with her complexity.
I used to find my fractured identity a great source of teenage angst. While traveling I have seen the privilege I possess, having the cultural material to find common ground with many different people. I do believe that as the world becomes more globalized, survival will come to depend on our ability to work through differences. This occurs every day in Palestine in the form of Palestinian, Israeli, and international nonviolent activists struggling together to end the Occupation.
Despite the injustice, hate, and racism I have witnessed and experienced in the past five months, I have retained a strong faith in humanity to work for social justice. Power works because one harmful action can trump the peaceful, nonviolent lifestyles of a million people. We must become capable of looking past violent actions. We must learn to give the respect that nonviolence demands.
When Baruch Marzel’s son and his three friends walk the streets of Tel Rumeida, Hebron, armed with sticks and looking to pick a fight, it is considered provocative to film them with a video camera, as soldiers tried to explain to Human Rights Workers after two of them were physically attacked by the quartet. The soldier commented, “It wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t filmed them.” How provoked should Palestinians feel, who daily face threats from armed settlers on their way home from work?
Baruch Marzel, a.k.a “Mr. Hebron,” is a fanatic fundamentalist leader of a recently formed Israeli religious right-wing political party, “Hazit,” and is currently running for the Knesset. Hazit’s website declares that “expelling the enemy [the Arabs] is moral. The Torah of Israel is the primary source of human morality, and according to one of its mitzvahs, Israel must conquer and liberate the Land [Israel and the occupied territories].” Hazit leaves no doubt regarding their stand on the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and their divine right to other people’s land. Baruch Marzel himself lives in the Tel Rumeida settlement in Hebron, on stolen Palestinian land. He is one of the ideological leaders and most prominent figures in his extremist settler community.
When Palestinian children walk to school in Tel Rumeida, settler children often throw stones at them. The residents of Beit Hadassah settlement, opposite the school, are provoked when they see Arabs pass outside their windows. How provoked should Palestinian children feel when they get stones thrown at them on their way to school?
The notion of provocation implies a certain normality. It also implies a stability or a status quo, that can be violated. In the violation lies the provocation. The settlers of Hebron have managed to distort this normality, and forced all others involved to accept their irrationality and their violence as something of the ordinary.
Having international Human Rights Workers (HRW’s) living in Tel Rumeida, documenting the inability and unwillingness of Israeli Authorities to deal with the violent acts of settlers, is considered provocative by the Kiriat Arba Police and the Israeli Defense Forces. This is why they falsely accuse the HRW’s of assault, intimidate and harass them and their Palestinian neighbors, raid their apartment, and deport them. How provoked should an HRW feel when he or she gets deported, guilty of using a video camera, a pen, and his or her own body as a human shield to support Palestinians in Tel Rumeida?
The Kiriat Arba Police and the Israeli Defense Forces have not only adopted the tilted reality promoted by the settlers, and are acting within its boundaries – they have also contributed to its creation, and are contributing to uphold it.
When a large group of settler visitors, some wearing ski-masks to cover their faces, rampage through the streets of Tel Rumeida throwing paint-bombs and stones, and hitting whoever gets in their way, it is considered provocative to be in their way. Police explain to HRW’s who tried to protect the Palestinian residents in the area that they shouldn’t be on the streets; that their presence was what agitated the settlers and could have caused further riots. How provoked should Palestinian men and women feel when they are attacked by settler mobs in the middle of the street they live on?
In this distorted reality of the Hebron settlers, a violent act in itself is not a problem, but the excuse the violator uses to explain the attack, however racist, crazy or extreme this excuse may be. Applying the same logic in other situations would result in, for example, accusing a rape victim of dressing too sexy, or a school kid of talking too much before he is hit in the face by a teacher.
A few days after a Palestinian family moved into a house adjacent to the Tel Rumeida settlement, they had their windows smashed by a mob of settlers, who were clearly provoked by the presence of their new neighbors. The family turned off the lights, locked their door and pretended not to be home, while the settlers screamed insults at them from the outside. “It’s like living in a prison,” said the mother in the family after the attack. How provoked should she feel for not daring to let her child play outside anymore?
The mere existence of Palestinians in Hebron is a provocation and a reasonable excuse to act violently against them, according to Baruch Marzel and his like. In a worst case scenario, this provocation could cause settlers to attack and even kill the Palestinians. How provoked should a Palestinian feel by living in a sealed-off area, passing through a checkpoint twice a day, having his ID checked at will by any soldier at any time, not being able to use a car or open shops in the neighborhood due to military orders, being ignored by the police after being attacked by settlers and knowing that their next door neighbor constantly conspires to take over his or her house?
Like spoilt children, the Hebron settlers are not accountable for their violent acts. In the racist framework that they have created, attacking a person is not something provocative, provided that the person attacked is of a certain ethnic origin. When will Baruch Marzel and his violent friends start to be treated as the accountable and responsible adults that they are?
Deserted Al-Shuhada Street in Tel Rumeida; Beit Hadassah Settlement visible at the end of the street.
In six days I will be deported by the state of Israel.
I am a human rights worker. I have been working to prevent and document violence against the Palestinian residents of Hebron in the West Bank. Attacks on Palestinians by violent Israeli settlers occur on an almost daily basis and range from insults and spitting to stonings and beatings; these attacks take place in an area heavily patrolled by Israeli police forces and often happen immediately in front of complacent soldiers. The presence of international human rights workers, like myself, sheds some light on the abuses that settlers and occupation forces commit, and on the crimes that police consistently fail to prevent, pursue and prosecute.
***
On January 19th, I was standing on Shuhada Street, in Tel Rumeida, after escorting some Palestinians safely to their homes. It was 20 minutes past 2 o’clock when an Israeli police jeep rolled up to where I was on the sidewalk – I recognized the police officers in the jeep. A police officer in the passenger seat leaned across the driver and asked me, in Arabic, “What is your name?” Within minutes I was inside the back of the jeep, under arrest and leaving Tel Rumeida.
Before going to Ben Gurion Airport, I made a brief stop at the Kiryat Arba police station where I was paraded – trophy-like – in front of Hussein Nabia, a police officer who previously arrested me on false charges of failing to identify myself and assaulting a soldier, and who has tried – without warrant – to break into the ISM/Tel Rumeida Project apartment. The officers who arrested me brought me into an office where Nabia was seated, “David!” he said, and the officers brought me back outside.
***
Tel Rumeida, a small neighbourhood of Hebron, is sandwiched between two small settlements. The settlers of Beit Hadassah and Tel Rumeida Settlements are some of the most extreme and violent in the West Bank; the founders of the settlement movement are among them. These settlers, with the support of the Israeli Military, aim to make life intolerable for Palestinians – with the goal of driving Palestinians from their homes, from the neighbourhood and, ultimately, from Hebron itself.
The victims of these attacks range the gamut of Palestinians in the neighborhood with no one being immune – old women and young boys, businessmen and university students.
***
At the airport I had a hearing with a member of the Ministry of the Interior (MoI). I had been waiting outside her office with police officers and just before I was summoned into her office, I received a phone call from a friend. Just as we began to speak, the police physically pried my telephone from my fingers, and took it away; I was told, “It is rude to talk on the phone when you are in someone’s office.”
My tourist visa has expired, but before it did I went to the MoI office in Jerusalem and asked for an extension. I was given, instead, an appointment at which I could officially apply for an extension. I explained to the official whom I met with, that my visa would expire before this appointment; “No problem,” she told me, and gave me a slip of paper explaining that I had an appointment at the Ministry of Interior. I explained this to the official who then issued a deportation order against me.
***
There was questioning and there were forms to sign. An oversize three-ring binder held copies of form after form, deportation order after deportation order, each form a different pastel colour, and each form translated into an array of languages.
During my hearing a police officer interrupted asking me to sign a form he held out to me. Among other things, the form was a waiver, and my signature would indicate that I was refusing my right to pick up my belongings (which remained in Hebron). To paraphrase: I recognize that it was suggested to me that I go to my place of dwelling, accompanied by police, and gather my personal effects.
“This wasn’t suggested to me, and I don’t want to waive my right to gather my belongings,” I explained in English. The MoI official translated the sentence into Hebrew for the police officer.
“In fact, lets go and get them right now,” I made to stand up from the chair, having visions of a police escort and me walking into the apartment after dinner. “Will you take me now to get my things? It says here,” I gestured to the form, ” that you will accompany me to get my things.”
More translation and then the MoI official asked, “Where are your things?”
“At my home.”
“Where is that?”
“Hebron.”
“Hevron?” incredulous. “You live in Hevron?”
“Yeah,” I replied. “So? Can we go?”
Again some translation and discussion before, “No one is going to take you to Hevron. Just sign the paper.”
I explained that I wasn’t going to sign a form saying that I waived my right, when in fact I was being denied said right. “Sign the form,” they replied.
I didn’t sign the form.
***
I was held in a room near Ben Gurion Airport for three days. The room had two windows, six beds, one toilet, two sinks, two showerheads, two chairs, one table and one television.
On at least two occasions I am convinced that the guards forgot I was there. One evening guards turned out my lights at ten-thirty P.M. It was not until after five P.M. the next evening that the lights came back on. That same evening a guard opened the door around half-seven, “Do you need anything?” he asked.
“Dinner?”
The guard threw a sandwich, wrapped in plastic, onto the table. These sandwiches were the staple food served to me at least nine times in three days. White bread – baguette-style – halved length-wise, three slices of white cheese, some pieces of iceberg lettuce and two cherry tomatoes.
A guard searched me – marking the fourth time I was searched that day – when I first arrived at the airport “detention centre”, before he put me into my cell. Looking at two marbles that I had in my left pant pocket – gifts from a child in Tel Rumeida – he asked, “Do you need these?”
“They’re mine,” I told him, and he let me keep them.
On the third morning of my imprisonment, I was sleeping when a guard came into my cell. “Hey!” he yelled at me, “Get up. It’s time to go!”
***
At Ramle Detention Centre I was searched again – grand total: five times. This time my marbles were confiscated. My lip balm was also confiscated. What was not confiscated was the razor – now broken – that I had been given in detention at the airport. The head came unattached in such a way that the two blades became removable. This remained in my custody throughout my time in prison.
During the three days that I was held at Ramle, I learned a some of what life is like there on a daily basis for the refugees and economic migrants who are imprisoned there – most for much longer than me.
Just before half-past six A.M. every day, loudspeakers blasted a wake-up warning up and down the halls of Block 4, second floor. Shortly thereafter, guards would enter every room and count the prisoners; everyone was expected to be on his feet. This marked the first such count, there being often six or more per day – wake up from your nap, stop your card game, get off your top bunk; stand up when the guard enters the room; wait while the guard counts each man; relax when the guard leaves.
Economic migrants spend time in Israeli “deportation centres” (read: prisons) awaiting their deportation, or awaiting a new job.
Most of the economic migrants I met in jail await deportation, and their stay in jail is punishment for having worked in Israel without a valid work visa. These people spend between one week and four months in jail waiting to be deported. Most of the prisoners I met who fell into this category had resigned themselves to the fact that they would be deported and were simply waiting to go home. Unlike me (if I had agreed I would have been on a plane the evening that I was arrested) these people often have to wait weeks or months for their deportation.
On the morning of the day that I was released from Ramle, guards came into my cell and told another inmate, Get ready. You leave today. The Thai fellow, who slept on the bunk next to me, had been four months in prison and the first notice he received of his departure was this warning, less than two hours before leaving the prison.
I met a Nepalese fellow who had a valid work visa. He had been imprisoned because he lost his job.
His employer was ill and suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. A turn for the worse in his employer’s disease left him without a job. For this, he was jailed until he was able to find a new job; after one week in prison he had a new job in Tel Aviv and was released on a Wednesday afternoon to prepare for his first day of work that Sunday.
***
If the economic migrants have a rough time in Israeli prison, the refugees have it worse. With not even the hope of deportation – having fled their home countries seeking asylum – the refugees at Ramle have no way to know how long they will stay in prison.
For the refugee men with whom I was imprisoned – from Ethiopia, Sudan, Liberia and other, mainly African, countries – each day is much like the other. Months pass without any change in their situation. Human rights workers come to meet with other prisoners, and tell the refugees they cannot help them. UNHCR meets with them and says, “We’re sorry; we know you are refugees, but unfortunately, we cannot help you.”
Tyson, from Ethiopia, has been nearly two years in prison, he showed me copies of letters written on his behalf – the return addresses are Canadian. One is from a group called Welcome Place in Winnipeg, and the other from a Canadian Member of Parliament. Both letters call on officials at the prison, and officials in the government, to release Tyson and the “70” Ethiopian refugees in his position.
Welcome Place wants to sponsor Tyson and the other Ethiopian refugees and bring them to Winnipeg. Most of the legal work has been done, what remains is for the refugees to have an interview with a Canadian official in Israel. The letters petition the government to please release them to allow them to fulfill these final requirements. This has not happened. Both of the letters are dated 2004.
“We are not criminals,” Tyson said. “We all have one thing in common. We are refugees and we are looking for safety.” Israel has shown them only imprisonment. “Israel should not forget it’s past. It was a nation of refugees.”
Looking out a window, barred with three separate layers of steel, Tyson pointed to a series of small huts arranged around a central courtyard with benches, palm trees and a small garden. “Those are the criminals,” he says, explaining that in those huts are Israelis who have been convicted of crimes and are serving their time. “Their doors are open 24/7 and they have a 41-inch TV.” These prisoners – convicted criminals – can walk freely in their courtyard, while Tyson and his fellow refugees are allowed outside for one hour daily, except Tuesdays when they remain inside all day. The refugees and economic migrants I was imprisoned with do not have a television; there is no common room – people socialize in the hallway near the bathroom or in their small cells.
Refugees like Tyson wait in prison with few ways to entertain themselves, extremely limited access to fresh air, and with no way of knowing how long they will be held in jail. Compared to theirs, my lot was quite easy.
***
After six days in prison, I was released on bail.
The MoI judge set bail at one thousand sheqels. Fifty thousand sheqels is considered a high bail, and fifteen thousand can generally be considered low. With white skin, and a Canadian passport, my NIS1,000 bail demonstrates the institutional racism that pervades all aspects of Israeli Bureaucracy that I have had the opportunity to witness.
The two conditions of my bail were that I leave Israel no later than February 10th, and that I not participate in any “International Activities” in Hebron.
As an “international,” I have wondered what might constitute “International Activity” in Hebron, and my conclusion is this: anything I might do in Hebron, witnessed by the Israeli police. Eating breakfast, visiting friends, drinking tea on the street – indeed, even walking on the street – in a nation (Palestine) which is not my own, could be viewed as a type of this activity. As such, I have not been back to Tel Rumeida, and have not seen my Palestinian friends, since I was arrested.
But: I am free.
***
I felt bad leaving Ramle. I breezed in and out of there with my blue passport, staying just over three days, while hundreds of other prisoners – who have committed no crime – remain for months. Tyson and the others didn’t feel bad; they were genuinely happy for me. No one should be in there, they believe that, and that included me.
***
I was arrested because Israeli police in the Palestinian city of Hebron know who I am; because they know that I am a human rights worker, and because human rights workers in Hebron often have to do the work of police officers: intervening in attacks to protect civilians from settler violence.
Instead of prosecuting or even – pursuing – the settlers who have maliciously attacked their Palestinian neighbours, the police of Kiryat Arba (Hebron) harass and arrest international human rights workers, who strive for justice alongside the Palestinians. If the state of Israel is interested in peace, then she should allow human rights workers, and international observers to work for justice; deporting those who work for justice cannot be seen as part of any “peace process.”
***
And so, in six days I will be deported. I paid for my ticket. I was planning to leave on this date. I will go to the airport on my own. Security guards will not carry me onto the plane – I will walk. This will be my deportation: quiet, and with a stopover in Budapest.
I recently had an existential mental breakdown. I no longer comprehend the difference between dreams and reality. The first symptoms appeared on Christmas Eve when I was trying very hard to get out of Nablus. Hundreds of people were crammed into the exit terminal of Huwara checkpoint. Many of them, like me, were attempting to visit Bethlehem for the holiday celebration. They were quick to tell me that the soldiers had closed the checkpoint hours before my arrival. The air was close to freezing and it was one of the heaviest rainy days thus far. It was a cold, frustrating, messy scene. Many began to chant “God is great” and made victory hand signs.
Israeli soldiers ran guns-first into the crowd, pushed the people onto the side walls and pressed automatic weapons against chests and faces. They grabbed six young men and slammed their bodies against a solid wall. One of them struggled and he was kicked and spat on for good measure before the group was taken into detention to wait for the border police to come and make arrests. The Palestinians got rowdier. Kids threw tantrums. The soldiers shoved and shouted the people into two rows that were so crowded that I was squished between all the people around me to the point of great discomfort. There was no space to set my travel bag on the ground, there wasn’t even enough space to move my arms without a massive struggle. My luggage was heavy and I had to drop it in a puddle, the only place available.
I first started noticing the collapse of normal reality after about three hours of being in this position. Strange phenomena began happening without clinical explanation. They let the first person through the turn style. We watched as a single soldier gave a slow body search, checked the man’s bags and scanned him with a metal detector before he was allowed to continue on to the identity check and questioning. It became time for the next person to pass through. Everyone was pushing towards the front and soldiers barked at people to watch their mouth and to stay within the ridiculous margins. I was too consumed by the physical discomfort to notice at first but there was a slightly audible “BAAAH”, “BAAAAAAAH”. Three of the people in the line opposite to me, whom were apparently of a creative persuasion, were making sheep noises. The satirical gesture was ingenious if you would rather be beaten in public than take another daily humiliation quietly.
This episode of my life, traveling in Palestine, Israel and Jordan, has sent me to the brink of madness and paranoia. There is even a clinical term for people who go wacko here and start to believe that they are the messiah returned. While I haven’t gone quite so far as to be diagnosed with “Jerusalem syndrome”; I need you to help me determine if I should actually admit myself to the Bethlehem mental hospital or if it’s the environment around me that’s actually crazy. Or maybe I am experimenting with magical realism in order to demonstrate something intangible about the whole situation here that can’t be explained by mere journalistic prattle. I don’t know. Only you can choose. In any case, my life has been comparable to a high speed hamster experiment ever since I arrived that first night in Amman and buildings started blowing up. I have been in Nablus for considerable time and my life and work there has occupied a space between an emotional powder keg shared with dear friends and the weird feeling of waking up nearly every night to the sound of the army shelling the refugee camp. But that’s a comparably small source of internal confusion at this point.
I got a real education when a German journalist friend took me to the American Colony hotel bar in Jerusalem for the sole purpose of watching highly paid members of the foreign press get drunk. The experience answered some of my burning questions about why the world spins and I recommend a night at American Colony to anyone with a strong stomach for other people’s moral compromises and personal failure. We caught the good people who bring you the evening news loudly reenacting their childhood problems and making passes on highly powdered young assistants, clinging to their own seats after too much southern comfort. The stereotypes about journalists are true, they mostly just hang out in hotel bars, international events play out in dry sarcasm and modern wars like Iraq are primed for family entertainment. The holy land is always on film and that is a strange place to be, a place where news creates itself and a lot of people do loony things just for the attention.
The other week some friends from Olympia received a visit by militants in Rafah whom explained that the whole group was to be kidnapped to pressure the Palestinian Authority to release an al-Aqsa brigades leader. The parents of Rachel Corrie happened to be around, they had what was certainly an awkward conversation which miraculously ended with the armed people leaving and being somewhat polite and apologetic about the whole incident. The seven Olympians had to be driven out of the Gaza strip in a siren blasting convoy of Palestinian police vehicles. The event was indicative of the chaos in the Palestinian areas and the near-impossible job of the PA when armed factions empowered during the heat of the uprising hold the balance of power in some places, especially in lock-down Gaza, although that is nothing compared to the difficulty that the PA faces when Israel blockades and violates the areas they are supposed to control.
I had to cancel my own trip to Gaza because of the chain of foreigner abductions, even after completing the time consuming security clearance process with Israeli border authorities. There was similar problems in Nablus when the al-Aqsa brigades, an armed Fatah offshoot, declared that international elections observers would be abducted if they did not leave the region. They marched through Balata camp shooting in the air, which would be normal, except that they were tearing down posters of candidate Mustafa Barghouti having declared him an enemy of the refugees. The Israeli occupation and it’s response, the intifada, has left the West Bank and Gaza militarized, emotionally traumatized, economically destroyed and ghettoized. The elections and their subsequent drama play out in some complicated ways under these circumstances. I was in Nablus when Hamas swept the municipal elections on December 16th. Hamas won an overwhelming victory in Nablus in particular. They held a thousands-strong rally in the city center after sweeping up seventy three percent of the vote.
It was a typical Hamas performance in most ways but on this day the people decked out in green had a look of jubilence that you usually don’t expect. They were so jubilant in fact that a man with green Hamas ribbons and religious markers grabbed my crotch and bolted into the crowd before I could kick him. It was a weird testimony to things underneath the surface amidst a hugely religious scene with people jumping up and down and chanting on cue. The Hamasniks listened to the newly elected municipality leaders speak and to a musical act, with a quite uniform women’s section in the back corner. “Mahmoud Abbas must respect Islam as the choice of the people” was a major message and of course there’s the call and response slogan “Islam is the solution” that echoed through the streets in downtown Nablus all evening long. Hamas is making major inroads on the dominant Fatah movement because people are clinging to any alternative to the PA bureaucracy that is removed from the Palestinian street. Because people think Hamas will make sense out of the internal chaos in Palestine and because they appear the most uncompromising in the face of continued Israeli suffocation of the territories.
The movement responsible for most of the suicide attacks during the Intifada is running on a “law and order” ticket and dropped the parts of their charter calling for the end of the Israeli state out of their election platform. The irony isn’t lost on anyone and it might be especially confusing to people who get their information from Bill O’reilly. Hamas makes contradictory statements all the time about whether or not they want to recognize the green line, but at the very least they are cooling off a bit for the election campaign. Some leaders are saying they are willing to talk to Israel and the group has taken it’s armed people off the street for the time being. Either way, people are definitely latching on to the Islamic upstarts for the moment, people are frustrated that the situation is not improving and a lot of people have left Fatah because of the timid leadership of Abu Mazen and because of the headache of the internal split.
No one knows exactly what’s going to happen next. All the militant factions have called off the cease-fire. In America we never hear the context in which such things happen. Many people believe that we’re John Wayne chasing down the terrorists who want to behead our children. They hate us for our freedom and our macaroni and cheese and Johnny charges into the sunset with Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Working Man on soundtrack. It’s all crazy, but the news people keep running around in stationary wheels in glass cages with three and three quarters cups of extra soft sawdust.
Four hours after my arrival at Huwara checkpoint it was finally my turn to go through the turn style. I walked up to the soldier posted on the far end and he asked me questions. Straight to the point, “what the hell were you doing in Nablus?”, he asked and I told him that I had been visiting the university. He shouted at me that no one is allowed to enter Nablus without military permission. The soldier asked a few more questions and I gave him a few more answers and eventually I moved on to the next soldier who searched my soaking bag. Another soldier checked my passport and my visa status and typed some things in a computer after asking me the same questions all over again before waving me through. Final it became time to cross through the checkpoint and I walked out through the lengthy fenced exit with barbed wire decor. I walked into the rain pour in an exhausted and delirious state. I eventually had to cross through five more checkpoints to get to Jerusalem [never quite made it to Bethlehem], but before I was able to do that, I had the strangest experience of my entire life.
My head was feeling light and my eyes were bulging just slightly out of there sockets. Bits of sparkling dust were falling out of the sky, and I looked up. My jaw dropped when I saw the majestic swirling pattern of light, mostly red and blue. My mind struggled to make sense out of the intricate pixels. They gradually formed into a human-like figure. A messenger of the lord. There was no doubt about it. An angel of mercy. I was paralyzed by the sight of the angel. Its face was innocent and its hair was perfectly groomed into one completely linear swishy. There was no trace of abuse or otherwise human influence in the hair. Each individual strand was carefully constructed and gelled with attention to possible gnots and split ends. It was this moment when I heard the most dangerous, possibly the most disturbing words that I have ever heard in my life to this point. “I have come back to you and i’m here to take you on a ride you won’t soon forget” and he stared straight into my most excruciating thoughts.
I couldn’t believe my eyes or his, but I recognized the guy from a strange experience from last year. The name jogged bad memories. It was James Reynalds, a mideast correspondent with the British Broadcasting Corporation. I remembered that swishy and traced it back to the summer of 04 on a maddening afternoon in Balata camp. Five army jeeps were parked on the main street. They were shelling at buildings and people on the street, which was a kind of weather in those days. Palestinian kids were ducking in and out of alleyways to toss stones and sometimes to flash the flag of their nation-to-be. I was trying to figure out what was going on with some elderly folks who were being held hostage in their home by soldiers. James Reynalds and a blonde woman with an expensive-looking camera walked up and interrupted my friend’s cell phone conversation with the cred crescent society.
“You guys have no business here”, he said while pulling out a professionally printed BBC handbook. “I have a handbook”, as if to say ‘I’m whitey the great hero so leave the monkey business to me’. “Do you have a handbook? Then get out of my way”. Both characters had absolutely well-groomed hair and everybody noticed it. My friend pointed out that the army was shooting at civilian children and damaging property, to which dear James coughed “we” are not here to cover clashes. At that we never heard from the the guy again. He disappeared with his blonde camerawoman into the occupied house that we were trying to gain access to for over an hour. The soldiers opened the door for the pair without much questioning. The whole game is about access, my children, access is the thing.
Later on I read an al-Jazeera news item about this one brave British reporter that got abducted in an occupied house in Balata. It was totally staged but a brilliant career move nevertheless. If my memory is working, a photograph prominently featuring James’ swishy became a small fad for a few seconds in the attention span of the media circuit. It brings us back to the moment where the merciful angel is staring me down with something like black tar heroin in his eyes. The thing knocked me half-conscious with the largest chainsaw imaginable in this year of our lord. James put me under his wing and dragged me through time into a purple vehicle with removeable roof. “This here is God’s sacrilegious Cadillac”. He got out to pimp his ride and the machine went flying when he climbed in the front seat and pressed a few buttons. That’s what my relationship with journalists is often like, for the record. They represent a bit of the individualistic grit that I admire in people and I can’t seem to avoid hanging around them in this corner of the world, but i’m held captive to their scumhood.
And there I was. Held captive in the rear seat of God’s sacrilegious Cadillac, my should being slowly sucked my a person accountable only to the large sums of cash being wired in from a prestigious news organization. The merciful angel whispered something horrible into my ear. “Look at yourself” he said although I was confused and I wanted to go home. “Look down”. The car had stopped at an intersection between life and death and the ground beneath us was a scene from my life. It was from a month ago and it hurt to watch. The center of Nablus. ‘The circle’. Hundreds of young men crowding in the streets. They tossed pieces of rubble, burning bags of garbage, old flower pots at the armored military vehicles that were rushing up and down the streets. More than twenty jeeps. The unmistakable crack of machine gun shells in rapid sequence. “Watch yourself freak out as the kid next to you gets shot”, James coughed again, “because that is enlightenment”.
It guy on the ground doing a half-crouch was me. Bullets were hitting the building opposite to me. There was a pause and I realized that the jeeps were around the corner and they could not see what they were shooting at. Two guys on the street ahead of me fell to the ground, one after the other, and a medical crew dashed towards them. Next it was a kid only a few feet in front of me. Blood exploded out a hole in his stomach. I moved to help carry him into a red crescent ambulance. Three or four minutes went by before there was another gunshot sequence. A boy in his early teens was shot in the groin and he screamed all the way into the stretcher. I watched my one month younger self panic, there being no way out of the situation when soldiers started shelling the same street from both directions. The tear gas and the machine guns didn’t seem to discourage the shabab from running into the line of fire for the chance to put a dent in an Israeli jeep with a piece of rubble. That’s how desperate the people are. That’s how serious the place gets.
James Reynalds extruded a scaly tongue that split into three split parts. He hissed like a rich maniac after twelve cups of instant coffee. “This whole country is holey hell” he asserted, forgetting his manners. I wanted to say it isn’t true but he started force feeding me American dairy products. The merciful angel pried my mouth open with cheese genetically enhanced to make children grow up depressed. I resisted with a blunt object but the toxicity of the dairy destroyed my defenses and I dropped into a coma. The normal world melted almost entirely and my mind was transported into another recent memory. I watched myself yell at some Palestinian children – “hallas” and “achterem halak”. Five boys were beating a younger one senseless. They had backed him into a wall in Balata. They were laying it into his face with open hands before I intervened with my friend.
The younger one was covering his face with his arms, too embarrassed from crying to respond to my efforts to comfort him before running away. As it turns out, the kids were playing a game akin to Cowboys and Indians. The kids playing the “Israelis” tracked down this “Palestinian” kid and beat him as a test of will. He was to gain some special social status if he could take the blows without freaking out. As it turns out again, as things often turn out exactly the way we do not expect it, the boy was embarrassed by my intervention in the situation. Balata kids reenact the theater of war and social constipation that occurs daily in their environment. The biggest problem with the whole bad show is that it destroys all the actors from the inside. When you have had over twenty of your best friends die, as with my friend Mohammad Ayyesh, you will never stop smoking.
In Balata there are women whose husbands keep them captive indoors because the live where the clashes happen and there are always nasty weather reports forecasting soldiers. The youngest generation in the camp, especially those born in the last five years, is rife with signs of mental retardation and malnutrition. The world became like a weather chart or a blue screen and James was pointing out all the nasty shit with a tantrum stick. Israelis ethnically cleansed the whole scene in 1948 and the untouchables were put in overcrowded camps that began as tent grids. The 1967 six day war resulted in military occupation and cowboy settlements. The whole Mideast has since been a chain reaction of bad news and television broadcasts. I have spilled hot tea on my pants.
James whipped out his chainsaw. “This that and the other thing” – the machine with the words ‘oversize load’ screeched – “is God’s way of letting us know that we are cockroaches”. I was at my mental limit at this moment and my arm reached for the angel’s hair-swishy. I wasn’t thinking about it. I had long given up the idea that i’m in control of my own life by the time my fingers had, like, totally messed with the fine British hair. I screamed although my voice was scratchy and my soul was zonked from whole milk. I remembered that the universe was subjective and that grammar has ruined everything. Five words shot up from instinct when my throat couldn’t take any more screaming. “Cockroaches can survive in space”.
It was my turn. Before either of us could understand anything [at all] I had already taken the tantrum stick and the car keys. “Ariel Sharon is on his way out and that’s the final sign that the rapture is on its way”. God will take the entire political and intellectual leadership of the world and put them all in a small chamber where they will be served nothing but cheap wine in Turkish bathrooms with fluorescent lighting. A couple weeks ago in Balata “a three year old I had barely met handed me a plastic ring and it was the most beautiful hand-me-down I have ever received”. I have met introspective people on each side of the green line that understand that politics is a waste of breath and that we all breathe the same air. The morning after I returned to Nablus I was overwhelmed by how many people remembered me. My friend Homad was brought to tears, it was a happy moment even though he hasn’t been able to leave Nablus for years.
My squabbling came from some deep ridiculous place. I have seen Arabs and Jews hold hands in the same high grade tear gas in Bil’in, with the same determination to free the ghetto. I know of humans who are hunted by the Israeli army who have never touched a gun but they spend half their lives evading capture. Yet they show up at their buddies’ wedding parties and help with the clean-up. In the most desperate places in the world there are people who never give up living life and that’s called faith. I’m here with friends I know from Olympia and Bellingham and from all over the world. We are the neo-postmodern puppy litter of David Bowie. We’re here to work and intermingle with the puppy litters of Fairuz because all of us know that history is progressive, that borders are disappearing gradually, that races are forged in toothpaste and that we are not enemies. Laugh at it all, once in a while. We have to keep living and laughing in our hearts.
The streets of Balata camp are lined with posters. Faces of the some three hundred and sixty martyrs of the camp from the past five years. The angel of mercy and I stroll up the main street and wonder about it all. Why can’t we be honest with ourselves when we want to know why there are people in the Mideast who have lost it and would hijack an airplane or blow themselves up on a public bus. No number of metal detectors will help us with this one. Maybe some day in the future we will consider asking ‘what up’ before biting all the abused children on the playground and threatening them with Guantanamo. That evening all the residents of Balata crowded around the purple Cadillac parked outside the martyrs’ cemetery. We took turns wrapping up the defective angel in colorful yarn and sent him away. He departed in the back trunk of God’s sacrilegious Cadillac, which drifted in good time to the place where angels are repaired. Later I purged the dairy from my system like it was the residue of high school education –
-which brings me out of the long nasty trip and I spent half a week in a nice bed in Haifa trying to get over it.
(Xander’s postscript sent a day later…)
I checked my email today and I was flattered to discover that a small handful of people actually took my email seriously. I’m enjoying the thought that several people thought that I had actually gone psychotic and had an angel of mercy come to me at a checkpoint in the form of BBC correspondent James Reynalds.
Everything in the piece actually happened – except for the whole mental breakdown and the angel taking me on a ride and so on and so forth. But my experience of this place has been crazy in its own right. The place is weird. I bring you to a not-so-subtle cue that I gave you guys ahead of time that there’s something coming up that’s not real. Most people caught it. I got about forty emails expressing delight about how satirical the whole thing was. To my continued amazement, twelve people took it the story literally and advised me in heartfelt sincerity to jump on the next possible flight home.
Paragraph four. Sentence four. “…maybe I am experimenting with magical realism in order to demonstrate something intangible about the whole situation here that can’t be explained by mere journalistic prattle”. If you didn’t catch that, it doesn’t mean you are a horrible person, but you could familiarize yourself with Gabriel Garcia Marquez. This could be one of those “war of the worlds” situations like when H.G. Wells got cut off when explaining that the alien invasion is not really happening.
Someday I will take my new found skill to new levels and incite massive panic in westlake center. In any case, I assumed that even people who miss the warning would understand the satirical nature of “Strange ride through Palestine” as soon as the angel of mercy starts force feeding me “American dairy products genetically designed to make children grow up depressed” or when he takes me on that first ride in “God’s sacriligious Cadillac”.
I’m having a strange moment, realizing that no matter what I write, no matter how rediculous it is, people will believe it provided I am in this corner of the world. That’s because American perceptions of the Middle East are dead serious. My Israeli and Palestinian friends who read it thought it was hilarious and recognized it instantaneously as satire. Funny that. There’s tragety going on everywhere, for sure. A lot of people really do go crazy here but I don’t think anyone hallucinates themselves into the captivity of television journalists with tongues that split into three sections.
People in Palestine are dealing with the tragedy by laughing. Often it’s the only option that people have. It’s what people do to keep themselves from going crazy. The situation is redundant. I am a little bored of writing these reports every time I happen to be around when there is an explosion, an invasion, a shooting here, an enclosed ghetto over there… And I feel like that’s not really showing you the true madness of the situation. The “Holy Land” is so screwed up, so essentially weird, that there might as well be BBC journalists coming to checkpoints in the form of angels to abduct foreigners and take them on rides. Oh well. I love you all.
