Letters from Palestine (13 page)

The solution

Since we want our baby to be born in
Jerusalem, both for nationalistic reasons (our future Palestinian
capital) and for the baby to get his French passport quickly, we
decided we will defy the Israeli occupation and go to Jerusalem. Of
course, even if the baby is born in Jerusalem, he (it’s a boy) will
have no right to live or work in Jerusalem, as the IOA will not
consider him from Jerusalem since my ID card specifies I live in
Ramallah. I have a permit, but it is good only until 7:00 p.m. So
what if I have contractions in the middle of the night or after
7:00 p.m.? The Israelis will not let me enter Jerusalem. Plus, even
if I have contractions during the day, the Israelis will not allow
me to cross with my husband in his own car. I have to queue,
sometimes for a long time, and this is not healthy for me or for
the baby. So we finally decided: political induction is the
solution! Yes, by political induction, we mean that we will have to
decide on a date to plan the delivery. The baby will be induced on
that day. We might decide on June 1, 2009.

As the photograph above indicates, Muzna’s
story has a happy ending. Her baby boy, Sari, was born in Jerusalem
on May 30, and, according to the latest note I had from Muzna, as
of December 2009, mother and baby are both thriving back in
Ramallah. —Ed.

Letters from Ghassan

_PHOTO

Ghassan Abdullah was born in the ancient city
of Acre on the Palestinian Mediterranean coast in 1942, which makes
him older than the state of Israel. (Napoleon had his first defeat
ever outside the old walls of Acre in May 1799.) Ghassan became a
refugee when he was six years old and lived for about ten years
each in Syria, Britain, Lebanon, and Jordan, with two years in
Italy and lesser periods in other places. That made him a
“professional” refugee for over forty years before he “returned” to
Ramallah in 1994, just before the establishment of the Palestinian
Authority.

Ghassan studied mathematics and computing in
England, worked with IBM for six years and with computer
applications at various places, including nine years at Birzeit
University. He has also edited science magazines in addition to
writing and translating occasionally. He is currently active in
several Palestinian civil society non-governmental organizations
(NGOs) in heritage, human rights, development, and the arts.

* * *

In these occasional pieces composed over the
past decade, the coeditor of this volume, Ghassan Abdullah, writes,
often with great humor, about the absurdities of life under the
Occupation. In this he writes, one might say, in the tradition
established by his good friend and fellow Ramallah resident, Suad
Amiry, whose book, Sharon and My Mother-in-Law, is one of the most
hilarious you will ever read about what it is like to live—and
die—in the occupied Palestinian territories, where sometimes humor
is about the only thing that can get you through it. Nevertheless,
Ghassan’s pieces always have an underlying seriousness, even when
they evoke laughter, and this is certainly most evident in the last
of them reprinted here, concerning his visits to Israel’s famous
Holocaust museum, Yad Vashem, which, as he explains, takes on a
very different aspect when viewed through the eyes of a
Palestinian.

I had a more exciting New Year’s Eve!

January 9, 2002

I am sorry I am sending you best wishes for
the New Year rather late. The reason is because I had to spend my
New Year’s night in a detention cell at Tel Aviv’s Lod, or Ben
Gurion, airport. Then I was deported to where I flew from.

The episode started upon arrival at Tel Aviv
airport at around 4:00 p.m. on December 31, looking forward to the
party for New Year’s Eve at a friend’s gathering in Ramallah. We
had just spent two weeks in Switzerland with my wife’s family,
mostly to get away for a while from our situation in the occupied
Palestinian territories.

After presenting my Palestinian travel
document at the arrival counter, I was led to the security passport
control office. Some other Palestinians were also waiting there,
and they mentioned that they are sending Palestinians back. When my
turn came, I asked to see a more senior officer and demanded an
explanation. The intelligence officer said there are new
instructions from the government to refuse entry to Palestinians
unless they had prior permits to fly or return through the Israeli
airport.

Lod airport has been the only possible exit
and entry for Palestinians in the last few years since the “peace
process” started. Of course, it is practically impossible for
Palestinians to get such permits from the Sharon government at
present. They told me I had to go back to where I came from. I said
I came from Acre, where I was born, before the state of Israel was
born, but they did not seem to appreciate that.

Ramallah is only forty kilometers away, I
argued, and I am too old to be a terrorist, and I work and teach at
Birzeit University, and I have been cleared by Israel as a
“returnee.” I also asked, why not let me fly to Amman at least or
somewhere nearer like Cyprus, at my expense? And I asked why take
such measures now at a time when violence is down and international
mediation is active again? Or does it mean that the Israeli
government is no longer abiding by the post-Oslo agreements,
notably the recognition of the Israeli-approved Palestinian
passport? To no avail.

I was escorted to a detention cell at the
airport, but not before I was submitted with my luggage to the
meticulous search of everything I had. The cell was a really lousy
place, about four by four meters, containing six double-decker beds
with plastic mattresses and dirty woolen blankets. It had two
small, high windows through which we could hear the continuous
thundering noise and hissing of the machines working the luggage
belts and the shouts of their workers. To go to the toilets, we had
to wait until another security guard was called to escort us to
another filthy place. A dry sandwich, which I wouldn’t touch, was
handed to us later. Needless to say, we couldn’t sleep all
night.

I had one companion in the room, a thirtyish
guy from the Czech Republic by the name of Vaclav, like Havel. He
spent the night telling me, in broken English, about magic, cosmic
energy, Atlantis, the pyramids, infinity, MULUC, and that this is
his 6026th year of incarnation. He was taking his ordeal so
confidently that I thought I will have to look into this New Age
stuff some day.

The second very entertaining thing in the
airport prison was all the graffiti on the walls. The three
languages I could read represented about 10 percent of all the
scribbling, but it gave an idea of the humanity that had passed
through this room and how they felt. Here is a sampling, although
some of the “anti-Semitic” writings and offensive drawings could
not be reproduced freely:

John Mercer from Miami, USA:

Denied entry due to the paranoid delusions
of the security people in this shit hole because I carry a laptop
PC. They think I am a spy!! They took my bags, my computer, and to
top it all off I lost $1000 coming here.
Never again!!!

Israel is not promised land.

Israel is fucking land.

In French:

I was here the 13-12-2000. My name is I.C. I
am Malien. I thank God the all powerful for locking me between
these four walls. It must be part of my deserved destiny.

We are hungry.

Welcome to hotel ***** Israel.

In Arabic:

Everyone who thinks of dealing with Israel
is an ass son of an ass.

Israel is the ultimate evil. I am from
Lebanon.

I came all the way from Baltimore USA and
all I saw was this damn room.

The next morning at 5:00 a.m., I was taken
out hastily, but not without threats to keep me for another week in
this hole, simply because I suggested they should at least have a
more decent detention place. I was taken to the airport tarmac by
two security guards in a police car with two African women from an
adjacent room. I was delivered into the airplane and my passport
and papers handed to the captain. It was also difficult to sleep on
the flight to Milan. At Malpensa airport, I was taken also by a
police car to the terminal where a higher Italian officer told me I
was free to go, probably thanks to my Swiss passport.

It will be for me, for a long time to come,
a most memorable New Year’s Eve, and food for thought.

Endnote: Ghassan finally was able to return
to Ramallah by flying to Amman and crossing back to the West Bank
via the Allenby Bridge. He had to leave books and other
publications he wished to bring back to the country because of the
weight of the luggage he would have to carry traveling by the land
border.

I want to keep my wife!

November 2006

Israel has decreed that my wife and I can no
longer live together. I am Palestinian and she is Swiss, and we
have been married for twenty-eight years. She was given two weeks
to leave the occupied Palestinian territory. The Israeli Ministry
of Interior wrote on her Swiss passport: “last permit.” We have
been living together in Ramallah for twelve years. We came in 1994,
when, after the Oslo agreement, we were encouraged to move to the
West Bank by the prospect of “peace” and development.

My wife Anita speaks Arabic, likes the
landscape, cooks Arabic meals, and she cares for my grandfather’s
village house, an old stone building and the plants around it, more
than I do. She votes in Palestinian elections as the spouse of a
Palestinian. She is active in serving the local society in public
health. She has so many friends here and considers it home. She
still has her valuable European element and contacts, but she
doesn’t want to be separated from this environment or from me, and
I certainly do not want to be separated from her.

Our children are grown up and work abroad.
But they are also not sure they will be allowed to visit us here.
On her way to visit us in Ramallah a few months ago, our daughter,
who has a Swiss passport, was delayed for six hours at Tel Aviv
airport and grilled when she landed. She was lucky. Others are
deported to where they took off from, often spending a night or
more at that notorious detention “facility” at the airport.

For the past twelve years, Anita has managed
to stay here by diligently renewing her permit or leaving and
coming back every three or six months to comply with the Israeli
“law” that applies in the occupied Palestinian territories. She is
fighting now to stay here by going to a lawyer and to the Israeli
courts, hoping for an injunction to be able to stay until a verdict
is reached. She is also in touch with her embassy, and she has
joined others in the same predicament in addressing the European
Union and the American consulate and in talking to human rights
organizations, both Israeli and Palestinian, and the media.

We don’t know what to do. But we have to do
it quickly. What do we do about our shared life, our papers and
accounts, the hundreds of little things that we have grown to
share? What do we do about the new apartment that we made the
“mistake” of purchasing at the wrong time? She was keyed up about
what tiles to choose and how to model the kitchen. We can’t
believe, or accept, that we are going to be separated. We believe
it though, when we are reminded by other “mixed” couples or
families who have, and are being, separated around us.

Since the spring of 2006, the Israeli
occupation authorities have been increasing the squeeze on holders
of foreign passports by denying them entry into the Palestinian
areas. Those affected include Palestinians with foreign passports
or foreign wives, husbands, children, parents, and other relatives.
They also include foreign nationals who come to teach at
universities, work, or volunteer with local or foreign
non-governmental organizations; experts with various projects,
often funded by European countries; sympathizers; or human rights
activists.

Bitakhon
is the magic word in Israel.
In the name of Bitakhon, or security, Israeli authorities can take
any illegal, inhuman, immoral, or aggressive measures against the
Palestinian population under military occupation. They can throw
the word “bitakhon” at any European or foreign diplomat who
questions any of their measures, even when those measures go
against human rights, international and humanitarian law, or the
Fourth Geneva Convention, which govern the conduct of occupying
powers towards the occupied population. It seems sometimes to
Palestinians that a third-rate official at any Israeli ministry can
frighten the whole of the European Union and its officials by
invoking the “security” of Israelis or by hinting at what Europe
did to the Jews.

My wife is not alone to be given an
ultimatum this last week. Dozens of other wives, husbands, and
children who have been living in the West Bank for years, renewing
their Israeli-issued “visitors” permits to stay every three months,
have been given short extensions, none of which exceed the end of
this year. Children will have to be taken out of schools and will
be separated from their parents, or from one of them. Mothers,
fathers, sisters, brothers, and grandparents of the cherished local
extended families will be torn apart. Hundreds of others are also
waiting their fate in the coming days and weeks. Thousands have
been denied visits this last summer to their families and homes and
roots. Summer is often the season for marriage of Palestinians
divided by different passports or IDs, and festivities used to fill
the summer nights with music and dance. Not this summer.