Letters from Palestine (14 page)

The Israeli occupation does not stop at
confiscating the land. I feel occupied in my shirt pocket. My
Palestinian identity card is issued by Israeli military
authorities. They control the Palestinian civil population
registry. Every birth, death, marriage, and travels in or out is
controlled by Israel, even in Gaza, “disengagement”
notwithstanding. Of course, they control the water, the roads, and
the movement of people within the West Bank through hundreds of
barriers and checkpoints. They uproot all the trees that they
decide are in their way, that are in the way of the Apartheid Wall
cutting its way into the flesh of our land, or in the way of their
colonial settlers who decide to take over yet another spot of land
or hilltop that pleases them.

Before people fall in love in Palestine now,
they ask about what ID each holds and from where it is issued. They
do not want to start to build a life together at risk of being torn
apart.

Endnote: Anita finally was able to stay in
Ramallah through lawyers, diplomatic demarche, and the media. She
was even listed for family reunion. It seems that Israel is
sensitive to pressure or scandal—sometimes.

When truth is funnier than fiction: the
resistance of humor

December 18, 2002

At the Surda checkpoint, on the road from
Ramallah to Birzeit University and other villages, Israeli
bulldozers are always busy digging up the asphalt and piling mounds
of earth and cement blocks. Every day we find the distance to walk
becomes longer. But there are positive aspects to it: The exercise
it takes to go across is making us fit. We are using this chance to
enjoy nature and the change of seasons. And using the opportunity
to meet friends and colleagues; help the elderly and sick across;
sympathizing with those arrested by Israeli soldiers and often made
to sit on the ground, tied up and waiting for “processing”: and
putting our remaining energy into hating the occupation even more.
It is also a chance to exchange the latest news and jokes.

Since the Israeli re-invasion of Palestinian
cities last April has left most of the population confined to their
homes, no cases of sunstroke were reported in the Occupied
Territories despite the hot Middle Eastern summer.

With drivers hardly ever able to reach even
fourth gear, thanks to checkpoints, car accidents are way down. We
also save on petrol.

Sharon is losing the demographic war with
the Palestinians. What do you expect people locked up in their
homes to do, especially when the power is cut off by the Israeli
Army and no TV?

Outsiders think the Israeli Merkava tank is
a formidable machine. But we hear that Israeli soldiers don’t like
it. It has small openings, which makes it difficult for them to
steal and carry away whole computers from Palestinian homes and
offices. That is why there are so many reports of them opening up
PCs and taking out only motherboards and hard disks.

In spite of the terrible hardship, you still
won’t find people sleeping on pavements like in New York or London.
There are still a lot of family and neighborhood safety nets. So we
guess we still have a long way to go before we become an advanced
society.

Ramallah is located between Tireh and
Al-Bireh. It is our own Tora Bora, as we follow the war news from
Afghanistan.

Palestinians are nowadays afflicted by
either one of two diseases: Sharonitis or Arafitis.

The other day I found, at a friend’s of
ours, a lovely big dog with long white hair. They named her Jessie.
When asked where they got her from, they said she ran away from
Psagot, the Israeli colony (or settlement) built on a confiscated
hill overlooking Ramallah and Al-Bireh. The settlement has multiple
barbed wire fences, watch towers, an electrified perimeter,
constant guards, and searchlights at night. The buses traveling
out, often with very few passengers, have bulletproof glass and
metal, with armored cars in front and behind for protection. Do you
blame Jessie for running away from such a life?

Confined to their houses, Palestinian
children around Psagot are excelling in a new/old hobby: flying
kites. They are becoming very good at it, flying kites and
directing them high above the Israeli settlement with pictures of
Arafat or the Palestinian flag.

The demonstrations that were taking place at
night—which involved people banging on pots and pans to challenge
the curfews—were quite an event. The practice was picked up from
Argentina. The kids loved it, banging on anything that makes a
noise outside, venting their anger at the Israeli soldiers, and
trying to scare the evil axe away.

In the West Bank, we always felt that the
people in Gaza had a worse existence, taking a heavier toll of
casualties, with a far higher percentage of people living below the
poverty line. But the other day, a French lady diplomat said to us,
after visiting Gaza, that people there now feel more sorry for the
people in the West Bank, because we have curfews and they
don’t.

In Ramallah, thanks to the Israeli
occupation army, we now have no police, no prisons, no security
services, no courts, no traffic lights, or fines. Yet there seems
to be very little crime, according to friends and neighbors. This
is primarily because there’s not much left to steal, not that
there’s anyone left to compile crime statistics anyway!

Old people, especially women, are more
popular again. They have so much to contribute now. Under curfew
and closures, with no access to hospitals, delivery of new babies
is being done at home, without doctors. The skills of old women are
needed again as midwives. They are also digging up the old recipes
of how to make things at home: marmalade, pickles, and preserving
fruits and vegetables without fridges. They also help in keeping
the young children happy with old-time stories. But my favorite is
the following: The Israeli occupation forces announced recently
that any car going round with men only could be stopped and
searched. A good friend of mine found an opportunity to make some
money. He is offering to rent out his mother-in-law.

Palestinians are the highest exporters of
international news per capita. Yet we don’t get any returns from
such exports, not even intellectual copyright royalties.

Solutions to the Palestinian question were
always plentiful. One of the latest is a geological solution, based
on the fact that the Palestinian coast is losing about three
centimeters every year. In a few million years, there won’t be much
of Palestine left to fight for.

A Palestinian at Yad Vashem

These visits took place in 1999 and 2000. It
was quite an experience. It took a lot to get myself, a
Palestinian, to undertake the trip. And I only did it after an
intense discussion with a German acquaintance about the triangular
connection between Germany, the Jews, and the Palestinians. The
effect of the visit on me was profound in many ways; I even
repeated it to let the first impressions sink in and more reactions
come out.

I went to the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial
in Jerusalem with the usual convictions of a Palestinian Arab: We
were never responsible for the pogroms and discrimination against
Jews in Europe, neither in the past nor in the Nazi era. So why
should Palestinians pay for the crimes of Europeans against
Jews?

The Jews have lived historically in Arab and
Islamic countries, generally at peace with others, and they usually
suffered only what the rest of the population had to go through.
Arabs are Semitic peoples themselves, and it would be ridiculous to
talk about Arab “anti-Semitism.” What Palestinians and Arabs are up
against is modern political Zionism, with its invasion of our
historic land and culture, using false myths and pretenses.

What was striking at first was the vast
number of tourist and school buses near the entrance of Yad Vashem,
not to mention private cars and public transport in the car parks
and roads around the site. I was told that every Israeli student
and soldier is scheduled to visit the memorial at least once. The
visit is also on the itinerary of many local tourist agencies and,
of course, a must for visiting foreign dignitaries.

The place, with its many sites, is very
imposing in its visual and architectural constructions. In
particular, the design and effect of the Children’s Memorial was
very moving and the Valley of the Communities very dramatic. The
historical museum is remarkably effective in conveying the message
in a way that does not have to resort to exaggerated language.
Reality is shocking enough. One immediate reaction was that the
Palestinians could learn from the memorial how to honor their own
martyrs and history.

Considering the millions of words used by
all the people who visited Yad Vashem to express their reactions to
the Holocaust, I am not sure I can come up with original ways of
expressing the horror and revulsion at what took place under the
Nazis. A Palestinian refugee can particularly imagine the endless
dimensions of the suffering of the victims and of the survivors.
The survivors, especially, sometimes envy the dead, after dear ones
are gone, homes and treasured possessions lost, and communities and
relations torn asunder.

But I cannot help looking with a
Palestinian’s eyes and feeling with a Palestinian’s heart. And my
reactions could not be isolated from the recent history of our
country: invaded and taken over by force, money, intrigue, and
alliances with the powerful of the day. In short, as Palestinians
put it, Palestine was stolen from its original inhabitants who are
the descendants of all the people who inhabited the land. Not only
did Israel take over and claim for itself the geography of
Palestine but also its history, religion, language, mythology, and
culture—even the falafel and hummus.

The Holocaust to us Palestinians has been
used mainly to justify to the world—and to Jews themselves
everywhere—the settler colonization of our country. Many writers,
including some Israelis and Jews elsewhere, have exposed this
manipulation of the suffering of the Jews. In the historical
museum, the progression of the catastrophe was gripping, and it was
almost painful to see what fanatic ideology could drive humankind
to do. Yet the political aim of the museum was so clear right from
the opening plaque at the entrance: all of that happened to the
Jews because they were “bereft of a state.”

Following all the atrocious pictures of the
rise of Nazism, the growing anti-Semitism, the treatment of Jews,
and the lead-up to the death camps, what really caused something in
me to break was a certain picture and comment. The picture of Haj
Amin Husseini shaking hands with Goebbels blew away much of the
trail of my empathy. It just seemed too cheap a shot, after the
gravity of the previous sequence of tragedies of the Nazi
extermination of Jewish communities in Europe, to lump together the
Palestinian struggle against foreign invaders with what the Nazis
stood for and did to the Jews!

Haj Amin, who is very much criticized by
most Palestinian historians, was merely practicing the age-old
politics of “my enemy’s enemy,” before the full scale of what
happened in the Holocaust was known. And when he uses the phrase
“Jihad (struggle) against the Jews,” he is just employing the usual
parlance of his Islamic background of the day, before the Jews
became Israelis. Also, Haj Amin al-Husseini’s quoted words in a
letter to Ribbentrop, “to prevent an agreement with Britain and the
U.S. to allow Jews to leave for Eretz-Israel,” put differently
would read, “to prevent foreign Zionist colonialists from taking
over his country, Palestine.” To display it out of context, as
continuation of Nazi actions, is cheating history and cheating
oneself.

Throughout the tour of the exhibition, I
could also see the nakba (the impending Palestinian catastrophe
that befell our people) in the making. The second time round,
especially, a strange déjà vu impression kept creeping up on me. I
noticed again and again some parallels between what is on display
at Yad Vashem and what happened to the Palestinians at the hands of
the Zionists, or Israelis, in later years.

The methods used by the Zionists against the
Palestinians seemed already all there: Dehumanizing the enemy and,
especially, the victim, as the term “Arab” in Israel is found in
“Juden” in Germany. For the places forbidden to “Jews,” substitute
“Palestinians,” forbidden to tread in their own land. For the Nazi
racial classification and branding of victims with “Juden” and the
yellow star, substitute the orange ID, the strict permits, the
special car plates, and the division of the Palestinians into
Druze, Moslems, Bedouins, Christians, uprooted, unrecognized, 1967
evacuees, Jerusalemites, returnees, refugees, et cetera.

The “illegal immigration” to “Eretz Israel”
reminded me of the Palestinians refugees trying “illegally” to
sneak back to their own homes and lands after 1948–49. And the list
could go on: For the barbed wire of the Warsaw Ghetto substitute
the barbed wire surrounding Gaza and its Palestinian access cage at
the Erez passage. And for the Jews’ attempts to break out of
concentration camps through tunnels, remember the Palestinian and
Lebanese attempts to break out of prisons, borders and detention
centers, created and caused by the Israelis.

How do you explain engraving Jewish
communities in solid rock, in the Valley of Jewish Communities,
while destroying Palestinian communities and erasing to the ground
more than five hundred of their villages? Even the revolt of the
Warsaw Ghetto evoked the stand of the Palestinian refugees in Tel
Zaatar, Sabra and Shatila, and other camps in Lebanon, all caused,
ultimately, by their dispossession at the hands of the Jews of
Israel.

Like the Nazis on trial in Nuremberg, Ariel
Sharon denies having “Palestinian blood” on his own proper hands.
The “Final Solution” expression has often been used also for the
Palestinians, not to mention the often-heard hate cry among
Israelis of “Death to the Arabs” and the calls for “Transfer,” or
deportation of Palestinians from their lands. And in parallel with
Holocaust deniers, we still find Nakba deniers among most Jews and
Israelis. One is reminded of Nelson Mandela when he talked about
how Apartheid used to give Afrikaners a false sense of superiority
that justified their inhuman actions.