Letters from Palestine (15 page)

A strange twist has taken place in
Palestine. If the Warsaw ghetto is now a memory, the ghetto-like
West Bank and Gaza colonies of Israeli settlers are a living memory
created by Jews themselves, with their barbed wire, watch towers,
glaring lights, armed guards, and dogs. One often wonders, what
kind of life and future will Jewish children lead in these colonial
settlements, compared to the easygoing Palestinian towns and
villages around them?

The way the Jews honor their dead at Yad
Vashem could be a lesson to Palestinians to create their own
memorials. But when Palestinians come round to creating their
memorials, I hope that these memorials would be different in at
least two aspects: without using the suffering of the people for
begging material and political support and without instilling even
more hatred toward others.

No real and lasting peace between Israel and
the Palestinians will ever take root by falsifying history.
Israelis and Jews everywhere have to undergo a serious re-education
process for what they did to the Palestinians. They have to learn
the facts and recognize their responsibility. And not withstanding
what compromises the leaders on both sides agree upon, Palestinians
cannot forgive without an Israeli recognition of what they did to
the Palestinians. It is perhaps the historic role of the
Palestinians to help Zionist Israelis and Jews everywhere to get
rid of their entrenched racist and anti-other attitudes. Israel can
never become a normal country, accepted by the entire world,
without Palestinian absolution, just as many Jews have done with
Germany.

The Dheisheh refugee camp, located near
Bethlehem, is one of the best known and largest of the camps in the
West Bank, originally established by the United Nations after the
dispossession of about three-quarters of a million Palestinians,
beginning in 1948. Dheisheh was established the following year and
was originally made up of people from forty-five different villages
that lie to the west of Jerusalem and Hebron. Now more than ten
thousand inhabitants, more than half of them children, reside in
this camp, on less than one kilometer of land.

Anna and I spent a portion of a day there
and stayed overnight while we were traveling with our delegation
and had a chance to tour a portion of the camp. It looks like what
it is—a ghetto. The streets are narrow and winding, the small
houses, sometimes no more than huts, are built higgledy-piggledy,
and shadows predominate in the narrow passageways. Outwardly, it is
a gloomy, somewhat forbidding, and cramped place.

Dheisheh has a long history of resistance to
the occupation, and, not surprisingly, it has often been subject to
military raids and curfews. Arrests are a fact of everyday life,
and killing and wounding of Dheisheh residents, often youths, are
not uncommon. Virtually every child who lives there has been
touched by trauma and has lost friends, family members, or
neighbors to death or imprisonment. Violence and loss come with the
territory.

And yet, Dheisheh is a vibrant community. It
brims with life, with vitality, with creative activity. Family and
community—people taking care of each other—that is the Palestinian
way of life generally, and it is especially so in places like
Dheisheh.

In the selection to follow, a young woman
named Manar, who grew up in the camp, returns there after studying
in the United States and writes back to her friends in the US about
what she saw and heard during the late spring of 2006. From many
letters that she wrote that year, I have selected a representative
sampling so that you can experience, albeit vicariously, what life
in a refugee camp is like. Manar’s letters could well be called,
without exaggeration,
Life and Death in Dheisheh
.

Letters from Manar

_PHOTO

My name is Manar Faraj. I have rotated around
the sun for twenty-two years. I was born in Jerusalem when my
parents had permission to go and see some friends. I’m so proud of
that, but after I was born in the greatest city of Palestine, I was
bound to live my real life in the Dheisheh refugee camp in
Bethlehem City and was raised from day one there. I grew up there,
and I thought that the camp was the end of the world. I did not see
my father a lot, but I saw him getting arrested by Israeli soldiers
in front of my eyes. I also saw my mother get beaten up and my
uncles taken away.

I have lived to be a freedom fighter, but my
means were different. At the age of ten, I joined the Ibdaa Dancing
Group, which is a Palestinian dancing group located in the camp.
They taught us how to express what we wanted to say to the world
through dance and art. I loved it. I found myself there, and I
found that this world might be just after all. I traveled to many
countries with the dancing group, such as the U.S., Greece, Italy,
Jordan, and UAE, to perform.

However, when I was a young teenager
(between fourteen and sixteen) I traveled many times alone to
volunteer in MADRE, which is an organization for women. In 2001, I
went by myself to South Africa to the conference against Apartheid.
After that, I went back to the U.S., and I was in New York when
9/11 happened. And that was really hard for me, as an Arab.

Back home, I got the highest grades among
the girls in the dancing group, so I got chosen for a scholarship
in the U.S. I didn’t want to leave the camp, but I really wanted to
learn. My heroes are my parents, who encouraged me and trusted me
to go, even though it is very hard for a girl from a conservative
culture to leave and live in the U.S. on her own. I got more than
one scholarship after that, but the most important one was from the
amazing Hopkins family, who helped me to get to the States and were
like my parents.

I’ve gone through a lot here, but now I’m a
junior at High Point University in North Carolina after having
graduated with a two-year diploma from a community college. At High
Point University, I’m now the president of the International Club
and a vice president of the Rotary Club. I’m also very involved in
the community as a result of teaching Arabic and the Quran, and
also by teaching people here about Palestine. This is what keeps me
going every day.

Date: Wed, 24 May 2006

Hello everybody,

How are you doing over there? This is Manar.
I will do as I promised and write every day about what I see in my
country with my people.

Well, as any girl who loves her country and
her family, I was very excited to go back to see everyone, I was
very excited to live in my culture among my people again and see
and remember my house and my camp.

I came from the U.S. to Jordan, because, of
course, the Israelis won’t allow us to go through Tel Aviv.

It was 6:00 am on Tuesday, May 23, 2006,
when the journey started to Palestine. My dad and I went to the
Jordanian bridge, of course, where we waited for a bus to take us
to Palestine. We waited until the bus came, and all the crowd who
was waiting for it got up and rode it with us to Palestine.

Before we entered, there was a checkpoint.
The Israeli soldiers—with their green uniforms, their big hats and
their eyes full of hatred and their weapons pointed at us—stopped
us and took our bags to search for any bombs.

I am with my dad. Everyone is quiet. The
silence almost killed me. I wanted to shout, but I could not. To
cry, but I could not. This is what we face every day.

Then we reached the borders. The soldiers
took our bags to search them again, and all the people stood in
long, long, long lines to wait for their passports and their
tasreeh
(permissions) to be stamped. There was just one
soldier who worked on that—one soldier who will laugh at us a
little, go eat a little, kiss her boyfriend a lot, then come stamp
for us a little—just one soldier for all of these people who were
waiting, tired and hungry, and with their kids.

Then I passed, but they stopped my father
and many others. Why? Just for fun.

Then they were searching a suitcase, and the
soldiers started to scream, “Erjao la wara” (go back, go back), but
in Hebrew, which I don’t understand. “Nobody move. Everybody go
back.” The people did not get scared because they knew that there
was nothing in there. It is just either for fun or they saw a
machine that they thought was a bomb.

The soldiers surrounded us. I had my cell
phone. I was filming what happened, but the soldier came and took
it and shouted at me to stop it and asked why I was doing that. I
said, “I am just videoing, why?” The hatred was coming from his
eyes. I could see it. I swear to God I could see it.

My dad came. The soldier shouted at my dad
and started to talk in Hebrew. I was alone where the soldier put
me, and my dad tried to come to me, but they wouldn’t let him.

I started to laugh at them and ask why I
could not video. Is it forbidden? And, if it is, why? No
answer—just eyes full of hate, looking at me. Security came and
asked me many questions: why, when, how, what, where—all the W.
questions in English. Ha ha.

Then the soldiers who caught me were
shouting at my dad. I wanted to do something. I could not
understand. The soldier was around my age, and my dad is like his
father’s age. Why would he disrespect him? And they wouldn’t let
some of the women go to the bathroom, and they would push them
really hard. All of us sat there looking at their guns, their eyes,
trying to do something. My dad said it reminded him of jail because
they put me on one side and put him on the other side, and they
ordered us not to talk to each other.

Then they said there was nothing in that
suitcase, so everyone come back to the lines. Again!

They made me wait for the suitcase with my
dad; they did our suitcases last because I was filming with the
cell phone.

The hours went by—hours and hours of
waiting. Then we took a taxi to Bethlehem. Finally? Nope, not
yet!

Many checkpoints from Jericho to Bethlehem,
as always. God, I forgot all my tiring troubles when I smelled the
olive smell of Palestine. God, I missed you, Palestine. I was
looking and looking and looking at my sad, hurt, bleeding country,
like a child who just came into life and was staring at his mom’s
eyes.

“Now, let me go.” My sister Hazar, who is
two years old, is trying to play with me! And my family is waiting
for me so I can eat my favorite food, warak dwaly (grape
leaves)—the real ones.

I will write as I see more. I won’t stop
writing the news to you. For me, it is better than the TV. We are
the real news. I will write to you every day, and if I do not, that
means I’m in jail or killed by an Israeli bullet.

Thank you all

Day 2

Hello my friends,

Today, I woke up to my parents’ and uncles’
voices. They were talking about salaries.

“What should we do? It has been three
months! People are dying! [Manar is referring to the situation in
Gaza, now under an Israeli boycott after Hamas took control
there.—Ed.] Do we need more pain?! Are we going to be worse than
Somalia?”

I was praying to God that what I heard was
just one of my nightmares, nothing else. But yes! It is the truth.
And the truth is even worse and more painful than that.

I cleaned the house as I used to do; I did
it with love and reminiscence. My sisters and brothers went to
school for their finals. I wish them luck.

As I was sitting in my room at 3:30 p.m.,
Hazar came to me saying, “Takho, aljiesh,” which means “They shot
him, the soldiers.” I asked what happened. I went with her to see
what she meant. I saw everyone watching the TV where the Israeli
soldiers were shooting people in Ramallah. The Almanara part of
Ramallah was full of soldiers and their jeeps, and they were
shooting at the people. The Palestinians were fighting with their
stones, five dead and forty wounded. Until now, we do not know, the
wounded might die because of the bad healthcare we have here from
having no money.

The room was silent. Nobody said anything
but Hazar, “Takho, aljiesh.”

Good night, my friends! What did you do for
the people today?

Maybe my English is not that good, or my
writing, but still, at least I’m telling the truth.

Free, free Palestine,

Manar

Day 3

Hello everyone,

Last night I could not sleep well. The camp
was full of soldiers who were looking for a young boy, fourteen
years old, to arrest him. Of course, we are used to this. It
happens almost every night. The camp’s sun was shining and looking
sad, but still shining—exactly like the people. They are sad, but
still smiling.

Today was my first day to walk in the camp.
In my camp, the people put up pictures of people who were killed by
Israelis everywhere in the camp. I was walking to look at the camp,
the people, and the pictures. Believe me, my friends, nothing has
changed, but more sadness and more pictures around the camp. Also,
the camp was empty; I felt that it was missing many people. Well,
that’s true! All the kids I used to know—they are now in jail. Many
boys from ages twelve to eighteen are arrested by the Israelis.
Why? Well, because they might be active people in the future so
they can achieve the freedom of their country, or because they
threw a stone. And, of course this is a crime in the soldiers’
eyes.

God, when I was looking at those boys, I
felt that they were asking me what I did for them over there in the
States. And I was telling myself that I would never leave them.

I went home. I saw my family gathered like
always. I sat with them and laughed a lot. Then my auntie said,
“Manar, we will cook lunch for you when your uncle gets his
salary.” In my culture, we invite people for food when they come
back from somewhere. It is like welcoming the person. My auntie
said, “But he will not get his salary this month or next month, so
why don’t you wait until the next summer. He might get his salary
then.” Everybody laughed so hard. I laughed too, but I looked at
them and felt proud of the way they treat life.