Letters from Palestine (22 page)

Today, in 2009, I am still directing the
Women’s Humanitarian Organization and will be receiving my master’s
degree in educational psychology by the middle of the year.

* * *

I would like to share with you some of my
personal life now. My family fled Palestine in 1948, strongly
believing they would return once the war had ended. Yet year after
year, they waited, in Lebanon, until the day that God would take
them back to their homeland.

Growing up in Bourj Al Barajnee refugee
camp, my brothers and I always knew that Lebanon was not our
homeland. As children, our parents would tell us bedtime stories
about Palestine. Though I’ve never been to our village, Tarshiha,
in Accre, I can describe it to you in every detail. The church, the
mosque, the wells, my grandfather’s café, even the breeze that in
summer made you feel like you were in the mountains, filled my
imagination each night as I went to sleep. Sadly, so did the grief
and longing that my parents felt for their homeland, eager to
return.

Despite such tragedy, my father, who was so
special to me, taught me to be strong and independent, treating me
as he did my brothers. This was quite different from what my female
friends, from more traditional families, were taught. My father was
a wonderful role model, teaching me to love, not to hate. He taught
me to think for myself and not to accept information without first
thinking about it analytically. Even as a teenager, he gave me the
freedom to live my life as I had wanted to, helping me develop an
ethical and moral framework to make the right decisions. These
ethics and morals remain with me and help me in my life today.

Throughout his life, my father was always
active in the camp, putting community issues ahead of his own
health. He was a diabetic and sadly lost both of his legs in 1998.
During the last few years of his life, he was mostly confined to a
small room upstairs, where at least a little light would filter
through the crowded camp buildings. It was impossible for him to
use a wheelchair in the camp’s small alleyways, filled with many
obstacles.

As his health deteriorated further and he
lay dying, his mind wandered a lot. He was not always aware of us
or of who we were. It was a time when he talked continuously about
Palestine and Tarshiha, our village, not as though he was
remembering it, but as though he really was there. He told us he
was picking figs, catching birds, and he was talking to friends who
had died decades before him. He was walking about his farm,
enjoying being there, almost as if the past fifty-four years had
not happened.

In April 2002, my father’s dream of
returning to Palestine and to Tarshiha finally came true. His
spirit flew there, and I am sure of it. There were no Israeli
soldiers, no checkpoints, no passports, no borders to stop him. His
spirit soared above all of these manmade barriers to a peace and
coexistence. At last, he returned to his beloved Tarshiha in
Palestine.

Although we were stricken with grief, we
knew that, one day, we too would return to our village and live
once more in our homeland. We all remembered his words and his
legacy of hope to us: “
Falestine ma daa’t ma bedea’, Hak wara
mtaleb’
.” (So long as we keep longing, our right to return to
Palestine will not be lost.)

_PHOTO

Ramzy Baroud is a Palestinian-American
journalist, author, and former Al-Jazeera producer who has taught
mass communication at Australia’s Curtin University of Technology
and is currently editor-in-chief of the Palestine Chronicle. He is
the author of several books on Palestine, including The Second
Palestinian Intifada: A Chronicle of a People’s Struggle and the
recently published My Father Was a Freedom Fighter.

There are no checkpoints in heaven

I still vividly remember my father’s
face—wrinkled, apprehensive, warm—as he last wished me farewell
fourteen years ago. He stood outside the rusty door of my family’s
home in a Gaza refugee camp, wearing old yellow pajamas and a
seemingly ancient robe. As I hauled my one small suitcase into a
taxi that would take me to an Israeli airport an hour away, my
father stood still. I wished he would go back inside; it was cold,
and the soldiers could pop up at any moment. As my car moved on, my
father eventually faded into the distance, along with the
graveyard, the water tower, and the camp. It never occurred to me
that I would never see him again.

I think of my father now as he was that day.
His tears and his frantic last words: “Do you have your money? Your
passport? A jacket? Call me the moment you get there. Are you sure
you have your passport? Just check, one last time.”

My father was a man who always defied the
notion that one can only be the outcome of his circumstance.
Expelled from his village at the age of ten, running barefoot
behind his parents, he was instantly transferred from the son of a
landowning farmer to a penniless refugee in a blue tent provided by
the United Nations in Gaza. Thus, his life of hunger, pain,
homelessness, freedom fighting, love, marriage, and loss
commenced.

The fact that he was the one chosen to quit
school to help his father provide for his now tent-dwelling family
was a huge source of stress for him. In a strange, unfamiliar land,
his new role was going into neighboring villages and refugee camps
to sell gum, aspirin, and other small items. His legs were a
testament to the many dog bites he obtained during these daily
journeys. Later, scars were from the shrapnel he acquired through
war.

As a young man and soldier in the
Palestinian unit of the Egyptian army, he spent years of his life
marching through the Sinai Desert. When the Israeli army took over
Gaza following the Arab defeat in 1967, the Israeli commander met
with those who served as police officers under Egyptian rule and
offered them the chance to continue their services under Israeli
rule. Proudly and willingly, my young father chose abject poverty
over working under the occupier’s flag. And for that, predictably,
he paid a heavy price. His two-year-old son died soon after.

My oldest brother is buried in the same
graveyard that bordered my father’s house in the camp. My father,
who couldn’t cope with the thought that his only son died because
he couldn’t afford to buy medicine or food, would be found asleep
near the tiny grave all night or placing coins and candy in and
around it.

My father’s reputation as an intellectual,
his passion for Russian literature, and his endless support of
fellow refugees brought him untold trouble with the Israeli
authorities, who retaliated by denying him the right to leave
Gaza.

His severe asthma, which he developed as a
teenager, was compounded by lack of adequate medical facilities.
Yet, despite daily coughing streaks and constantly gasping for
breath, he relentlessly negotiated his way through life for the
sake of his family. On one hand, he refused to work as a cheap
laborer in Israel. “Life itself is not worth a shred of one’s
dignity,” he insisted. On the other, with all borders sealed,
except that with Israel, he still needed a way to bring in an
income. He would buy cheap clothes, shoes, used TVs, and other
miscellaneous goods and find a way to transport and sell them in
the camp. He invested everything he made to ensure that his sons
and daughter could receive a good education, an arduous mission in
a place like Gaza.

But when the Palestinian uprising of 1987
exploded and our camp became a battleground between stone throwers
and the Israeli army, mere survival became Dad’s overriding
concern. Our house was the closest to the Red Square, arbitrarily
named for the blood spilled there, and also bordered the Martyrs’
Graveyard.

How can a father adequately protect his
family in such surroundings? Israeli soldiers stormed our house
hundreds of times; it was always he who somehow held them back,
begging for his children’s safety, as we huddled in a dark room
awaiting our fate.

“You will understand when you have your own
children,” he told my older brothers as they protested his allowing
the soldiers to slap his face. Our freedom-fighting dad struggled
to explain how love for his children could surpass his own pride.
He grew in my eyes that day.

It’s been fourteen years since I last saw my
father. As none of his children had access to isolated Gaza, he was
left alone to fend for himself. We tried to help as much as we
could, but what use is money without access to medicine? In our
last talk, he said he feared he would die before seeing my
children, but I promised that I would find a way. I failed.

Since the siege on Gaza, my father’s life
became impossible. His ailments were not “serious” enough for
hospitals crowded with limbless youth. During the most recent
Israeli onslaught, most hospital spaces were converted to surgery
wards, and there was no place for an old man like my dad. All
attempts to transfer him to the better equipped West Bank hospitals
failed as Israeli authorities repeatedly denied him the required
permit.

“I am sick, son. I am sick,” my father cried
when I spoke to him two days before his death. He died alone on
March 18, waiting to be reunited with my brothers in the West Bank.
He died a refugee, but a proud man nonetheless.

My father’s struggle began sixty years ago,
and it ended a few days ago. Thousands of people descended to his
funeral from throughout Gaza, oppressed people that shared his
plight, hopes, and struggles, accompanying him to the graveyard
where he was laid to rest. Even a resilient fighter deserves a
moment of peace.

As we have already seen, Israeli violence,
sometimes in response to Palestinian acts of resistance and
sometimes completely unprovoked and wanton, is a fact of daily life
in the West Bank, and, as we shall see, also in Gaza. Accounts of
Palestinian acts of violence, particularly those that occurred
during the years of frequent suicide attacks in Israel, receive
widespread coverage in American media. Until recently, owing to the
Israeli assault on Gaza during the winter of 2008–2009, Israeli
violence against the Palestinians has been rarely mentioned. After
all, if news is what is novel, not routine, this is easily
understandable. And yet, though we may not hear of it, Israeli
violence, in the form of raids, harsh and arbitrary curfews,
arrests and torture, and murders, is something that all
Palestinians know about from firsthand experience.

Although this kind of violence continues to
this day, it was particularly widespread after the Second Intifada,
which began late in 2000, especially during the year 2002 when
there were many raids, lasting weeks, into the main cities and
various villages of the West Bank. Hundreds of Palestinians lost
their lives at this time and many more suffered serious, and often
crippling, injuries.

In the selections that follow, we offer just
three personal accounts of such instances. One—which we have
already encountered in one of Manar’s letters—concerns the siege of
the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem in 2002. A second story
describes an unprovoked murder in the city of Nablus that same
year. And the last story is by a man who was permanently disabled
in his village when attempting to rescue children from a raid. His
story is particularly of interest in that it discloses a
little-known but pervasive fact about the nature of Palestinian
resistance: meeting military violence with militant
nonviolence.

_PHOTO

My name is Jiries Canavati from Bethlehem. I
am thirty-two years old and have one daughter. I am a Christian and
was born in Jerusalem, but, unfortunately, I can no longer visit
Jerusalem because Israeli law prevents most Palestinians from going
there.

I graduated from the Bethlehem Bible College
and work as a tour guide.

Since my father passed away in 2003, my
three brothers and three sisters live together with my mom, and now
I am the only one who works and helps to support them all.

I was inside the Church of the Nativity
during the siege in 2002 from the first of April until the tenth of
May. After that, the Israeli army put my name on the blacklist so
that, today, I cannot get permission to move outside
Bethlehem—which means I live in a big prison. Nevertheless, I am
lucky to have many friends, some Jews and some Muslims, but I love
them all, and they love me too because we are brothers and all
belong to one God.

I pray every day and ask God to live a
peaceful life, in freedom, respect, and happiness.

I love you all.

* * *

During our Interfaith Peace-Builders tour of
the West Bank, we eventually made our way to the famous Church of
the Nativity, immediately across the street from Manger Square in
Bethlehem. “The little town of Bethlehem” is now a city, which,
most shockingly, especially to Christians, is choked by
checkpoints, patrolled by omnipresent gun-toting soldiers, and
partially enclosed by what Palestinians understandably call the
Apartheid Wall upon which you will see an explosion of creative
graffiti of protest.

As one of our delegates remarked, “I wonder
what Jesus would say if he could see what Bethlehem looks like
today.” Many tourists, Christian or not, must find themselves
dwelling on a similar rhetorical question when seeing Bethlehem for
the first time these days.

Our very competent guide, Saïd, took us into
the church and began his account of the history of this most
celebrated of Christian churches in Palestine. Suddenly, he
interrupted himself. He had spotted a friend of his, another guide,
who had actually been present and trapped inside the church when it
was under siege by Israeli forces in 2002. Saïd asked his friend,
who happened to be free at the moment and whose name turned out to
be Jiries Canavati, if he would be willing to share with our
delegation the story of his personal experience in this church
during the siege, something that had made international headlines
at the time.