Letters from Palestine (23 page)

Jiries graciously assented to Saïd’s
request, and for the next fifteen or twenty minutes gave us a
riveting and horrifying account of what he and hundreds of others
who had taken refuge in the church had had to endure. Many died
during this time, and in leading us around the church, Jiries would
occasionally point out bullet holes and other signs of damage to
the church that were still visible.

After his talk, as our delegation was
leaving, I stayed behind (actually I remember running after Jiries
before he disappeared into the crowd) in order to nab Jiries. I
wanted his story for the book. Somewhat out of breath, I hurriedly
introduced myself and told him about the book I was working on. He
said, “Sure,” and gave me his card. I told him I would write him
when I returned to America.

And I did. But I heard nothing back—not the
first time I had suffered such a disappointment. But then I should
have remembered that Palestinians often don’t have easy Internet
access, and besides, it seems that they usually have better (read
“more urgent”) things to do with their time than to respond to my
importunate notes. Of course I wouldn’t be writing these words if I
did not eventually hear back from Jiries. His long letter, which at
the end promised another in which he would recount the story of the
siege, began this way:

Hello my brother,

How are you doing today? I hope you are just
doing fine . . . And I hope this email will find you in good
health.

First of all, I am very sorry because I was
busy the past few days. But now I am writing you an email to
explain a little about the situation here in Bethlehem and the Holy
Land area . . .

So began a very loving correspondence
between Jiries and me that has continued to this day. Indeed, as
you will soon see for yourself, Jiries is a very loving man. And
you will also see that he did keep his promise to me by providing
an account of the siege of the Church of the Nativity along with a
more general description of daily life under occupation in his
beloved city of Bethlehem, where, by the kind of surreal irony that
the occupation often entails, Jiries remains trapped. For he is
still a prisoner of the Israelis who are continuing to punish him
for the “crime” merely of his having once found himself an
involuntary hostage, facing death, in the church that tradition
holds was built over the cave where Jesus Christ was born.

* * *

On October 25, 2006, Dr. Bill Dienster
interviewed Jiries (George) Canavati, a survivor of the siege of
the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, which occurred in
April–May 2002 when Israeli troops invaded and reoccupied
Bethlehem. What follows, then, is a first-person account of this
siege and its aftermath.

* * *

The story started with some problems in the
West Bank and Jerusalem; I remember very well. Five or six
Palestinian civilians were killed in a taxi, and one of them was
engaged to a woman from a refugee camp in southern Bethlehem. When
they killed her fiancé, she decided to suicide herself. She carried
a bomb, moved to Jerusalem, and killed seven Israelis. And for that
reason, they said, It’s over. We want to occupy the whole West Bank
area. They occupied Nablus. They occupied Jenin, Ramallah,
Tulkaram, and Qalqiliya. They moved to Hebron and Bethlehem. They
came to Bethlehem on the first of April, 2002.

And there were very big numbers of soldiers,
lots of tanks, helicopters, all these things. Between six and seven
thousand soldiers came to this area and about three hundred
vehicles.

The occupation started between 11:00 p.m.
and midnight. The people were all over in the streets: civilians,
fighters, and people from the Palestinian Authority. Most of them
were watching, like a movie in a cinema. They couldn’t believe what
was going on. From inside our houses, they said, we are not sure.
So they went outside to see.

Now, the situation was very, very terrible.
It was very dangerous, too. The helicopters were shooting in all
directions, and many people were killed in the streets. No one
could help them. Many fighters were killed, and some people were
killed inside their houses because they got bullets through the
windows. And no one knew about the dead people in the houses until
after a week, ten days, when people in the neighborhood started to
smell bad smells, and only then found the dead bodies lying
there.

One of the young men said, we need a place
to hide because we are four hundred, five hundred people, fighters,
whatever. But they have thousands of soldiers here, and they have
tanks. And they are shooting us with missiles, rockets, and heavy
bullets.

Another said, the Church of the Nativity is
the best place to go because it is the holiest place, so the
soldiers might respect it. So they opened the door of the Catholic
church and moved inside. After that, they called their friends and
other people, and they started to come to the church.

Myself, I wanted to go home. I called my mom
and my family, when all what I could see were bullets and shooting
and heavy bullets. My mother said, don’t come back home. Around 150
soldiers, she said, had occupied the three floors of our building
and were keeping the families in small rooms.

So I followed the people and entered the
Church of the Nativity. We came into the church in three groups,
the first around 50 people, the second 70 or 80, and the third over
100, until altogether we were 248 people.

In the beginning, we all thought we were
going to stay only two or three days, then the army would leave
Bethlehem, and we could go home. But in fact, when the Israeli
leaders found out that some of the people inside the church were
fighters, they occupied everything around the church. They occupied
the peace center and the Bethlehem municipality in front of the
church: on one side, all the houses in the Milk Grotto
neighborhood, the White Sister’s House, and the Russian Hotel; the
Bethlehem 2000 buildings behind us, the Franciscan Terra Sancta
school, and the Casa Nova Hotel to the other side. They surrounded
us. The area was full of soldiers. No one could move.

The situation inside was very terrible. We
were 248 people from all over, different places and different
mentalities. There were leaders, people from the Palestinian
Authority, the Tanzim (Fatah) Movement, and Hamas. The governor of
Bethlehem was inside and the director of the Catholic society. So
the leaders talked. They managed everything with the fathers inside
the church.

And for the first two or three weeks, the
Israeli military said, we will not talk with you. They said to the
governor and to the fathers, we are not going to negotiate—nothing.
We want those people, all of them, to go outside one by one and
surrender themselves. If not, we will occupy the church and attack
the church, and we will shoot or kill them all.

And day by day, they started to use
loudspeakers, with noises and whatever. They said, we want you to
surrender yourselves and go back home safely. And they started to
bring new technology: the first week, they brought a box and a high
crane, and they put the box on the crane and a sniper was inside,
so they started to shoot people from outside; and the second week,
they brought two cranes. We called it an electronic machine gun:
they put on the cranes a machine gun, a video camera, and a
telescope, and they control them by the computer. So they see you
on the computer screen, and when you move, they just press the
button and shoot you. And this is how they shot many people.

In the first three days, two young men were
killed inside the church. One of them was with the Catholic group
and the National Guard and wearing his uniform. His name was Khalid
Seyam. He went on the roof, just, you know, to check to see if
there was a way to move out and bring food or run away. So the
soldiers behind the church saw him, and they shot him with one
bullet in his face. It was a little hole in his face, under his
eye, but when we turned him over, the back of his face was
destroyed. We call those bullets the “dum-dum” bullets; they
explode.

And after two days, another young man was
killed in the Casa Nova: he was looking for food, but unfortunately
he found soldiers instead. He was twenty-five years old, married,
had a daughter and a son. We brought him inside the church, and he
had two bullets in his chest. You want to help. You want to give
them something, but you have nothing.

“My brother, I don’t want to die. My
friends, I don’t want to leave you. Please, I miss my wife. I want
to see my little daughter.” You know, all these words: “I love you;
I’m a good believer; and I’m still young.” And you want to give
him. You want to support him, but there’s nothing in your hand.
Five minutes, ten minutes maximum, bleeding, and then he passed
away. This was something no one can believe, but when you live that
moment yourself, and you feel it, you find that it’s really,
really, suffering. I remember that was the worst time inside the
church.

The first two dead bodies, I remember the
governor and the fathers talked to the Israeli leader and told him
we have two dead bodies. Please, just out of a kind of respect. You
may want to send them to their families so they can pray, and this
is our tradition. After that, they have to bury them. Please,
you’re finished, you know? And the Israeli soldiers said, no, we
don’t need them. You just keep them inside with you.

So the father said we can’t do anything. We
need a place to put them. So he found boxes, instruments given as
presents from Italy to the Catholic church, and cut them into
coffins. We put the bodies in those two coffins, and we closed the
holes with wax from candles to prevent the smell. And we kept them
inside the church, in the Greek Orthodox Holy Innocents cave, for
fifteen days, between us. For fifteen days! Until they start to
lose their shape. And when the Israelis took the coffins and opened
them, they found them dead!

So by that time, we had big problems—with
the food, the water, electricity, bathroom, all this stuff—but the
most important thing for us was the food. For ten days we ate from
the fathers, the monasteries; they have three churches and a big
monastery, so they gave us all they had. And we ate everything, and
it was good for ten days. But don’t forget, you are talking about
248 people, a very big number. And after, they said, we are
suffering like you, we are all the same now.

So we started to move behind the church in a
field. We used to crawl between the grasses and the leaves, and
some friends gave us food and bread. And we did that five or six
times and ate for one week. But then one of the snipers saw a young
man in the garden and shot him, and they found out there are people
outside helping to give food for the fighters. So they occupied the
whole garden and put lots of snipers in that area.

We started to look for a new thing. One kid
inside the church, fifteen years old, said I can help you, but I
need a cellular phone. He said, my brother works with the ambulance
center. (The only people who could move at that time were the
ambulance drivers because it was curfew, when every week they give
you two hours just to bring food, medicine, and that’s it. And if
they see you out during curfew time, they shoot you right away.
They don’t care.) And the boy’s brother said OK, I can help, but
how?

So we called the people in the area, Beit
Sahour, which is near Bethlehem. We called the families and the
neighbors and the friends and explained everything to them, and
they agreed to collect food from their houses and bring it to the
medical center. So at night, nine or ten o’clock, we called the
young girls in the neighborhood, thirteen–fourteen years old, and
they walked between the houses to gather food at the medical
center. Then, the ambulance took the food to a house near the
Church of the Nativity, and they threw the bags of food from that
roof onto the roof of the church. And they did that seven, eight
times, and we ate. But then one of the bags dropped onto the
street. When the soldiers opened the bag and saw the food inside,
they found out that people were helping from the houses.

So they occupied all the houses and kept the
families in very small rooms. And that was the worst time. Nothing
at all. It was twenty-seven days. On the twenty-eighth, by chance,
I was guarding the church door for the governor and the director of
the Catholic Society. I was looking outside to the square, and it
was silent, no cars in the street, nothing was moving. But through
the little hole, I saw people coming toward the church. So I asked
the governor, and he said open the door.

And there were twenty-eight people.
Seventeen were arrested by the Israeli soldiers, but eleven were
able to enter the church. They were from peace movements, from all
over the world. They gave us some bread, food, cigarettes, water,
whatever, and we ate four days exactly together. Of course, one
meal, you know. So what happened after that? Nothing at all, and no
food. And that was the worst time.

I remember that many people have a lot of
medical problems. As for me, I got problems in my kidney, and I
lost fifteen kilos (thirty-four pounds) in forty days.

And for twenty-six people, we opened the
main door because the governor of Bethlehem said to them, If you
want to leave, it’s up to you. You can do that. In my opinion, it’s
better for you to be in jail or in hospitals than to become dead.
So if you want to surrender yourself, it’s up to you. So we opened
the main door, and twenty-six of them moved outside, and they
surrendered.

And I remember nine people were killed
inside the church, and twenty-six were injured. We arranged with
the Israeli leaders to send them to the hospital, but to this day
they are still in prison.