Letters from Palestine (27 page)

A winding road encircles the town’s land on
three sides. The gas was fired from all directions before residents
even got close to the gate that is the only possible entrance to
their lands.

Just 250 meters from the center of town,
with another 250 to go, demonstrators were pelted with the gas that
mixed with heavy rains and burned the skin. Elderly men were on the
ground vomiting, children were ducking for cover behind boulders,
but the soldiers were on all sides. The explosions were
omnipresent, and one had to jump and duck, do a hopscotch skip at
times, to avoid being hit with the bombs that fired the burning
noxious substance. This week was light on the warfare, with
previous weeks witnessing rubber-coated steel bullets and live
ammunition.

Iyad Burnat, the head of the Popular
Committee against the Wall in Bil’in said, “This is a small
demonstration this week,” yet there were still at least one hundred
people at the outset, carrying flags of all Palestinian political
parties along with the national flag. They chanted for justice, for
an end to occupation. Many demonstrators ran, half doubled over, to
escape the gas that burns the eyes, the skin, the nerves. They also
ran to escape the bullets that have come in other weeks.

But it seemed a game, with soldiers standing
behind the fence that acts as the Wall in this area of the West
Bank. Some demonstrators danced and cheered in confrontation to
occupation during a torrential downpour. Burnat’s wife said, “They
are stealing our land. They’ve already stolen most of it. There is
no other way to spin it; this is our reality.”

“It’s every day they incur into the town,”
Burnat says while walking with a crowd of his fellow townspeople.
“Every night they come into town, break into the houses, arrest
people.”

He has been arrested eight times himself.
“They target all of the leaders of the nonviolent resistance
because they want to stop it.”

Later, in a car driving with friends, he
turns the radio dial, stopping on Um Kulthum. “You know why I love
only her? Because that’s all we listened to for two years in
prison.”

Back in town twenty-six-year-old Hamis Abu
Rahma is doing remarkably well for having been shot in the head
just three weeks ago. He wears a stocking cap to protect the slice
across his scalp. From just twenty meters away, an Israeli soldier
shot him in the head and the arm. The third grenade, fired from a
machine gun, missed him. He does not remember anything after the
first shot, as he went into a coma on the ground. For fifteen
minutes, the soldiers would not allow anyone to aid the bleeding
man. Ambulances were banned, but friends were able to take him in a
car to Ramallah Hospital, a twenty-minute drive. Abu Rahma was just
meters from his home when shot, well within the residential part of
the village, far enough from the lands of his family that the
Israelis have confiscated.

His mother tears up talking about the near
loss of her son, a clearly gentle young man, soft-spoken while
sitting on a makeshift hospital bed in the living room. His hand
and arm still shake, but he says he is getting better every
day.

All of her sons are back home after stays in
prisons and hospitals. The family is no longer able to live off of
their land since they are forbidden from reaching it.

“We had olive trees, fruit, beans,
vegetables.”

During this Friday’s demonstration, Burnat
said that 1,500 olive trees were stolen for the Israeli settlement
encroaching not only on his land, but the other settlements that
surround western Ramallah, growing as ominously as cancer.

Nearby, Na’lin is active in the nonviolent
resistance against the Wall and settlements that are also taking
its lands, while Beit Ilo is another town that is surrounded by
settlements on the hills around the Rayan home and their
neighbors.

In the evening, the family says they stay
indoors. “If we walk the streets, we risk being shot,” Mohammad
Rayan says. Travel from Ramallah to his home is severely impaired
with their road rerouted by Israeli forces who took the easy route
for the settlements.

Western Ramallah is a sight to behold:
flowers, greenery, boulders, trees, hills; a pastoral image out of
the impressionist period, but marred in the near distance by jeeps,
soldiers, guns, settlements: the stuff of occupation.

“They break into our house or someone else’s
in town every night,” the mother of Hamis Abu Rahma says while
sitting in her living room.

Down the road, in Burnat’s house, his wife
says the soldiers come often. Their four-year-old daughter Manar
says she is frightened at night when they break in, particularly
when they “come to take Daddy.” But her plans for the future? The
tiny girl with bright, excited eyes, who sports a faux gold “M”
around her neck says, “I want to be a doctor to help all of the
injured people and the people who get sick from the gas.”

Over in the Abu Rahma family home, the
mother says, “I know this is a different kind of gas they use. They
experiment on us. I don’t know what the long-term effects are, but
I will not be surprised if we develop cancer from this.”

After years of struggle she is teary, yet
defiant. “No, we will not give up. But what the future holds, I
don’t know.”

_PHOTO

Daoud Nassar, thirty-eight, is married and
the father of three children, two daughters, Shadin, ten, and
Nardine, six, and a boy, Bishara, four. He has a diploma in
religious studies from Austria and a BA in business administration
from Bethlehem University as well as a degree in tourism management
from the University of Bielefeld in Germany.

Daoud is the founder and director of the
Tent of Nations: People Building Bridges, which is further
described in the account that follows. His organization has
received international recognition, including a peace prize from
the U.N.

* * *

We were sitting in a cave listening to a
handsome young man named Daoud Nassar talk about his family’s farm.
When I first starting reading about Palestinian culture in David
Shulman’s book,
Dark Hope
, I was astonished to learn that
many Palestinian farmers inhabit caves, and now I was in one. But
it was not the sort of cave that would especially interest the
spelunkers of this world. On the contrary, it was surprisingly
spacious and comfortable, and it was only one of several on this
farm. Indeed, it turned out that Daoud’s grandfather had lived in
one for many years, and one of his sons had occupied one for more
than sixty years!

This particular cave is located in the hills
near Bethlehem in what is now the West Bank on a one hundred acre
farm that has been in Daoud’s family for almost a hundred years.
But if you were to climb out of the cave and into the light, you
would see on all the surrounding hills encircling Daoud’s farm a
series of (illegal but government-subsidized) Jewish settlements
with their distinctive clustered red-roofed houses, which is the
invariant design of the 120 settlements that now infest the West
Bank and occupy traditional Palestinian land.

The settlers and the State of Israel want
Daoud’s farm, and he and his family are now living on the last of
the Palestinian farms in the area, determined to hold onto their
property at all costs. So far, they have had to pay $130,000 in
legal and other fees to do so, and the battle isn’t over yet.
Indeed, in his latest newsletter, in April 2009, Daoud mentions
that Israel is now demanding an additional $15,000 in order to
reregister the land on his family’s farm, and even then, there is
no guarantee that that will be the end of it.

In what follows, Daoud will tell his own
story, so all I will do here is to provide something of a context
for it, along with my personal impressions of Daoud himself.

In traditional Palestinian society, a man’s
handshake was his word, so when Palestinians acquired land, there
often would be no documentation to prove it—for in those days, none
was needed. But after the 1967 War, when Israel conquered the West
Bank, the Israelis were determined to occupy (that is, colonize)
their newly acquired territories, and since Palestinian farmers
would typically not have any legal proof of ownership, many of them
were gradually dispossessed of their land.

Daoud’s grandfather, however, made this
difficult for the Israelis because he was an exception to the
general practice. When he purchased this farm in 1916, he took the
trouble to register it, and when the Israelis tried to take it, he
had the documents to prove he owned it.

Nevertheless, since the whole game here
revolves around Israel’s relentless and decades-long attempt to
expel the Palestinians from their land, the authorities did not
give up easily. Eventually, in 1991, they simply declared the whole
area, including the Nassar farm, Israeli state property. Daoud’s
family, naturally, fought this in the courts since they had the
necessary documents to show that this seizure was illegal.

In recent years, the farm has been
prohibited from having any electricity and any water—and that is
still the case today—and all of the structures on the land were
placed under a demolition order, which is still in effect. Israelis
came to Daoud and offered him millions for his land—he refused. One
person simply gave him a blank check and asked him to fill the
amount. Daoud said, “This land is my mother; she is not for
sale.”

He and his family have continued to be
harassed by the Israelis and the nearby settlers while they have
now lived for years deprived of all essential services, yet they
have remained steadfastly devoted to their land, no matter what the
cost, financial and emotional. As Daoud explains, the settlers
twice tried to construct roads through the farm’s property, and
both times they were halted because of the legal actions Daoud’s
family was forced to take—again, at their expense, which seemingly
never ends. And to this day, they are still in danger of losing
their land. Nevertheless, they are convinced that the Israelis will
not succeed.

As we listened to Daoud speak in the cool
confines of the cave, he also told us that he and his family have
now created another kind of bulwark against land confiscation. In
2000, they established what they call a Tent of Nations, an
organization that brings young people from many lands together for
cultural and educational programs of various kinds to facilitate
conflict resolution and reconciliation, and today this program has
received international recognition and support as a result of which
more and more people have learned about Daoud’s family farm and
their efforts both to preserve and share their heritage with
others.

When I was listening to Daoud tell this
story, while in the cave, I was struck by the thought that this
man—and his family and many friends and supporters—represented the
very essence of the resilient and steadfast Palestinian spirit I
had already observed so often on this trip: their dedication to
their land; their determination to maintain it and their way of
life, no matter how much it may require of them; and their
commitment to nonviolent approaches to resolving the long-standing
conflict between themselves and their would-be Israeli occupiers.
Indeed, in Daoud’s vision, there is even and always room for
Israelis themselves under his tent, and when they come in peace, he
would certainly welcome them, too.

If after reading Daoud’s story, you would be
interested to learn more about the Tent of Nations and its
programs, you can go to Daoud’s website: www.tentofnations.org

March 2009

In 1916, my grandfather bought a piece of
land about 19 meters away from the city of Bethlehem where a nice
hill rises about 950 meters above sea level. From that area, you
have a clear view to the west, and you can sometimes see the
Mediterranean Sea from there. My grandfather went with his family
from Bethlehem, and he stayed in a cave, and he started to create a
new existence for his family—for his kids. He wanted for his kids
to have a good future on the land.

He started with his sons to cultivate the
land, to plant trees, and the family used to live in a cave. So
this was for a generation. And later on, my grandfather died, but
before he died, he gave the authority to his children to continue
the work he started. So my father and my uncle grew up with this
land. They continued the work their father began, and later on they
continued planting trees, cultivating the land, and having a very
productive land.

Now, later in the 1930s, after my
grandfather died, my father’s uncle continued the work my
grandfather started. When my grandfather bought the land, he
registered it under the Ottoman Period, so we have papers from the
English Mandate, from the Jordanians, and even after 1967 from
Israel. So this was the story of my family in the cave for
generations.

Now, in the ’50s, my grandmother was sick.
So my father went with her to Bethlehem, where he stayed with her
until she died, and then he came back to the land. He found another
cave, and he stayed there. My uncle stayed in the same cave of his
father until he died in 1987, after living all his life with the
land, and he was married to this land. My father, Bishara (his name
means “the good news”), also died, in 1976, and now the next
generation of my family continues to work the land of my
grandfather, Daher, in honor of whom our farm, Daher Vineyard, is
named.

Now, in 1991, we heard by chance that Israel
had declared the whole area “state land,” and they said that any
Palestinian who claims land should come within forty-five days to
prove it. Many Palestinians don’t have the papers for their land.
We were lucky that my grandfather had registered the land in 1916,
so we were the only family who went to the Military Court and
presented the papers. After the first session, the case was
postponed because the military judge was shocked to see these
papers. Then later on, after a couple of further postponements, the
judge said we need you to survey the land again.