that look that look

My mother once said that when a man most needs help, he is least able to accept it. I looked on as my parents went their separate ways along inevitably not so separate paths until a tolerable semblance of separateness overcame the ten little hands stretched inexorably across the void, fingers grasping, sweating, connecting, if only for parents’ desperate memories of what was best for them, that is to say, keeping it together for the kids’ sake, until finally, destiny and odds caught pace, content to release a mother determined to defy the old, “Babies having babies” addage, but not, as it came to pass, the father. Her path inclined up, but not gently, toward greener pastures, while his dropped sharply in another direction, jutting into a concrete maze of single room apartments for the forever single, cordially proximate to the local, not so friendly neighborhood liquor and lifestyle store. On my hilltop perch, squinting through the haze to the second of these paths, I watched as my father become a grandfather.

I’ve seen the look of a man in desperate need but lacking the requisite of request, eyes sunken beneath wrinkles and time and reality, the betrayal of his faded former self, too tired to grasp at the edges of the socket and pull to freedom. The body distended and bleeding inside. The wilted strength of a man both young and old. The steps faltering more than once on that long, lonely walk to the other side. The quiet, reflective sort of sadness hiding in those deep eyes, chaos boiling behind but never boiling over.

A prisoner can slam his fists into white painted walls until they streak crimson, but when his voice ceases to resonate and fails to echo even unto itself, when the guards fall silent beyond the limits of doubt they remain at all, when the prisoner knows he is alone, when crimson becomes oxblood becomes black, only the look, that look that look remains.

I see it reflected in eyes that dig into me and ask without asking what’s wrong, where have you been, you look tired, are you ok, what’s the matter what’s the matter. I was asked twice today why Balata. Why would I pick that place, those nights, those sleepless nights, the gunfire that can’t startle a response no matter how hard it tries, the soldiers, the spotlights, the burning homes, the listless, the shadeless, the steel bars over shattered glass, the look my eyes earned there, the price they paid.

My first answer was automatic. I have to try harder, have to live harder to have the right to speak about this life I’m only visiting when I decide finally to leave it. I have to bleed and burn. I have to earn it. The hills of this valley are too close. I’d see the flash, count the seconds, curse the thunder.

My second answer was quieter. This city is a grandfather, he breathes and laughs and mourns. If you stay the winter, you will admire his best suit, a pressed starched shirt and tie, enjoy his knaffe and Turkish bath, smile to the smile of an unassuming man obliged to welcome a guest and shelter him from the rain.

Stay the spring, and between the city’s mountains adorned white, against backdrops of deep green and birth, you will hear the crack and scream of his enemy’s bullets. You will see the balaclava clad stalk its ancient seams. You will leave a wise man.

Stay the summer and you will know his grandsons’ rage. A hot wind will drape Gulf dust across the city. Stare to the gale and it will pull your tears from their corners, evaporate and abscond with them before they are called upon to fall. His family will reveal itself to be families, the colors of their masks will emerge blue and red and black. As habibis become malak zelemehs and welcomes become where have you beens, your eyes will begin their retreat. Slowly, steadily, defensively, instinctively, less sure of the for sures.

You will stand halted on a path that was so recently familiar so recently rising, as he sets you off his shoulders and acends to your own. His handshake will become an embrace, a gift and curse. His shaking arms will tighten as you lay hot against his woolen jacket of patchwork and torn, empty pockets. Pass the threshhold of cologne and the sweet and sour odor of a tired man will soak through your salt and rust skin. Feel the weight of his love and know you are family and family is forever. Relent as he pulls tighter. That is the choice you made. This is the changing of the season. To accept him is to accept his past and his father’s past, his children, their tragedies, their graves, his enemy, his dreams, his shattered dreams. Quiet your voice, silence your objection. Put your head to his frail, undying chest and listen, listen for the first time, to his heart still beating within.

This city heaves with collective strength. Breathes in as one, exhales as one. The air is shared between so many, the weight, the weight. It closes in on the pharaoh, unstoppable, unyielding. Quiet your voice, silence your objection. Listen to his heart, still beating within. Do not leave him alone. The fall is near.

Human Shields

Apr 14, 2007 – Nablus

During a recent raid on the West Bank city of Nablus, Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) operating in the Sheikh Munis neighborhood surrounded a house and began demolishing it, though the man they had come to arrest was not present. Below the scene, on the main road from Huwarra Checkpoint toward Balata Refugee Camp, soldiers in armored vehicles patrolled in an effort to prevent residents and journalists from accessing the area. Soldiers fired tear gas, percussion grenades and rubber-coated ammunition as local youths responded to the incursion by throwing stones.

As a young man passed a military humvee, soldiers reached out and began attempting to pull him into the vehicle. The boy protested and was soon joined by second man who spoke with the soldiers in an effort to secure his release. Subsequently, both men were made to stand in front of the humvee to discourage the stone throwers. The incident was caught on tape by a human rights activist and has set off a fresh round of intense media scrutiny into the use of human shields by the Israeli Occupation Forces.

Sam Neil, of the Research Journalism Initiative, a human rights organization based in the West Bank, filmed the incident and was shocked by the international reaction.

“I’m surprised by the debate this footage has sparked,” said Neil. “The international community is treating this as if there is a chance the Israeli military might be using human shields. There is no doubt they use human shields, and have as a standard practice for a very long time.”

The use of human shields has long been forbidden by international law under the Fourth Geneva Convention, and the practice was even banned by Israel’s own supreme court in an Oct, 2005 ruling. The decision forbids using civilians for military purposes even if they have agreed to do so, as the dramatic imbalance of power in such situations renders genuine consent impossible to obtain. In an affidavit presented by Adallah, an Arab Israeli human rights organization, an Israeli reservist admitted, "No civilian would refuse a 'request' presented to him at 0300 by a group of soldiers aiming their cocked rifles at him." Despite the clear requirements of the court rulings, Israeli forces have routinely violated human rights law and continue to employ civilians during military operations.

Often, the practice can be far subtler than firing over the shoulders of a captive. By confiscating Palestinians’ identity cards, Israeli soldiers are able to detain civilians at length during military incursions. Palestinians accosted by soldiers without ID are immediately arrested. Said Neil, “I’ve personally witnessed Israeli soldiers using human shields in various capacities nearly a dozen times since 2003. I’ve seen soldiers detain adults with their children for hours, forcing them to sit beside military vehicles for their IDs to be returned while soldiers conduct house searches and other operations.”

“One of the fundamental problems is the requirement for video proof of such activities. The West dismisses victims’ testimony immediately. The dismissal is racist and endemic.”

During Israel’s February 2007 invasion into Nablus, human rights organizations documented several incidents in which the IOF forced Palestinian civilians, including children, to serve as human shields during search operations. The Research Journalism Initiative submitted a filmed interview with eleven-year-old Jihan Tahdush to the Israeli Human Rights group B’Tselem, in which she recounted how soldiers had kidnapped her and forced her to lead them into neighboring homes.

In her testimony to B’Tselem, Tahdush said, “I went down the steps leading to the neighborhood. The soldiers walked behind me. The soldier had his weapon aimed in front of him. He said to me, "Slowly, slowly, don't be scared, we're with you."

During the invasion, an Associated Press television crew managed to film Israeli soldiers forcing 24-year-old Sameh Amira to lead them into homes of suspected resistance fighters. The rare footage ignited widespread international outrage over the practice. The Israeli military says it has launched an inquiry, though without a thorough, independent investigation, such an inquiry is inadequate.

“The army launching its own investigation is equivalent to a company conducting its own IRS tax audit,” said Neil. “It is time that the international community hold Israel responsible for its disregard of human rights law.”

For its part, the IOF has released a statement that it will investigate the most recent incident, and that the commanding officer, whose name was not released, has been suspended from operational duties. Palestinian Information Minister Mustafa Barghouti dismissed the announcement.

"They are treating it as an isolated incident," he said. "The problem is systematic and ... they (troops) continued the practice despite the (Supreme) Court order," he said.

Sam Neil is an activist with the Research Journalism Initiative in Nablus. He can be contacted at ripplescross@yahoo.com.

www.ResearchJournalismInitiative.net

Throwing Stones on Google Earth

At this very moment, a corporate imaging satellite is circling Earth in Orwellian orbit, spying the surface and publishing our photos in the grandest of larceny. We fall from Sputnik onto our own roofs, spot our cars, twist our bodies and spread our arms to catch the wind like wounded birds, pull back on air and howl recklessly in screaming descent to the safety of swimming pool suburban splashdowns.

If I looked better in black, I’d vote anarchist. But I like the way Google Earth makes the world feel smaller. I plot fantastically on the White House, hunt nukes in North Korea and prowl African plains in successive instants, grip Sumatra with Mickey Mouse kid gloves, spin the globe East, sail back to Denver and hover over my girlfriend’s apartment. If I had money, an ill-fated illusion I’m only now coming to terms with, I’d upgrade my membership to this planetary community, low angle a live shot and peer through her window to see if my clothes still pile the floor. As a freeloader, though, the picture simply goes flat in an awkward reminder that intimacy comes only to those willing to pay the cost. For now, I’m contented to know that I’m as far from home as I can get, drinking a beer with my friend Faraj in a Palestinian refugee camp.

Unlike me, Faraj didn’t choose Balata Camp. He came with his family from their own camp in Jordan just as the Intifada broke out. At a rally against the newly erected and now infamous Huwarra checkpoint, he bought his residency with a bullet to the hip and the legitimacy that blood on the street affords the foreign. A year and a half later, he was in an Israeli prison for harboring wanted men. Now, desperate to return home to his family, he’s stranded, a secret evidence security risk. Out of one prison and into another.

His friends call him Urdani, (Jordanian) and though he’s Palestinian through and through, I call him Ajnabi. It means ‘foreigner,’ and though it’s not intrinsically derogatory, there remains something harmlessly disparaging to be consistently addressed as an outsider. I would know.

Like a lot of the foreign volunteers here, I find myself embroiled in ceaseless effort to fit in and shed my strangeness. I smoke local cigarettes in harsh quantities and burn successive pots of Arabic coffee, an acquired art for which I have an obvious learning disability. I like that Faraj tells me straight when I’ve blown another attempt. I appreciate his teasing and the look on his face that assures me that although I am still ajnabi, in his flat, that’s a good thing.

Technically, you’re never really alone in a West Bank refugee camp. Twenty-five thousand people share a single square kilometer of cinder block oblivion. Narrow alleys jag across each other, kids pause marbles to pelt strangers in playful trauma, clothes drip from Little Italy’s memory and garbage smolders in the blank spots. It’s an incongruous sort of loneliness to wander the crowd without your friends, your shows, your jokes.

My speech becomes a silly aberration of subconsciously broken grammar. It’s the next best thing to actual Arabic, but regression nonetheless. "I live here since before three months," and so forth, peppered with ‘yanis’ in place of the ums… and proven phrases like Esh Ekbeer! (What’s up big guy!) These make people laugh, but I don’t have to do that with Faraj; he gets it. He gets me. There’s a reason the foreigners find him. We make him happy. Maybe we remind each other of home. But we leave, as foreigners do, one by one, uncertain if we will be blessed Israel’s permission to return. “I become don’t care,” Faraj says. He’s grown used to being left behind by friends, many forever, one by one. Our friends from California look at him, puzzled, and I laugh because to me, he makes perfect sense.

When I start to sleep through the gunfight nights and my dreams turn to television and Chinese food, I turn to my good friend Google Earth. Faraj and I spin the planet and look for his mother’s home, buried in a camp four times Balata’s size, somewhere near the airport between Amman and Zarqa. After seven years, it takes a few minutes to find his way back. He missed his sister’s wedding. He missed a lot of things.

We sail together over the Atlantic, to Colorado, to my mother’s home in Highlands Ranch, where white flights flourish and transplanted trees struggle through foreign soil. Manicured streets wind snaking in successive half circles toward a cul-de-sac at the bottom of the hill. As we fall from heaven toward suburbia, I brace for gasping disbelief at the size of our house. A British girlfriend toured our mansion once, sickened by splendor and awed by a garage door that lifted in magical intuition upon our arrival. Faraj was strangely comfortable with its appearance.

“They’re all in a circle, man. Like big family.” I admitted that of the seven houses within earshot of my mother’s home, I new the name of only one person, Max, the black guy, our own ajnabi. “The houses are so close together,” he said.

“Faraj, you’re a Palestinian. You’re telling me our houses are too close together?” He laughed. “You know,” I said, “people that live in glass refugee camps shouldn’t throw stones.”

Paper Bags

My mother is afraid to go alone into her own basement. As a girl, three brothers waited patiently for her to descend the carpeted stairs of their parents’ home, hidden in the darkness. As she groped nervously for the light switch, they prepared their boyish attacks. Her few years had already taught my mother through arduous repetition what lay ahead, yet despite her brothers’ constancy, in each startling detonation of an air-filled paper bag, terror emerged anew, embedding itself deep within her psyche. Her burgeoning confidence betrayed, even into adulthood she remains trapped within pervasive readiness. This is the sound of a low-altitude sonic boom wrought by an American built F-16 fighter plane.

In the activity center, I joined a grammar school dance and drama class. Between laughter and applause, hand-in-hand I was ushered about, clung to by small fingers with sure grips. Children climbed into my lap, wrapped their arms around my shoulders and recited their names excitedly. Unable to be close enough, cheek-to-cheek they whispered to me their brief histories and offered gag candy with spring loaded rubber beetles glued to sticks of gum. Diminutive dancers fumbled the steps of the Dabke, unwilling to shift their gazes, beaming eyes lavishing the delights of being watched. They took proud and eager turns introducing me to dead older brothers, cousins, fathers – tiny photographs tied with shoelaces to their necks.

We wake throughout the night to deafening percussions, windows rattling, pressure pounding against our chests and clapping our ears. Silence. Then in thunderous waves, wraiths shake the cinderblock walls and torture our wary solitude. Babies cry, children wet beds. Kids peer over dusty windowsills, searching the sky for the fading blue afterburners of jets long since passed. We flinch but internally, terribly revived, then resheathe our bodies beneath readiness and sink trembling back to sleep.

The soldiers came last night for Fadi’s older brother. Amidst a barrage of stun grenades and automatic gunfire, he took refuge inside a partially destroyed building. They attacked the structure with an American built armored bulldozer, its throaty diesel engine heaving as steel tracks cackled laborously over the asphalt. M16 assault rifles cracked sharp brass rounds through shattering concrete, severely wounding him in the abdomen as he made his escape. The hours-long operation began on the street below my window, less then thirty meters from where I slept. I awoke only when a sonic boom shook the camp just before sunrise.