The refugee and the foreigner

I cannot know the nation of your memory; her history is occupied. Palestine is a name, a just fight, but a human name, ascribed to define not a boundary of earth, but the essence of a people and the home for which they long. There is injustice that I, a foreigner, retain my right to walk upon these sands, while a man expelled does not. Human rights cannot be given, only denied. I am not lucky to have my rights in hand, they are mine, by right, to live and die for. But as your rights are denied, I inherit the responsibility to live and die for them as well. I am a refugee in your Palestine. And like you, I am rooted to her and my blood was spilled into her soil. Perhaps I may come and go as I wish, and perhaps I am a fighter, bound within her memory. The zionist lays claim, binds her in razor wire and punctures her breast with mast and flag. But his presence cannot spoil what will outlast him, and us. When the last of the occupiers is gone, her wounds will heal and she will remember us not by name, but by deed when we were in the company of each other.

Shaden's son

We sipped our coffee and pondered the survived beauty of the city beneath us. Frank's foot rose above venturing ants, hovered undecided on their fate, though he had not begun to consider the implication of ending what he failed yet to recognize as a life. Sa'ed scolded him with the authority of an abrupt poet, the consequences crystalized in that instant. But the poet's voice, halted, could not belie the tenderness of its source.

Memory can scald, inwardly collapsing worlds that condense to unbearable weights bound impossibly within. Legacies are felt with hands, seen on the softened faces caressed by the individual who embodies them. They are carried by the collective, flags relieved in favor of what she gave a generation of sons.

'God willing' is not an expression of doubt, but the sounding of a promise we are being looked after. It is faith, not merely hope, that we will meet on this holy path again, to walk a few more steps together in a changed tomorrow.

-In loving memory of Shaden Abu Hijleh
killed October 11, 2002

The Olive Harvest

Hello! Hello!
Ya Haramiyye!
Allah hu Akbar!

A worn man rises swiftly from a recliner, its muted fabric dusted and torn in the dirt and soil shade of olive trees still alive amidst the discards of this broken city, a remnant orchard boxed in a Rockefeller project.

He’s upon the two women in an instant, pulling at the synthetic burlap of a bag not even half empty. Her old hands are impossibly strong. This woman banished, ventured from the camp. Her hands are rough, as rough as his. Such calluses never relinquish their utility.

He pulls with insistence,
but not violence, his anger tempered by her desperation. His case booms, right but not righteous, not framed within rules worth following. It’s a reverse mugging in Central Park East, after the sun has fallen to earth and burned our homes and skin, everything but the biblical, symbols of hope and promise.

He takes care not to offend this thief. His hands maneuver deftly around her staid grasp. He never touches her, not once, decorum beguiling, colors of our compassionate nature painting the summer faded.

They wind down. He sits and smokes. They sit and listen. In the refuge of stolen provision, his appeals steadily lose bite, a man drowned whose nervous impulses force desultory relent. Kick, spasm and twitch last appeals to the onlookers.

It’s over. He collapsed, defeated and redeemed in his recliner. They, with his scant harvest, up the slope and back to exile.

In returned silence, the police drive slowly past, obligated if not curious. They do not stop.

mourning

I am a concept

you desire

life outside pages

wandering sick streets

gasp smoke

to sear your lungs

cry still conception

to drown your delusion

a single drop will do

what want will not

form clay from stone

trace my contours

as we ponder my colors

beg

for truth

plead this image

this flat form sees

the shape of you

mourning the loss of me

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.”

For Jennifer

An overdue journey guided me briskly through relentless rain, my brown leather trainers soaked and weighted as I leapt across and into murky puddles. Sweet, charcoal smoke climbed upward and away from the burning embers of a determined grill, stolen from an awaiting chimney by heaving drafts, drenched and denied promises of broiled tomato, onion and za’tar.

I drew and held a tentative breath, passed the butcher with averted gaze, straining as a child when witness to his first paraplegic; a slaughtered, skinned body swayed heavily in segments from steel hooks. The butcher scraped a rubber broom across chipped, spotted tiles, pacing methodically in crimson splashed galoshes. Blood spilled onto the black asphalt in tides, swirled through a meandering spectrum of oily rainbows, and found the piled beaches of a construction site. It pulled at the powdery dunes of unmixed cement and wandered lazily on, a brown, silted concoction, between crowded steel bars, briefly floating the rotting skins of discarded vegetables and an empty cigarette pack before disappearing beneath the road.

I pulled the collar of my wool coat around my neck and peered upward through a thin, stinging veil to a dimly lighted window. Cinderblock walls, pocked by Israeli guns, shown dark grey as they slowly absorbed a days old storm. I wrenched my hands from dewy pockets and pushed through the metal door, punctured and ironic, its sharp, rusting bullet holes inviting the chill fury behind me.

I ascended a narrow corridor towards the blaring explosions of an Egyptian action movie and collapsed unto a crushed velvet cushion. In the corner, an elderly man stroked his wiry, metallic beard and kneeled eastward upon a faded rug. Next to me, a boy with Coke bottle glasses squinted intently at a television mounted high on the wall, secretly anticipating the change of channel and hippie-era Speed Racer cartoons during commercial breaks, impossibly tiny feet hanging motionless from his perch on the couch’s edge.

Three cracked mirrors reflected a disguised man, a foreigner’s face hidden beneath squalid black shrubbery, neglected tan curls protruding from beneath a stretched winter cap. I waited, a stranger unto myself, until beckoned to the stiff rose leather of a motorized chair, my dingy jeans wiping oily hair from its surface.

It is here that the ritual and clanship of men transcend nations. This fraternity of artisans lifts itself from the currents of three worlds, pauses solely on its universal day of rest, and invites only those who know the way as Tuesdays dawn.

He scanned the crowded counter. Scissors, an oversized comb, a brush, thick with shorn black hair, a towel to drape over his shoulder, its worn cloth drenched with heavy shaving cream and subtle after shave.

Trust is releasing Western vanities to the mercy of Eastern considerations, without the luxury of language, bound beneath nylon and vicars’ stretched white paper.

It is letting a declared enemy of state brush through your dusty hair; pull through tangles and examine moles cautiously; advise you as a doctor with the concurrence of waiting patrons; cut through American brown amidst Palestinian black; grasp your jaw and tilt your head with rough, steady hands; examine, evaluate, strategize; touch you prone; set a razor blade to your throat and deftly scrape away self neglect; return you to a vaguely familiar self. It is trust that opens wide the heart, without the longing of expectation.

“The radical, committed to human liberation, does not become the prisoner of a ‘circle of certainty’ within which reality is also imprisoned. On the contrary, the more radical the person is, the more fully he or she enters into reality so that, knowing it better, he or she can better transform it. This individual is not afraid to confront, to listen, to see the world unveiled. This person is not afraid to meet the people or to enter into dialogue with them. This person does not consider himself or herself the proprietor of history or of all people, or the liberator of the oppressed; but he or she does commit himself or herself, within history, to fight at their side.” --Paolo Freire

A letter to Parents & Teachers

Dear Parents and Teachers,

"It’s a wonder I haven’t abandoned all my ideals, they seem so absurd and impractical. Yet I cling to them because I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.

It’s utterly impossible for me to build my life on a foundation of chaos, suffering and death. I see the world being slowly transformed into a wilderness, I hear the approaching thunder that, one day, will destroy us too, I feel the suffering of millions. And yet, when I look up at the sky, I somehow feel that everything will change for the better, that this cruelty too shall end, that peace and tranquility will return once more." Anne Frank - July 15, 1944

Her voice was uncontainable. From an attic, as the lights of her captive world flickered and conceded darkness, she preserved her single, beautiful perspective. Its worth is irrefutable, though simple, told through the trembling hand of a fourteen-year-old girl. We would not deny that though her journal lacked the insights of scholars or the repudiation of the Gestapo, it remains in fact an invaluable window into her era.

In our era, we often walk with trepidation into understanding the confusing and heartbreaking world. We shy from topics that challenge our beliefs and burden our confidence. Our sources must be objective, our teachers non-committal, our news balanced. We grasp for “both sides of the story” during minute segments afforded in clipped articles and Katie Couric’s nightly world debriefing.

If a young Rwandan had penned Anne’s diary during that country’s genocide, would her words not possess the same merit? If it had been written by Yolanda King, would we demand of those pages the white voices of Jim Crowe’s South lest her journal be deemed unbalanced and her point of view tainted?

Anne Frank offered the perspective she was capable of providing, her own. Through her words we are gifted the history, love and hope of an individual person. We do not search for “the other side” because her poetry inspires in us the understanding that there were in fact millions of perspectives all around her, striving, struggling, being extinguished. Her life could not be inscribed upon a side of a coin, flipped over to reveal the faces of her tormentors, or those who stood by as her essence was stolen.

During a talk I recently gave to a group of high school students, I asked them to identify someone they know for certain to be biased.

“Ok,” I began, “How about Osama bin Laden?”

“Definitely,” they agreed.

“Can you prove it?”

“He hates America, he’s responsible for 9/11.”

“How do you know that?”

“It’s common fact,” they scoffed, “Everyone knows that.”

“Have you ever met him?” I asked, “How did you discover it was him?”

“Watch the news,” someone chided.

“Ok, fair and balanced. We’re looking for evidence. Let’s say we get all our information about Osama from Bill O’Reilly on Fox News. Is Bill biased?

“Yea,” a few young Democrats laughed, “He loves Bush.” Thoughtfully, a boy added, “It’s clear what he believes about things - abortion, the war in Iraq, terrorism…”

“And that helps you to identify his bias?”

“Sure.”

“So you know things about him, what he thinks, how he feels…What did O’Reilly have for breakfast this morning?” I asked. “I had two cups of coffee, by the way. Can you think of someone else’s bias you might have more evidence of?”

“How about you?” a young Republican erupted.

I winked. “You’re so right and you’re almost there.”

“You’re saying I’m biased?!” he grimaced, his discovery not relieving his frustration.

“I’m saying you know more about yourself than anyone else,” I encouraged. “You have more evidence of your own bias than any other source of information you could ever find. It’s your eyes and your ears you are learning through, and a lifetime worth of experience is how you integrate what you encounter. But that means you’re also the most qualified person in the world to evaluate that bias. Your’s is the only voice on the planet for which you have everything you need to critically analyze. You know where you spent Christmas Eve three years ago and you know what you’re going to do Friday night. Can you tell me the same about Wolf Blitzer?”

Bias need not be a four-letter word. Bias is simply the culmination of our experiences and a pre-consolidation of our understanding. No politician, reporter or teacher is exempt from their perspective, and rightly so. Be wary of the person who claims to possess a coin with the world engraved into opposing halves. Listen with caution when a reporter tells the story of another’s life without giving pause to reconcile you to his own.

As educators, we retain a remarkable possibility, an exercise in honesty, to teach not facts to be remembered, but perspectives to be questioned. If we are to bestow anything, let it be the facility of our students to doubt us, to disagree with what we know and to discover their own truths.

Our endeavor is a risky one. Our method seems absurd and impractical. Our discoveries will be wrought with the discomfort of allowing our beliefs to be challenged and limited by the constraints of our own senses. Rightly so.

Sincerely,


mark turner

Founder, Research Journalism Initiative

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.

Demonstration

1/12/07
From IMEMC and RJI (Bil’in, West Bank) - Approximately 150 Palestinian, Israeli and international demonstrators, accompanied by several journalists participated in a demostration today against the illegal Isreali Annexation Wall in Bil’in.

The procession approached an access point in the Wall and demanded the gate be opened. Residents held pictures of photojournalist Fadi Aruri, (24) of Ramallah, who was shot several times in last Thursday’s invasion of that city. Aruri remains in critical condition in Tel Aviv.

Demonstrators took refuge on the adjacent hill as youth began lobbing stones toward the soldiers. Israeli forces fired tear gas, percussion grenades and rubber-coated steel bullets at the youth, before opening the gate to allow access for two Israeli Border Police units.

Residents and activists lay in the road and were intially successful in preventing the passage of the two jeeps. They were joined by resident Muhammad Ali abu Sadi, (70) after he had been struck repeatedly by soldiers. Abu Sadi suffered exhaustion and collapsed shortly thereafter. After a scuffle in which soldiers attempted to prevent treatment, he was attended to and revived by Bil’in medical relief volunteer Sheik Suliman Yassin. The remaining protesters were beaten and dragged across stones as they were removed from the scene.

Two Israeli Border Police units then pursued Palestinian youths several hundred meters into a residential area of the village, firing tear gas, percussion grenades and rubber-coated metal bullets. Three Border Police Officers attempted to arrest an American activist who retreated as the military approached. The activist surrendured after soldiers fired several rounds of rubber-coated munition at him, though he was not injured. He was forced to his knees and soldiers began binding his wrists when an Israeli videographer interceded. He was released shortly thereafter.

Border Police units retreated toward the access gate in two jeeps, firing tear gas and rubber-coated bullets from rooftop hatches atop the vehicles. Bil’in, located near Ramallah in the West Bank, has lost close to sixty percent of its land to the construction of the Wall and expansion of Modin Illit settlement. Residents here have held similar protests every Friday for nearly two years.


Several people reported injuries, including:

Adib Abu Rahma (35) – beaten with batons
Sameer Suliman Yassin (31) baton injuries to the hand
Wha’il famil nasser (29) baton injuries to the head
Khaled shoukat al Khatib (20) explosive gas bomb to the back
Ashraf Muhammad Jamal Khatib (27) rubber coated bullet in the leg
Zuhdia ali al Khatib (40) rubber coated bullet in her leg
Motassem ibrahim abu Rahma (20) rubber coated bullet in the leg
Associated Press Journalist burned by percussion grenade
Jonothan Pollack, Israel (25) rubber coated bullet in the stomach
Sarah, international volunteer (25) explosive gas bomb to the shoulder


For more information, please contact Abdullah Rahman, international volunteer coordinator for the Popular Committee Against the Wall and Settlements in Bil’in at: (972) 054 725 8210.

The Mall

In Tel Aviv there is a place that looks like home. It’s a mall, full of movies and music and sports wear and panty shops. There is a sign, in Hebrew, on a window in a pizza shop that reads, “Delivery driver wanted, apply after military service.” Most citizens are required to serve in the Israeli army, but everyone here knows that. Palestinians, on the other hand, are forbidden.

There are scores of Palestinians in Tel Aviv who have come seeking work. They pick fruit and pave roads. They paint walls and collect garbage. This mall, far from the checkpoints and curfews, where food is thrown away and teens scurry about coveting fashions, is where Apartheid manifests. It’s hidden away, but buried deep beneath, are the Wall, the blockades, the assassinations and the colonies. And every so often, Apartheid peeks through to the surface, in the form of a sign, on a pizza shop window, that translates, “Delivery driver wanted. Arabs need not apply.”

Fadi

We waited outside the critical care ward of a Tel Aviv hospital while doctors inside prepared him. The doors swung open mechanically, controlled by a switch behind the nurses’ desk. On a stretcher, covered by a thin sheet, they wheeled him out of the unit. He had been shot in Gaza three days before, caught in the crossfire of an emerging civil war. Dead at the age of twenty. Moments later, our friend Abu Fadi came through the doors holding a pair of mint green smocks for us to wear.
His son was shot by the Israeli Army during Thursday’s incursion into Ramallah. An undercover special forces unit had attempted to capture or kill a man from Kt’ab al Aqsa, the armed wing of the Palestinian Fateh party. Fadi lay in an induced coma for five days, struggling to survive three bullet wounds. He is a young photographer working in Ramallah, and a friend of the activists who work in Bil’in Village.
“His color today is not good,” his father worried from the doorway. “Try to talk to him.” Nadav and I leaned in toward the bed, afraid to touch him. His body is covered in soiled bandages. Two nights before, they removed one of his kidneys, now he is fighting a severe liver infection. Thick tubes reach down through his mouth and into his chest. They are taped awkwardly into his mouth to hold them in place as the respirator clicks back and forth, pushing air into his lungs and then waiting for it to release slowly and laborously out.
“Say something to him,” his father says. I don’t know where to look. Can he hear me?
Say something.
His neck is craned in my direction. Nadav’s mint green cover is coming untied. I mended it earlier when he accidentally tore the string from the papery fabric.
Say something.
If I was laying in this bed I would want to hear the sounds of encouragement, the sounds of friends telling me I look good, the doctors say I’m going to be fine.
Say something.
I watched the invasion on Al Jazeera. The picture kept jumping and skipping from the shitty signal. That always happens on Al Jazeera.
Say something.
My mouth is dry. My wallet is still in my pocket. My passport already looks old. I should find a better place to keep it. Stop fidgeting. Why are my hands so clammy? Open your mouth,
Say something.
I want to touch him. If I can’t talk I can at least let him know there is someone here. I don’t know you, Fadi. Nadav, tell him I want to help him. Tell him he can trust me.
Say something.
I want to lay next to you in that bed. We can just lay there together and wait for this stranger to go away. Give our friends a chance to be comforting. They speak Arabic.
Say something.
Sing. Tell me a joke. Tell me anything. Put your dirty hands on my face and let me feel you here. I can’t see you but I can hear. I can’t speak, it’s these tubes, I’m not asleep. I’m trying to show you a sign. It’s not the respirator, I just moved my leg. I know you’re here.
I said nothing. I escaped the room. I walked out of that hospital, that prison. Abu Fadi is not allowed to follow. He is illegal in Tel Aviv, no permits, no permission. His son is struggling to survive and he is a prisoner there until Fadi and he go back to the West Bank.
The elevators are controlled remotely. Guards patrol the gated compound. Abu Fadi will sleep in the Fonduq downstairs with the parents of the others from the West Bank and Gaza. They cannot leave either. None of them are legal in Israel. Each wounded person is allowed a single relative to stay in the hospital until they can be deported back to the places they were shot. Abu Fadi will see the mother of the murdered boy they just wheeled past me. He will comfort her. He will console and empathize. He will do what today I cannot. He will say something.

Arrival to Nablus

I arrived to Nablus today and took a service (shared taxi) from the checkpoint toward the city, getting out at the top of the hill above Balata Refugee Camp. I walked down the steep road from Jerusalem street, past the pungent cattle stable and made my way toward the main entrance and market. I headed straight for the restaurant of my good friend Muhamad, and our happy reunion marked the first of many throughout the day.
The most significant change I noticed in the journey from Jerusalem was the ease by which the Israeli military directs and controls the flow of Palestinian movement. This does not mean that Palestinians were free to move about, but rather that droves of Israeli soldiers, roving patrols and makeshift (bulldozed) roadblocks have been largely replaced by permanent checkpoints, the Annexation Wall and its many watchtowers. Palestinians wishing to enter Nablus walked the long, fenced corridor through Huwarra Checkpoint just south of the city unimpeded; those wishing to leave stood motionless in line.
From Nablus, men between the ages of 20-40 years are uniformly banned from exiting, save the few who are able to obtain temporary permits to enter Israel in search of work. Even then, those who are able to reach Israel must obtain a work permit through the endorsement of the trade unions there. For many who choose to leave their families in favor of employment, the decision to work within Israel is distasteful and made of desperation.
The isolation imposed on Palestinian population centers in the West Bank, and Nablus in particular, in combination with an international economic embargo has left this once thriving city in poverty. Work is extremely scarce, unemployment endemic, and hope for relief the only currency readily available.
A functioning Palestinian Authority (PA) was difficult to identify in Nablus three years ago, now it is non-existent. The militias are the only visible remnant. Men from Ktab-al Aqsa (the military wing of Fateh) and the military arm of Hamas passively patrol the streets of whichever areas they enjoy support. They provide no real public service in the traditional sense of governmental security forces. Though these militias were founded under the auspices of organized resistance to the Occupation, now they are largely biding time.
Since the beginning of the Second Intifada, Israel has been relatively successful in its efforts to dismantle organized, armed resistance. Thousands have been imprisoned or killed, and six years on, the will to fight has greatly diminished. What is left of the militias is reluctant to engage Israeli troops when they invade Palestinian areas to make arrests or destroy infrastructure. If either side expends too much of its resources in such fighting, it will be that much weaker if a dominant party emerges from the current Palestinian political crisis. In this vain, they have turned the guns on each other, and many believe the division to be so deep, that if Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is successful in pushing through new elections, the result could be civil war.
Their rivalry has intensified since the international boycott of the Hamas led PA, and many feel that Abbas’ continued dealings with Israel to be nothing short of appeasement, even accusing Fateh of deliberately sabotaging Hamas’ ability to govern. In turn, critics of Hamas point to an unreasonable stubbornness and an inviable approach to democratic governance. American endorsement of Abbas is seen by some to be an attempt to stoke these tensions.
But the real pressures are largely external, led by Israel and the United States in their efforts to coerce Palestinian cooperation.
Cessation of international financial aid has devastated the Palestinian economy. In Nablus, once busy and crowded marketplaces are closed. People here are becoming ever more desperate to sustain themselves, worried they may be headed toward a situation akin to Gaza, with its humanitarian crisis of unprecedented scale in Palestine.
The lack of activity has encouraged most of the international activists to seek out new communities where they can be more effective. Groups such as the one in Bil’in near Ramallah conduct weekly demonstrations against the Annexation Wall cutting through that village’s land. In Balata Camp, I was struck by my ability to blend in. Hardly a single child came running to ask, “What’s your name?!” and I sensed the lack of an organized and consistent team of international activists here had left its mark. I plan to visit with several Nablus-based NGO’s and evaluate the situation here before I make a decision about the best location to base RJI’s activities.

From Askar Refugee Camp, Nablus, West Bank