Tears of Palestine
I haven’t been able to cobble together three words about the current situation in Israel and Gaza. All I can access is a writhing knot of agony and powerlessness in my stomach and heart. So I’ve decided to share something I wrote 20 years ago about the two months I’d spent in the West Bank late 2002. While there, I was with a group accompanying Palestinians in their daily activities, bearing witness to and attempting to alleviate the situation there at the time (tear-gassing of schools, curfews, arrests, settler harassment of olive pickers, the building of the wall, stalling of medical workers at checkpoints…).
I know the situation is complex. My paternal grandparents were Latvian Jews whose journey to the United States included escaping the Russian pogroms in Latvia, and then fleeing from Manchester, England, at the beginning of World War I. However, I wanted to provide one perspective, and perhaps a longer view of what is happening now. I’ve left the footnotes in as they were at the time.
Tears of Palestine
July 2003
Tears of Palestine drip from my memory — a slow trickle of sorrow meandering down the hallways of my heart. The outline of a capsized olive tree bleeding earth from gnarled, naked roots takes shape around the corners of my mind, drawing the way for a torrent of images to come crashing through me.
It is the pain and fear contorting the face of the pregnant woman as she waits for Israeli soldiers to decide where her baby will be born. It is the seeds of violence and despair taking root in the soft mind of the Palestinian child whose first words include “soldier,” “tank,” and “gun.” It is my fingers going numb from the steel grip of a 7 year-old boy terrified of the tank aiming its canon at us as we walk past. It is the tarnished, broken dreams of the young girl waiting for the bulldozers to come demolish her home. It is the dark shadows and spidery lines of worry dancing around the eyes and forehead of the soft-spoken young man who goes to bed each sleepless night knowing that the Special Forces are after him. It is the red, green, white and black of the Palestinian flag wrapped around the body of a 20 year-old who left his house at the wrong time. It is the crumpled shape of the old man whose heart collapsed from the effort of leaving the ambulance to limp around the roadblock. It is the helmet, machine gun, and bullet-proof uniform of the 18 year-old soldier who fears the 7 year-old child gripping my hand.
It is the silence of the birdcage that shelters the carcasses of bullet shells, sound bombs, and teargas canisters that crashed upon the shores of the village’s quietude[i]. It is the sound of the sergeant’s laughter as he throws the teargas into the small house and closes the window on the family trapped inside by the call to curfew. It is the disembodied voice of the loudspeaker splitting the night air to announce that the house is surrounded and all the men are being taken away. It is the relentless metal clatter of the bulldozer’s teeth ripping into the fertile land which will soon be ravaged by a vast expanse of concrete that will isolate the village from its livelihood[ii]. It is the bruised and damaged fruit spilling from the wooden cart knocked over in a military raid that sent 30 people to the hospital on the eve of Eid al Fitr[iii]. It is the vegetables rotting at the checkpoint of a starved city under siege. It is the vestiges of a village abandoned by inhabitants worn down by settler attacks on their livestock, olive groves, generator and water tank[iv].
It is the checkpoint gamble — the roll of the soldier’s mood that determines the outcome of the Palestinians’ day: whether the mother will reach the market, the daughter will get to work, the son will be arrested, the father will be detained, the house keys will be confiscated, the professor will teach her class, the farmer will sell his produce, the patient will receive treatment, the water and food supplies will get through, the ambulance will be fatally delayed…
It is the sound bombs and light flares punctuating the deadly incursion of bombs, tanks, F-16s and helicopter gunships that paralyze the crippled cities for weeks on end. It is the spreading web of curfews, bypass roads, checkpoints, road blocks, border controls, police surveillance, and aerial patrols that slowly squeeze the life out of the territories. It is the deep green of the pine trees, the sparkling turquoise of the Olympic swimming pool, and the rust-colored roofs of the whitewashed homes in the government subsidized, heavily guarded Israeli settlements built on illegally confiscated Palestinian land. It is the thirsty animals, the hills defaced by settler arson and bulldozer sabotage, the villages isolated from each other by the expanding net of settler roads forbidden to Palestinians, and the dusty rubble of demolished houses that lie in the wake of the gleaming settlements. It is the age-old battle over land, water and resources wrapped in the age-old pretense of religion.
It is the political that becomes personal that becomes political as history inexorably repeats itself.
It is the Israeli mother whose child died from a Palestinian attack in a Kibbutz that was advocating for peaceful relations with its West Bank neighbors. It is the Palestinian father whose son died in his arms as he tried to shield him from the flying bullets. It is the American mother whose daughter’s martyred face is plastered near the site of the home she tried to save from demolition. It is the smile of the optimistic teenager from Balata camp[v] turned to stone as he watched his favorite cousin die in his arms. It is the Tel Aviv bus stop where the young woman would have exploded with her boyfriend if she hadn’t been late meeting him. It is Palestinian/Israeli relationships reduced to suicide bombers on one side, soldiers and settlers on the other. It is my Israeli friend struggling to make ends meet in an economy devastated by its military spending, settlement subsidies, and the impact of the Intifada. It is the West Bank’s rampant unemployment, minimal per capita income, and exorbitant cost of rebuilding its shattered infrastructure[vi].
It is the normalization of violence and prejudice that fragments the psyche into a kaleidoscope of fear, mistrust, and hatred.
It is the trembling lips of the Keffiyed leader who pawned the interests of his people for his own political survival. It is the ghosts of Sabra and Shatila haunting the tainted words of the President who demands others to be accountable. It is the blank check of the U.S. government that sustains and fuels the Israeli military[vii] in the cheapened name of democracy, while domestic budget cuts have ripped American social services to shreds. It is the U.N conventions that demand withdrawal from the territories, gathering dust in the annals of history. It is the hypocritical policies of neighboring Arab countries proclaiming unity while trading solidarity for profit. It is the doubletalk of the well-oiled propaganda machine that distorts the truth and dehumanizes the “other.” It is the silence of the complicit media that choose to ignore an Israeli peace demonstration of over 60,000 people. It is the NGO time, money, energy and hope rapidly dwindling from the futility of building and re-building amidst the shifting quicksand of military invasions. It is the police protecting the contract workers, the army guarding the settlers, and the activists standing between them and the teenagers throwing stones.
It is a perverse game of cat and mouse where the decks are stacked and the outcomes predetermined, but every player is a loser to the greedy expansion of the state.
It is the laughter, the open doors, the generosity that transcends despair. It is the unbreakable spirit of the occupied, the insatiable desire to survive. It is the courage of the young Israeli soldier who faces multiple sentences and social ostracism because he refuses to serve in the territories. It is the pungently sweet smell of crushed olives permanently imprinted on my senses. It is the hauntingly beautiful pre-dawn call of the muezzins as we patrol the village unwinding from a tense sleep of fear and anticipation. It is the energy, joy, and hope that courses through the limbs of the young dabke[viii] dancers. It is the sun-bathed hills dotted with olive and citrus trees — the moments of intense peace relished for their scarcity.
It is my guilt at being considered brave for non-violent acts of resistance that brand others as terrorists. At paying taxes that help fund the atrocities I witnessed and experienced. At being able to leave, to forget, to be heard, to be free, to plan my day, to make choices, to study, to work. To explore the world, to marry without threat of curfew or bombs, to give birth in a hospital, to watch my children grow up freely, to send them to the college of their choice, to get old and retire in peace… To cherish — from the safety of my living room — the fading memory of a capsized olive tree bleeding earth from gnarled, naked roots.
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[i]One family that I visited kept remnants of bullet shells, sound bombs and teargas in the birdcage outside of their house.
[ii] Jayyous is a village near Qaliqilya that is 6 kilometers inside the green line and will lose 75% of its agricultural land — including approximately 20,000 olive trees, 50,000 citrus trees, 20 greenhouses and 7 water wells — to the “separation wall” that will eventually stretch along 230 miles of the West Bank (source: Chris McGreal, “The £1m-a-mile wall that divides a town from its own land of plenty,” The Guardian, November 26, 2002).
[iii] The celebration that marks the end of Ramadan. Families visit each other and exchange sweets and gifts for the children. The day and night-long raid in question occurred in Tulkarem, preventing people from buying food and gifts.
[iv] All the inhabitants of the village of Yanoun, which lies South of Nablus and has a population of c. 100, left in October 2002 due to increasing attacks by Israeli settlers, including on their generator — leaving them without electricity or running water. The presence of Israeli and later international peace activists enabled the return of about half of the villagers.
[v] A Palestinian refugee camp in Nablus. There are over 1.5 million internally displaced Palestinians in Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza strip.
[vi] The unemployment rate in the West Bank is 60% (versus 10% in Israel), the per capita income is $1,700 ($17,000 in Israel), and the damage caused by the Israeli occupation to Palestinian infrastructure in Spring, 2002 amounted to an estimated $350 million (source: New Internationalist, issue 348, August 2002: http://www.newint.org).
[vii] Israel receives the largest amount from the United States — 1/3 of the US’ foreign aid spending, adding up to over $84 billion since 1949 (source: http://www.palestinemonitor.org/factsheet/US_Aid_to_Israel.htm).
[viii] Dabke is a traditional Middle Eastern dance characterized by the stamping of the feet that gave the dance its name.