This week I learned what it feels like to be a Palestinian. We set out on a research trip to Nablus and found that nearly every step of the way was punctuated by the deliberate harassment that Palestinians live with every day. At first, our trip was almost thwarted when a bad-tempered Israeli soldier decided to deny me and a friend access to the city at the Huwwara checkpoint. Aptly dubbed by Palestinians as the “Humiliation Place,” the Huwwara checkpoint at the edge of Nablus is known for its aggressive soldiers with nasty manners and tempers to match. It was not a surprise, then, that it was here that a traveler carrying an American passport like myself would get a true taste of how Israeli soldiers of the occupation treat Palestinian civilians. When we reached Huwwara, the soldier in charge, hardly more than a teenager, arbitrarily decided he would not let us through the checkpoint. He gave no plausible reason. Perhaps he was simply “in a mood.” Perhaps it is a deliberate form of psychological warfare. Palestinians suffer regularly from the unanticipated disposition swings of Israeli soldiers who patrol their streets and block their roads. And this week, I did too.
After a lengthy verbal exchange with the soldier, we retreated reluctantly. An hour later, we returned with our own kind of improvised armor. Ironically, the only way we could get by the checkpoint and its foul-tempered guardians was as passengers in an Israeli taxi, in which we passed without a second glance from the soldiers. The stark difference in treatment reminded us once again that, even though we could step briefly into Palestinian shoes, we would never know what it is like to inhabit them permanently. We were American citizens again – albeit Americans slipping through the mountains to a city to which we had just been denied entry by an M-16-bearing military officer – and as such were privileged with much broader rights.
Still, we had not crossed the main checkpoint and so had to resort to a winding trip through the mountains. It was also interrupted – this time by a band of four Israeli soldiers, two of whom were singing as though intoxicated, sitting at the side of the road constructing their own kind of temporary checkpoint – again, arbitrarily. Our taxi driver helped us convince them to let us pass, and finally we reached Nablus safely and proceeded with our original plans. We entered the run-down, battered and dusty Balata Refugee Camp, which we learned is the home to about 20,700 people, none of whom is without a story about how the Israeli occupation has affected their lives.
There is Kefah Abu-Hamadah, age 34, who last year during the Israeli invasions rushed out of her house in the middle of the night to the aid of two Palestinians who lay injured in the street. Without warning, a soldier aimed and shot at her, point blank. Her left arm was struck by the bullet and is now paralyzed. Her daily activities severely debilitated, Kefah told us proudly that if she could do it all over again, she would do the same thing. This is what it feels like to be a Palestinian.
There is the family of Ra’ed Fatah, a vegetable vendor, who used to sell his wares in the center of Nablus every day, until he was killed last year by ordinance delivered from above by the vicious American-made Apache helicopters responsible for so many Palestinian deaths here. He was only 29 years old, and now his three children are fatherless. Just two years old when her father was killed, Aram Fatah announced to her mother that she wanted to go to the “sky and bring him home”. The family struggles without their father, with barely enough food to get by. This is what it feels like to be a Palestinian.
There is An’am Khleb Salmieh, who was at home with her five small children when the Israeli army rolled up to it in their mammoth tanks and started firing. The family was inside when two bombs hit. They survived and ran to the neighbors where they watched the rest of their house crumble under the weight of Israeli army shelling. They were among the 900 people left homeless by Israel’s house demolitions in Balata in spring 2002. As if this wasn’t sufficient, Israeli soldiers violently arrested An’am’s husband, blindfolding him and detaining him without charges for two weeks. With the help of humanitarian aid the house was rebuilt, but today it remains empty – all their worldly goods were crushed by the demolition tanks – and they cannot afford new furnishings. This is what it feels like to be a Palestinian.
There is the family of an Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade leader, who faced disproportionate punishment for his political activity, when Israeli Apache helicopters singled out his house with lasers and then let loose. This particularly Israeli brand of collective punishment left no one in the area unharmed; the suspect’s house was demolished and four houses nearby were also partially destroyed. The effect on the children living there has been incalculable– their grandfather reported that they cry constantly, their school grades have sunk, and they are afraid and nervous. This is what it feels like to be a Palestinian. Extensive
And there is Ashraf ‘Anati, living outside of the refugee camp, who wears the image of the man who was to become his brother-in-law around his neck, keeping the memory of his beloved friend close to his heart. The man in the picture is Nidal ‘Abidaat, who was shot to death by Israeli soldiers outside ‘Anati’s home, after they had cut off the electricity, gas, and water from all the homes in the neighborhood for a week. The soldiers then herded ‘Anati’s eighteen-person family into one room and threatened to shoot anyone if they so much as put a foot out the door. ‘Anati himself was detained at Huwwara detention center and upon release was stripped and forced to walk the five kilometers home naked. This is what it feels like to be a Palestinian.
Leaving Nablus the next day, we had to pass the “Humiliation Place” again. As we approached, we saw three soldiers arguing with a large group of Palestinian men, who they appeared to be detaining or otherwise harassing. It was not a surprise to us when we saw the brutish soldier from the previous day who had denied us entry, yelling loudly among the others. As we passed, I turned back, looked him in the eye, and tossed him a friendly wave. He recognized me immediately and bolted from the group, hustling toward me. Surprised and flustered, he blurted out a rapid succession of questions: “Where did you come from?” “How did you get through?” “What are you doing here?” I looked ahead and kept walking, answering coolly, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m going to Jerusalem.” We walked on and he stood gaping after us. It was a small, sweet moment of victory for us. But the pleasure of that instant was overwhelmed by all the destruction, loss, and heartache suffered by Palestinians in Balata refugee camp, at this checkpoint, and throughout Nablus. The words of a woman living in the refugee camp rang in our ears. When we asked her where she lived, she told us simply, “In hell.” That is what it feels like to be a Palestinian every single day.
Leila Saad is a graduate student at Harvard University at the John F. Kennedy School of Government.
Ramadan Ended! Now What?
Date posted: October 26, 2006
By Dana Shalash for MIFTAH
So today is the third day of Eid Al Fitr that all Muslims worldwide celebrate right after the culmination of the month of Ramadan. Not sure if it’s only me, but Ramadan seems to have lost its glory. Years ago when I was a child, people’s attitudes towards both Ramadan and Eid (festival) were way different than now. Maybe I have grown up to the extent that I see in them nothing but the mere fact that few arrogant relatives come for a visit for a couple of minutes, and everyone just sucks them up.
It has been a gloomy day in deed. Being self-centered often times, I thought that my own family never enjoyed the Ramadan that other people celebrate. But the night prior to the Eid, I went for a drive to Ramallah with my uncle and three sisters, we toured around Al Manara and the mall a bit, and felt the legendary atmosphere. People were happy. That hit me; I am not accustomed to seeing them vividly preoccupied with the preparation for the big “day.”
So I came back home and wrote to all my contacts wishing them a Happy Eid and expressed my astonishment and satisfaction to see promising smiles in the crowded streets of Ramallah. But the sad part was that I knew it was merely fleeting moments and that those smiles would be wiped off soon. Not only have my fears become true, but I was blind. Yes, blind. Or may be I just chose not to see it. May be I wanted to believe that we are actually happy.
Would I miss Ramadan? NO. Not really. It has been made hell this year.
While Ramadan is believed to be the holy month during which people get closer to Allah by fasting from food and drink all day long and focus on their faith instead, I am not pretty sure this was the case with us Palestinians. It was only a drug. Ramadan numbed our pain. We could handle both the Israeli and Palestinian political, economic, and security pressure knowing that the day of salvation was approaching; the Eid. But after the three days elapsed, then what?
Now thousands of Palestinians are waiting for the next phase. It has been seven months now. Seven months, and thousands of the PA employees have not received their salaries. And two months elapsed with millions of students deprived form their right of education. I have three sisters and two brothers who do nothing but stay at home. They have not attended school from the very beginning of this term. It is both sad and frustrating that they have to “do the time” and pay a high price.
Reading the news headlines on the first days of Eid is not healthy at all. It lessens the effect of the drug, and one starts to get sober. Sounds funny in deed, but that was the case.
Few minutes ago, I surfed some of the blogs and came across few Iraqi bloggers writing on both Ramadan and Eid. If the titles did not mention “in Iraq,” I swear I could never tell the difference between Iraq and Palestine. The hunger, misery, constant killing, and lack of security are all Palestinian symptoms.
I am speechless now; I can hardly verbalize the so many conflicting thoughts. Heaven knows how things would be like next Ramadan, but I would not speculate it already. It is not time to worry about it now, other issues are on stake; food, money, and education. Until then, there are a lot of things to sort out.
Dreamless Hebron
Date posted: July 21, 2003
By Leila Saad, for MIFTAH
The kids piled on my lap once they saw that I had a camera. More than an everyday camera, it was digital and possessed the unique ability to display the immediate results of what I was attempting to capture around me. I showed them the last picture I had taken, and they squealed. It was of one of the nine children swarming around me – a handsome, almond-eyed boy facing the camera with a simple, and distinctively sorrowful, expression. He was holding his hand in a gesture that crosses all boundaries of language, politics, geography, and religion: “Peace.”
Mrs. Al-Iwiwi and her husband and nine children live in the center of the Old City in Hebron, and if there is anything they do not experience in abundance, it is peace. What they do have in abundance is violence and harassment – at the hands of the ultra-radical Jewish settlers who have infiltrated this neighborhood as well as the Israeli forces here to protect them.
Mrs. Al-Iwiwi tells us about life here. She has nine beautiful children around her, but that does not assuage the loss of a tenth child. The city was under curfew when Mrs. Al-Iwiwi was ready to give birth, so she could not leave the house to get to the hospital. The ambulance could not reach her either, and her baby was born dead. Just 17 days later, the settlers who live no more than an arms-length away tried to burn down her house. The family has no phone so they shouted out the windows to neighbors for help, and as they ran to the stairs, they passed out from the smoke. On an average day life is simpler, but still Mrs. Al-Iwiwi must insist that her children stay indoors, because the settlers next door have been known to entertain themselves by throwing stones or even shooting at Palestinian children.
Mrs. Al-Iwiwi’s story is unique, but not just for the degree of violence and harassment she and her family experience. It is also unique because hers is one of the few Palestinian families left in the old city. Most others have been pushed out – either by force, by home demolition, by poverty, or by pure exhaustion. Mrs. Al-Iwiwi will not leave. She says staying in their home, on their land, is their form of resistance.
A Hebron street under curfew is desolate.
The largest city in the West Bank after Jerusalem, Hebron is the home to 140,000 residents. Of those, just 450 are Jewish settlers, who are guarded by some 2,000 Israeli soldiers (though they themselves are often already armed to the teeth). In all of the West Bank, settlers number about 200,000 – with another 200,000 in East Jerusalem and 6,000 in Gaza – but there is something unique about the Hebron settlers: Unlike elsewhere, settlers here have positioned themselves in the heart of this Palestinian urban area.
The first Jewish settlers came to Hebron in 1968, shortly after Israeli occupation of the West Bank. As the location of the tomb of Abraham, Hebron was seen by Jewish settlers as a city allocated to them by some kind of divine real estate decree, and they were inspired to start settling when a radical Zionist posted an advertisement in a newspaper inviting “Families or singles to resettle [the] ancient city of Hebron.” At first they settled at the edge of Hebron, and in 1971 this became Kiryat Arba, which is today the home of about 6,000 settlers. Slowly, settlers started to inhabit the Old City, where today they are the source of the worst tensions in perhaps all of the West Bank. The result of Jewish settlement here has been not just tensions but also displacement of Palestinian residents, along with continual, major disruptions to daily life in the form of shop, school, and hospital closures due to strangulating curfews.
Once bustling in the manner of the lively souqs of Cairo, today the Old City is nearly deserted. Almost every shop is shuttered. Yet a few survive, and besides being notable for sporting signs pockmarked with bullet holes, they have few customers. One formerly wealthy restaurant owner points out his establishment to us, now completely stripped of its stove, tables, and chairs. All that remains of his business is a small portable griddle situated at the front door, which he fires up only occasionally for the rare hungry customer who has some spare change to spend.
A butcher recounted his story with a flair for the humorous, making light of his suffering. (We are reminded that laughter is sometimes the only way to face a life so difficult.) He told us he is the most popular man in town. His friends nearby nodded in agreement. Why? Because when a curfew was imposed, he could not reach his shop to sell meat. When it was lifted for a few hours, he would hustle to the shop, chop up the meat, and give it away to his neighbors before curfew was exacted again. This happened over and over, and the butcher’s popularity soared. But what was a boon for his friends spelled ruin for him, and he could not go on. Today, you will find the butcher sitting, like most of the out-of-work shop owners, at the entrance of his shop, passing time near his once-thriving business place. The store is vacant, except for the huge metal meat hooks that hang imposingly above the window. Unadorned, their sharp ends symbolize the starkness of what the Israeli curfew policy has left behind for these Palestinians. We laughed at the story to lighten the moment and to participate in the Palestinian bid to find sweetness in the sad. But the humor of the moment vanished when I later learned that the butcher has leukemia, no access to medical treatment, and a large family to support.
Tired from trudging around in the heat – not to mention that a small ache in my heart had formed during the conversations with these Hebron residents – I was ready to retire to the village of Sa’er, where we would be spending the night. Even that would prove to be not just difficult but also representative of the traumatic effects of the presence of illegal Jewish settlers on Palestinian territory. First we got in a taxi. It left the paved streets of busy, downtown Hebron and onto a bumpy, rocky dirt road. We held on to our seats as we jostled up and down. Then we got out and walked down the same uneven, dusty road for a quarter mile. Here we got another taxi. Then out again and another 10 minutes’ walk of more irregular road. Now we reached our hosts’ car, and from there drove to his home. For us, the trip was inconvenient and moderately irritating. But for the elderly men and women on the same path, it was near impossible. So why did we have to take this complicated route, when our host lived just two kilometers from Hebron? Because the fine, new paved roads of Hebron are not allowed to Palestinians. Only Jewish settlers can drive down these roads.
Hebron boys loiter on an empty street in front of a school that has been closed.
That is not the only problem that an apartheid road system causes. The next day when we found ourselves sitting in the Hebron Governate office, I could not stay focused on the instructive briefing we were receiving; my eyes kept wandering to a figure sitting near us. He was here for help, because an Israeli military order had recently been issued to demolish his home. It is located between two settlements, and plans have been laid to connect them with a road. Of course, the officially stated reason, common to all Israeli act of aggression, was “security.” I didn’t talk to the man, but I’ll never forget the look in his eyes. They were big and glassy and trenched in bags that belied sleepless nights. He was slouched and quiet. He looked beaten.
As we left the desolate streets of Hebron, I silently mourned so much loss – the loss of income for families dependent on shopkeeper’s revenues, the loss of a vibrant economy, the loss of stability and homes, and above all the loss of childhood. The children here are a generation growing up in despair. When we asked them about their lives, they told us about their schools that have been closed, their friends who have been killed by Israeli soldiers, or they did not say anything at all. When we asked children here what they want to be when they grow up, they could not answer. “What is your dream?” we asked them. “We don’t have dreams,” they responded.
Leila Saad is a graduate student at Harvard University at the John F. Kennedy School of Government.
