You were born in this house of stone, perched on the edge of the hill overlooking a valley of olive trees and, just beyond the next set of hills, the desert. Your father was born in the same house. You brought your bride to live here, and your children are growing up in this same stark landscape, under the same fiery sun that is burning into us today as we stand on the edge of the hill. You, however, may not exist.
You carry a West Bank identity card, not a Jerusalem resident’s card, though the village was annexed to Jerusalem two weeks after the Six Day War. This is because at that time the village Mukhtar had his house in Um At-Tala’, a little ways to the east; so the army registered all the families of the village as West Bank residents of Um At-Tala’. What difference did it make? All the villages of the area were settled during the nineteenth century by Bedouins from the Dehamra tribe. The same families are spread over these brown-green hills in village after village—Al-Khass, Um Tuba, and several others. The intrusion of an Israeli bureaucrat in 1967, writing things down, must have seemed a minor, evanescent event. Life went on.
Of course, all requests for municipal services from Jerusalem—water, electricity, sewage disposal, schools—were rejected over the years. The municipality would sometimes claim simply that “the village does not exist.” So the village got its water and electricity from Bethlehem, and that was fine. What difference did it make?
You were not, however, allowed to build a new house in this nonexistent village. In 1992 the Ministry of Interior notified all the villagers that they were living within the boundaries of Jerusalem, a part of the city. Thus every time someone applied for a building license, the application was rejected. Standard practice whenever a Palestinian living in Jerusalem wants to build.
Things happened: the Oslo agreements, the return of Arafat, the Al-Aqsa Intifada. At first they impinged relatively lightly on the lives of the 200 villagers. More menacing was the building of a vast, and spectacularly ugly, Israeli settlement of stone and concrete at Har Homa, just three kilometres to the south—on stolen Palestinian land.
Then, one day in March, 2003, an Israeli man calling himself Dvir turned up. He was, he said, a representative of the Ministry of Defense—or, possibly the Interior Ministry; the story was not very stable. Anyway, it was a lie. He was a freelancer, a scout sent to sniff out lands that could be taken by Israel. A Border Police patrol came with him into the village. He spoke of the great Wall that was going up to the east of Nu’aiman. If you are prepared to leave now, he said—to relocate to somewhere on the other side of the Wall-- he might be able to organize some kind of compensation. If you wait, you will get nothing. In fact, you will die, like a goat without water. Jerusalem does not recognize your claims to this hill or these fields. You were never here.
How is it that in such dark situations there is never a dearth of Dvirs, dependably eager to lend a hand to the cruelty?
Now the Wall is nearly built—we see its wide, violent swathe, a giant V cutting off the village from its hinterland. What is worse, because the villagers all carry West Bank identity cards, they are now officially illegal aliens—living in their own homes. Their land has been annexed to Jerusalem, but they are condemned to a ghost-like non-existence. Their water has mostly been cut off; they now have to import water by tankers at ten times the old cost. They no longer have access to the hospitals or work-places in Palestine, and soon the schools will also be closed to them. They also have no right to enter Jerusalem, since they are, after all, illegal and can be arrested at any moment. In effect, they are imprisoned in their homes in a nightmarish loop of the Wall, a Kafkaesque limbo without recourse and with little hope. The Supreme Court considered their case and, some months ago, ruled against them. The next step, as everyone knows, will be to drive them out by force.
Nu’aiman is beautiful, a fragment of Old Palestine; the scent of the peaceful past still hovers over the footpaths leading to the ridge. There are 22 stone houses (five with demolition orders hanging over them); a few fields; olives, children, a black horse. The valley below them, however, is already being torn up by the bulldozers, and soon nothing will be left of the olive groves. The new “terminal”—the army euphemism has taken hold in all the Israeli media—for the southern West Bank is being built here; trucks and workers from Palestine will soon be lining up every day outside a labyrinth of roadblocks and fences in the hope of getting past the Wall, into Jerusalem. A new road, for settlers only, will cut through the hills past the village in the direction of the large settlement complex of Tekoa. Meanwhile, the Nu’aiman lands are slotted for development for Har Homa Daled-—the natural extension of the hideous concrete suburb, which is creeping toward the village like some prehistoric monster. The house you were born in and grew up in and live in will soon be gone. No one was here.
Jamal tells us the story in a dignified, impassioned Arabic; Yuri translates into Hebrew for the Israelis, I into English for our few American and English guests. We are a group of about 25, and we have picked our way, in the heat of the day, through the heaps of rubbish which litter the only remaining access road to the village. The rubbish, at least, is not subject to ethnic divisions; Israeli and Palestinian refuse, from Har Homa and the nearby villages, mingles promiscuously on this hill. The old road east and south has been blocked, and even if the villagers were able to leave their houses they would not, of course, be allowed the use of the settlers’ road. The trap has closed.
“You are welcome here,” says Jamal. “Anyone who comes in peace is our guest. Not soldiers who come in their uniforms, with their weapons; but anyone who comes with an open heart and a living conscience. All we want is to live in peace. Let Israel build its Wall, if it needs to, on the real border, the Green Line. Let there be two states living side by side. Anyone can see that the Wall, as it is being built today, is not for security. It has only one purpose: to steal Palestinian land. It will have only one result—to deepen hatred and the hunger for revenge.” He still has some hope that the High Court will save them, despite the recent decision. Can the judges be so blind? Why do they not come to see Nu’aiman with their own eyes? And how can the Army lawyers lie so blatantly? Danny Tirza, the slick and self-righteous officer responsible for the trajectory of the Wall, himself a settler, had the temerity to tell the court that the line chosen here, at Nu’aiman was the “most humane option.” Probably the judges believed him. At first the State argued that there were no houses at all in Nu’aiman before the Six Day War; but the villagers were able to produce aerial photographs from the 1920’s that showed the oldest houses standing. So the State changed its tune: there were houses here, it admitted, but whoever may have lived in them had no relation to the present owners. Jamal points to the house beside us: “We have lived here for generations. I was born inside these walls.”
I walk back with Yusuf, a big man with a deep smile, married to an Israeli woman. He asks me what I teach at the University. “Indian Studies,” I answer in Arabic. “Inti Hindi?” he asks, looking at my dark skin. “La, Amriki,” I say, and add that I have lived here for 40 years. “Ahlan wa-sahlan,” he says—welcoming me, a newcomer, a stranger, to his land.
We sit in Yusuf’s garden, sipping water, trying to make sense of what we have seen. No one is without pain, but there are some Israelis on this excursion who wish to squeeze it into the official categories. An older woman asks: Don’t they realize what has caused this disaster—the suicide bombers and Palestinian terror? Why are they blaming us for building a wall? Shelly, who led the tour together with Amiel, says gently: “You seem to be feeling some inner conflict after coming here and meeting Yusuf.” No one could possibly fail to like Yusuf; he is real, and suffering, very far from being someone’s convenient statistic. Not everyone has Shelly’s patience or Amiel’s gift for eloquent understatement. Gad, the photographer, turns to the questioner: “You don’t understand. There are many words, people say things, the government says things, mostly lies, but there is only one true fact—and that is that they want to take this land and drive these people away. Nothing else matters to them, nothing else counts, this is what it is all about. They use the terror as their excuse.”
As for me, I am grief-stricken, dumb, sick at heart. There seems to be no way to help. Maybe, by some miracle, the court will yet intervene. More likely, the villagers will lose everything. I wander back to the bus with Yuri. Not knowing what else to do, I hand out some of the flyers we have prepared for the Wednesday teach-in: Iyyad Sarraj, the eloquent psychiatrist from Gaza, will be speaking about “Present Traumas and Future Hopes.” Yuri, always the Sinologist, smiles. In Chinese, he says, there is no word for “trauma.” What about the traumatic memories of the Cultural Revolution? No, he answers, the Chinese don’t think of memory like that. They make a clear distinction between historical memory and mythic memories—unlike the Jews, who have only mythic memory, with a few fixed points, our father Abraham, the Exodus, the two Temples, and the Holocaust. That’s about all. Perhaps that’s why the Jews seem unable to imagine the suffering they are causing Yusuf and Jamal and hundreds of thousands like them.
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.
