Full Moon Over a Sad Land

    Although it is raining lightly, the full moon comes through the clouds as if shedding a skin, and the land below, thirsty, pleads for renewal.

     Two young men lie bleeding on the pavement near Gush Etzion settlement. One of them is accused of trying to stab an Israeli soldier.  The two are left to bleed to death.  They have  not yet been identified because no one has touched them.  This news is from “Palestine TV News” at 8:00 p.m..

     I have just had dinner in the home of my friends whom I will call Sami and Hanna.  They are middle class professionals living in a modern apartment, have good jobs and three children, the youngest a senior in high school.  Beyond that, nothing about their lives is recognizable.

    Briefly, I will tell you their story, while admitting that I can no longer keep up with the number of deaths of Palestinian youth, whose names I have been trying to record.  Let me at least dedicate this piece to them and their grieving families.

    Sami is the director of a local environmental protection agency. He and Mazin Qumseyeh collaborate on protecting biodiversity and the wild plants, birds and animals of Palestine.  He is also a legal resident of East Jerusalem. As holder of a Jerusalem I.D., he can travel in the West Bank and into Israel, one of the few “privileges “ afforded to a select group of Palestinians, and one that Israel is happy to revoke under any pretext, such as being related to a suspected terrorist.

     Hanna is a West Banker. As such she does not have a Jerusalem ID.  She owns a lovely, old home in Beit Sahour, (West Bank) with a garden and an extra apartment for her mother-in-law. However, she cannot live there now.  Hanna is a social worker and director of an agency that serves mentally handicapped adults. Until a year ago she could walk to work, and her children could walk to school.  Then the family was forced to move out of their home and into a neighbhood half an hour’s drive away, where there is no public transportation.  This neighborhood is squeezed between the apartheid wall and a military checkpoint. Its only advantage - and the reason for the move -  is that it is located just inside the boundary of East Jerusalem.  This makes Hanna, with her West Bank ID “illegal” in her own home, should any Israeli authority find out.  But that is the risk they are taking in order to accomplish another purpose.

      When Hanna gave birth to her second child, her now 19 year old daughter, Yara, she could not get the Israeli permit to enter Jerusalem for the delivery. Thus Yara was born in the local (West Bank) hospital. Had she been born in Jerusalem, she would have had a Jerusalem ID with its concomitant privileges. As it was, she was not given any ID at all.  “Why wasn’t she given a West Bank ID?” I asked.  Because at that time the Palestine Authority (PA) refused it, saying that it might tempt Sami to give up his East Jerusalem residency in order to join his West Bank family.  “And what was wrong with that?”  Answer: The PA did not want Sami, or anyone else, to move out of Jerusalem and thus leave space for more settlers to move in.  It was a sort of blackmail.

     For the next 19 years until the present, Yara has had no document - no picture ID, no passport, nothing.  As a high school student moving about her in her town of Beit Sahour and adjacent Bethlehem, this was not of major importance. But now Yara is a university student in the city of Nablus, a two and half hour journey away, which she makes every week, taking two different vehicles and passing through at least 3 checkpoints where her ID might be demanded. Sami’s reaction to this reality came through in his response to my idle question, “So, what do you think of your daughter wanting to be a lawyer?”

    “I am in great pain,” he answered.  “I try to tell her to be careful, but she says, ‘What can I do? I have to go to school. I can’t just stay home.’  So, I am helpless.  I can’t protect her.”  This might sound like any parent’s lament, but these days it is dangerous to be on the road as a Palestinian. Period.  People are afraid to go to the store, or to walk anywhere after dark, much less leave town.  In all my 13 trips to the West Bank, I have not seen nor heard such fear.  It is because in this last month settlers and soldiers are shooting and killing Palestinians—not arresting, not shooting to injure, but shooting to kill—many times without provocation, as video footage has proven.  If these were isolated incidences, people would not be afraid to go about daily life.

   As I finish this story, I now have the names of the two dead youth whose images I saw on the TV: 17 year old Shabaan Abu Shkeidem and 22 year old Shadi Nabil And al-Muti Dweik, both from the city of Hebron.  Maybe in the next few days the local news will tell us about them, their lives up till now, their parents and siblings or their broken dreams. It is a sad land.