Maybe because everyone around me today is facing daily and nightly threats to their safety and sanity, I am paying more attention to what that must be like.
I realize that we are all living with the existential threats of nuclear annihilation and climate catastrophe, and that we manage not to dwell on that reality. I am speaking as a white person of adequate means, who lives in a peaceful, rural setting. I am aware that what I am feeling is largely determined by that identity.
But today I am in occupied Palestine, where there is no relief from the conditions of military occupation. Everyone’s days and nights are impacted by armed soldiers who do not have the least respect for Palestinian life or culture. Try to picture yourself in the following. On her way to work as a teacher or nurse, or engineer or lawyer, Mariam may be stopped and her purse searched while she waits for a young foreign (i.e. Israeli) soldier to hand back her I.D. and allow her to continue on. She cannot protest for fear of prolonging this process, already prolonged for as long as the soldier feels like making her wait. There is no way for her to avoid feeling humiliated, but one resistance she can offer is to show no emotion whatsoever. The soldier would rather see her squirm. Multiply this by thousands of Palestinians who are trying to get to work on time.
Put a young mother with a baby in her arms in that same position. She may not squirm, but the child might cry for whatever reason babies cry, and the mother cannot quickly find a solution to console her child. Or let’s say that the victim of this treatment is a man taking his six year old son to the doctor for a painful earache. He had to get a special permit to cross the checkpoint for medical reasons. Even with the permit, the soldier tells the father to lift his shirt or stand in the rain, and the boy takes this in. His father treated like a child.
Once father and son return from the doctor and get through the checkpoint, they will walk by the home that was just reduced to rubble. It wasn’t their home, this time, or maybe it was. And maybe when they left home this morning, it was still standing, the boy’s toys and books neatly on a shelf in his bedroom. He knows that his older brother was arrested a few nights ago because that was a very scary night, being woken up by soldiers with guns breaking down the front door at 2:00 in the morning. He remembers he wet his bed because he was so scared. He is too young to understand why his brother’s arrest was followed by punishment for the whole family and his toys ruined.
I have often wondered how I would feel if my house burned down and I lost everything in it, and what would I most miss. I think I would mourn most the loss of my journals and photos. But a Palestinian woman loses something much more profound: the center of family life, a place of safety, of comfort, and a sense of belonging. It is something she can never recover, even if she has the means to rebuild her house.
Neither fathers nor mothers can keep their children from going out to protest the appearance of Israeli armoured jeeps in their streets. Typically, the children throw stones at the invaders. Typically, the soldiers fire tear gas at the children who may retreat temporarily. But when the kids start in again, the soldiers fire live ammunition, and often hit their target. Then there is a dead or maimed child, and a mother who can’t bear the grief, and school chums who saw what happened – the blood, their friend lying still in the street. This is a daily possibility that hangs in the air. Every Palestinian watches these scenarios on the TV evening news.
A common scenario in Bethlehem, about a quarter mile from where I volunteer at the natural history museum, is for youth to throw stones at an enormous military watch tower to express their outrage at the latest aggression against their lives. They did this just yesterday, and the tear gas used to stop them drifted downhill to the museum. As we felt our eyes tear and throats burn, we closed the windows. This time the protest was in solidarity with the 30,000 residents of Shuafat refugee camp just North of Jerusalem. Israel had closed all traffic in and out of the camp for three days as the army searched for a Palestinian they presumed to be the killer of an Israeli soldier. (Interestingly, Israel’s mighty army has not yet found the killer, aka resistance fighter.)
To prove the pointlessness of using military force, to hold on to power, the closure of Shuafat enraged another 120,000 people who needed to access the camp or at least drive near to it to conduct the business of their daily lives. So when Shuafat called for a nationwide general strike, the youth of Bethlehem (and presumably in hundreds of other places in the West. Bank) responded. The army fired tear gas at the youth, and prepared to use live fire if they did not disperse.
To be continued….
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