Reports from the West Bank. June 2005.
Report 1. Things get better, things get worse.
For some there
was never an Intifada (uprising), it was just a name given to another point
in the series of political ups and downs. For others, it has ended, somewhat
unofficially with Arafat's death. For others, it is still going on; the resistance
movement is far from over. Whichever way one wishes to define the moment now,
things have kind of changed, or maybe not. [4 pictures]
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Report 2. A Conspiracy of Guns.
On Sunday night,
my friends and I decided to walk home from the Ramallah Club, an outdoor café
where families let their children roa around freely. It was to be a rather long
walk home, with a few steep climbs to negotiate. In the mood for a breezy evening
stroll, we figured a nice quiet walk home would do us some good. Towards the
end of our walk, at the end of the longest uphill, as we neared the circle where
we would each part our separate ways, we heard some shooting. One friend claimed
it was coming from the left, another from the right; perhaps it was the echo
that we were hearing since we were in a valley of sorts. Making nothing of it,
we continued uphill, when we were astounded by a couple of young men running
down the hill screaming, followed by more intense and louder gun shots. We stopped
in our tracks. The two young men turned to us as they continued running and
shouted for us not to continue to the intersection. A whizz of cars suddenly
came by, and I managed to wave down a taxi among them. We asked him if he'd
take two of us to the hotel, and the other two of us would walk the long way
home, avoiding the circle. He refused, claiming that the shooting was taking
place right in front of the hotel. He had his walkie talkie on and we could
hear much louder gun shots from the other end, muffled by demands of "don't
come, don't come." We told our out of town friends to come home with us,
they could either spend the night or wait until things calmed down. [1 picture]
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Report 3. Untitled.
I walked through
the Qalandia checkpoint for the first time yesterday. I was told it had changed,
but I didn't realize to what extent. By the time I got through, my eyes were
heavy with tears that I managed to supress. But I am still crying. I am in shock.
Shock is not a word strong enough to describe the sensation. I am in awe. I
am angry. I am sad. Distressed, distraught, anguished. Confused. Beaten down
maybe. It was obvious two years ago that Qalandia was one day going to be an
official border, that it would change from being just a checkpoint. That it
would be similar to Erez, the only place where one can enter or exit the Gaza
Strip from, with a permit of course. Gaza long ago had a "seperation fence"
built around it, so perhaps when we pass through Erez today it's not surprising.
But when you see a border being built piecemeal, without agreement from both
sides, it is something else… [2 pictures]
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Report 4. Where's the Revolution?
I was standing
in the noon-time sun with what I discovered is a self-proclaimed revolutionary
fighter. He wants to liberate Palestine, perhaps one of the few people who thinks
he can, or that this is somehow still possible. Another man standing near us
made his way into the conversation and brought up the impotence of the United
Nations. If ithe UN not able to force Israel to relinquish land, how will an
armed revolution materialize in anything more? I asked the young revolutionary
what he thought. He stood silently. I thought perhaps he did not understand
my question, my accent, maybe he needed time to reflect. I asked again. No answer.
I asked specifically a third time what he thought of two particular UN resolutions.
[2 pictures]
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Report 5. Going to the hospital.
My friend's
aunt had to get an operation done. I didn't quite understand at first, something
to do with her leg. He was going to visit her in the hospital in Jerusalem,
so when he heard that I wanted to go down as well, he suggested we make the
trip together. Ok, I said.
We started out the usual way: going through the Qalandia checkpoint. Once to
the other side, I figured we would take a taxi straight to Jerusalem. I was
a little mistaken. We took a taxi to Abu Diss - that neighborhood East of East
Jerusalem that Israel likes to mask to the world as the future Palestinian capital
city in Jerusalem (needless to say it's about as close to Jerusalem as Ramallah
is). The taxi heads East, down the hill towards the Dead Sea, in the opposite
direction of Jerusalem. I can see the Wall snaking all around the landscape,
some places where it is still under construction. [1 picture]
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Report 6. When occupation is the least of your worries.
Every society
has its hierarchies, the wealthy, the poor, the urban, the rural, and so on.
But often times in the face of a common enemy differences are put aside and
a sense of collectiveness and unity prevails. Not so here, it seems.
Palestinians have long had social classes and their ensuing hierarchies, whether
it be the land owners and the farmers, the educated and the illiterate, the
Muslim and the Christian, the merchants and the teachers. When referring to
the "catastrophe" of 1948, it's the loss of land, lives and nation
that is most mourned for, the forced exile, the foreign domination, the disruption
of life. The numbers vary, but hundreds of thousands of refugees were forced
to flee, and a large number of them fled into the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
The same happened again in 1967 when the "official" Israeli occupation
began forcing more Palestinians into the refugee camps that litter the holy
land's landscape. Many of these refugees were land owners themselves, wealthy
merchants, sailors and traders, educators, from different socio economic strata,
but they were all equal in the face of exile and expulsion and arrived in the
refugee camps with not much more than the clothes on their backs. Undoubtedly
they were helped by the locals, but hospitality waned quickly when the refugees
were forced to survive, took on employment, started their own businesses, tried
to integrate into the disrupted society, and essentially competed over the scarce
resources.
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Report 7. The Difficulty of writing.
Trying to survive
here one is in a constant state of exhaustion, so trying to write reports makes
one's life even more exhausting. The difficulty is not in a lack of things to
write about, but in a lack of space to think clearly about the millions of things
that are honestly dumb-founding. So rather than write a report about something
specific, I thought I'd just send one about everything and nothing. A kind of
stream of consciousness... [1 picture]
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Report 8. The curse of a blue ID
Since the Palestinian
Authority arrived in the Territories in the early 1990s, Palestinians living
inside the West Bank and Gaza were given new identification cards, nicely tucked
in green or orange covers. One is not allowed to remove the cover, since the
color is there to help Israeli police and/or soldiers tell right away whether
a person is Palestinian or Israeli. Israeli citizens hold blue ID cards; as
do Palestinians who live within the State of Israel. Many people outside the
two countries get confused about this, and the modern concept of a nation-state
and its boundaries hasn’t managed to do away with this confusion, but
only added to it.
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Report 9. Lying to get out.
Rashid Khalidi
described it beautifully in the introduction to his book on Palestinian identity
– that any Palestinian’s identity is at once questioned, traumatic,
and reinforced at a political border. So perhaps it shouldn’t have surprised
me when I was ambivalent, scared, nervous, confused when in line at the Tel
Aviv airport, wondering whose advice I should heed… Some told me to flat
out lie and deny having been to the Palestinian Territories. “Don’t
even mention that you were in Jerusalem,” they said. “Jerusalem
is too close to the Arabs. Just say you visited Tel Aviv, Haifa, not cities
where there are Arabs.” My Palestinian friends who live within Israel
(those whose families did not flee in 1948) told me to use them as my contact
info. As one told me: “my record is clean. Just tell them you stayed with
me.” Some suggested I go four hours early, others suggested going late
so as to minimize the time getting questioned and searched. My Israeli friend…
I was too shy to ask to use his name as a contact person. [1 picture]
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