by Kate Raphael
She suddenly worried that a Palestinian would think the jocular reference to refugee camps was in bad taste. Thankfully, Tina chuckled.
“People don’t think it’s weird, you being here alone?”
“I’m sure some of them do, but Jaber has a lot of clout in the village. When the army raids people’s houses at night, usually someone calls me to come and take pictures of the damage and help find whoever’s been arrested. So I guess they are glad enough I’m here.”
Engrossed in the conversation, Chloe had not realized everyone was standing up. The Israelis followed Shimon and Abu Shaadi out of the house. Three of Abu Shaadi’s sons joined them, as well as the two young women Chloe presumed were his daughters-in-law, and their children. Chloe was disappointed but not surprised that no media had shown up. She had called every contact she had the night before, and some of them had said they would try to make it, but uprooting trees was not news any more. One TV reporter had told her to call him if there was violence.
When they reached the land, the trunks of olive trees with lopped-off branches greeted them like ghostly gargoyles. There was no sign of bulldozers or soldiers. Chloe hoped they would come soon. Even in the early morning, the sun was beginning to beat down. By noon it would be unbearable. The Israelis seated themselves in one group, shading under a tree that had not been cut. A few of them had spoken briefly to Abu Shaadi in the house, but now they seemed content to talk among themselves. Rabbi Shimon and Avi sat with Abu Shaadi and Jaber, talking rapidly in Hebrew.
With her limited Hebrew, Chloe saw no point in joining them. She sat with the women for a while, not really talking. She didn’t know them, and they didn’t seem interested in making conversation with her. She ambled over to where the small children were playing, and asked them to help her with her Arabic. Kids were always good teachers for her, since she was closer to their level. They taught her the word for slingshot, and some sports-related words like “net” and “basket.” She promptly forgot them all.
Tina was sitting among the women now, and they were all talking animatedly in Arabic. The women were touching her hair, making big gestures. One of the women was pulling a scarf out of a picnic basket—doubtless it had been covering bread or something—and wrapping it around Tina’s head. Tina didn’t look happy. Chloe couldn’t help her. Palestinian women would never try to tell her how she should dress or pray, but diaspora Palestinians were another story. Tina could take care of herself, Chloe figured.
Chloe wandered over and sat down in the circle of Israelis. Itai turned to her.
“So, you are living here?”
“Yes, in Azzawiya.”
“What do you do here?”
The dreaded question. What did she do, indeed?
“Mostly I take pictures and video of human rights violations in the area and support Palestinian nonviolent resistance to the occupation.”
“Nonviolent resistance, yes. That is what the Palestinians need to do. If they could get everyone in their communities to commit to nonviolence, give up armed resistance, they would win.”
“Well, if the Israelis would commit to nonviolence, maybe the Palestinians would follow suit.”
He shook his head fiercely, his beard a waving exclamation point. “It never works like that. The occupier will not disarm first. The occupied people always have to take the risk. It’s not fair, but it’s reality.”
“But the Palestinians have been using nonviolence for years and years, and where has it gotten them? All during Oslo, there were no bombings in Israel. The number of Israeli settlements doubled, and so did the number of checkpoints. There was a nonviolent movement then. People would plant trees, and the next day the army would come and dig them up.”
“No one said it would be easy,” said the young man. She was about to retort that his life seemed easy enough, but a hand on her arm stopped her. Tina, her head dutifully covered, was perched next to her, waiting for what Itai would say next.
“But,” he went on, “ultimately, the settlements will benefit the Palestinians, because now it is not practical any more to talk about two states. Right now, the suicide bombings allow our government to justify harsh measures, to destroy the Palestinian resistance. But if the Palestinians used only nonviolent pressure, eventually, our government would have to grant Israeli citizenship to everyone who lives between the Jordan River and the sea.”
“Well,” Chloe said, “I’m not sure you are right, but even if you are, who says the Palestinians want to be Israeli citizens?”
“As long as everyone is equal,” a man named Gil chimed in, “what’s the problem?”
“There’s no problem,” Chloe said, “as long as you think it’s okay to annex territory by occupying it.”
“Exactly,” Tina said. Chloe turned to glance at her. Her expression was controlled, but a muscle in her face twitched.
Itai said, “You have to be pragmatic. Israel has already annexed the territory, the point now is for everyone to have equal rights.”
“What about the right to our nationality?” asked Tina.
“Nationality is a luxury,” said Itai.
“Fine,” Chloe said, “why don’t you give up being Israeli? That’s a nationality that has not existed for even sixty years, no one has had much time to get so attached to it, right?”
Gil turned to Tina. “What do you really want?” he asked. She flinched. Chloe thought she understood why. With one short statement, she had become the spokesperson for the entire Palestinian population.
“What do I want? I want the Jewish settlers to get out of my grandfather’s house in Jerusalem so my family can move back in. I want the Israelis to pay my family for the land you took away from us, and the houses you knocked down in my mother’s village. I want you to admit that you killed my cousin in cold blood, and I want to hunt down the men who deliberately shot her on her front porch in broad daylight, and put them on trial for war crimes, and I want to see them go to prison for the rest of their lives.”
Chloe watched the shock settle on the faces of Itai and his friends. In the space of a minute, or maybe half of one, she saw them go from relaxed and conversational, to wary and combative, to frightened and angry, and they had not even gotten in a word. She observed Tina with a mixture of awe and tension, wondering if she knew how dangerous it could be to be so honest with Israelis. Probably, these men would never report her or her family to the army or the secret police, but they could. Some of them might even be in the army.
Tina wiped something from her cheek, that could have been sweat or the beginning of tears. Chloe thought it would be very hard to be the only Palestinian involved in a conversation like this. The Israelis were just passing time; they could have been talking about anything. She wished the bulldozers would hurry up and come.
The sun was approaching its zenith. Chloe’s water bottle was empty. She strolled over to where Avi sat alone, writing in a notebook.
“They won’t come today,” Chloe said. “They’ll wait a day or two, to catch him unawares.”
“You don’t know that, they could just be late.”
“They could also come at six p.m. If we wait all day, and they don’t come, people will be demoralized and not come next time.”
“If we leave and they come in an hour, people will be more demoralized.”
He had a point. No one was very interested in her opinion anyway. The Israelis would pay no attention to her because she didn’t speak Hebrew. The Palestinians wouldn’t pay attention to her because she was a woman. They would rather talk to Avi, even though he realized she knew more than he did. He would listen to what she had to say, and if he agreed, represent it to the Palestinians as his idea.
He turned back to whatever he was writing, and she snuck a glance over his shoulder. He was not writing after all, but sketching. He had done a creditable job of capturing the scene, giving it a liveliness her photos couldn’t match. She was in the center of his drawing, arguing with Itai.
“I didn�
�t know you drew,” she said. One more thing to hold against him— she couldn’t draw a stick figure.
“It’s my job,” he said. “I’m an animator.” Funny, she had never imagined him having to work at all.
“One of my best friends is an animator,” she said. “For Pixar. She works at night.”
“So do I,” he said. “That way I can have my days free for this. But I only work three nights a week.”
A distant clanking brought him to his feet. Two bulldozers were chugging up the hillside, a yellow Caterpillar with a wide iron blade in front for moving and leveling piles of earth, and an orange Volvo with a serrated bucket for digging up trees by the roots. A blue border police jeep led them and another brought up the rear. Top Killer’s head poked out of the top of the lead jeep. The soldier who told Chloe to go to Iraq aimed his rifle out the passenger’s window, straight at Abu Shaadi’s grandsons.
The boys had slingshots in their hands, and now they scrambled around, looking for stones. Chloe hoped this wasn’t going to disintegrate into a slingshots versus automatic weapons competition. Jaber said something to the boys and they moved aside. They didn’t drop their stones, but they relaxed their arms. The Palestinians arranged themselves in two ragged rows, men and boys in front, the women behind. The internationals ran to the front. Some of the Israelis went forward toward the jeeps, yelling things in Hebrew.
Chloe stood off to one side, near the boys with the slingshots. She switched her video camera to standby and slung it over her shoulder, then took a small still camera out of her backpack and snapped a few pictures of the soldiers and the protesters. Wordlessly, Tina came and stood next to her.
The jeep stopped about ten meters from the group. Top Killer and Iraq took their time dismounting. They gathered their weapons, clad themselves in bulletproof vests and helmets, checked the readiness of their long sticks, and walked forward with their hands cradling the triggers of their rifles. Immediately, Itai and two other Israelis, a man and a woman, walked forward to intercept them. Abu Shaadi hung back with Jaber.
Chloe sprang into action, moving in between the two little bands of Israelis.
“Come talk to the soldiers,” she called to Abu Shaadi in Arabic. “This is your land. It’s for you to decide what will happen.”
The older man looked to Jaber for concurrence. Jaber urged him forward, one hand on his arm. The mayor and Rabbi Shimon went too. They spoke quietly, too quietly for Chloe to hear what they were saying. Top Killer kept fondling his gun. The bulldozers loomed behind, occasionally revving their engines.
“This is our land,” Chloe heard Abu Shaadi repeat over and over in Hebrew.
“Shetach sagur.” A closed area, Top Killer kept replying.
It didn’t sound like they were making much progress. Shimon remonstrated with the armed men, who waved papers at him. He tried to take them, but Top Killer lifted them over his head. Then they all went over to the jeep together and spread the papers on the hood. Shimon pointed to the paper and then to a clump of trees, and Top Killer shook his head and tapped his finger forcefully against the paper and swept his arm out, indicating all the land they could see.
“Eser dakot,” Top Killer said finally, loud enough for everyone to hear. He was giving them ten minutes to leave or his troops would use force, possibly arrests, to disperse them. The Israelis erupted in a din of Hebrew, arguing about what to do. Shimon seemed to be saying they should leave, because there was no media present, and Avi was arguing they should stay and be arrested if necessary, so the Palestinians would see that they were serious about their solidarity. Abu Shaadi and Jaber stayed out of it, pacing and smoking.
Their ten minutes were almost up. Shimon was talking on his cell phone. Top Killer, Iraq, and two other guys were fiddling with the orange bulbs Chloe recognized as sound grenades. Once upon a time, the sight of those grenades would have scared her. Now she was relieved to see them, because as long as they had these “non-lethal weapons,” they would probably not resort to live ammunition. Of course, their choice of weapons was partly based on the presence of Israeli civilians. If the Israelis really left, or were arrested, the strategy might change in a hurry.
Chloe went forward until there was no one between her and the army vehicles. She crouched down, aiming her camera, trying to capture the soldiers, the jeep, the bulldozers and the land behind them, in the same shot. She snapped a couple pictures, then moved across to the other side to see if she could get a better angle. She was thinking of trying to get behind the bulldozers to get a shot with the bulldozers and the Palestinians in it, when suddenly she heard, “America. Boi.”
Iraq was pointing to her, but it was Top Killer who was commanding her presence. She ignored him, but backed away slowly, getting closer to the rest of the internationals.
“Why do you take pictures of us?” Top Killer demanded.
“Documentation.”
“What?”
She cursed herself for using an English word he wouldn’t know. Iraq translated the word into Hebrew for him.
“Let me see your camera.” Top Killer reached out his hand for it. Chloe hesitated. She didn’t want to be the center of a confrontation, but her camera was her prize possession.
“I’ll show you the pictures.” She turned the camera to playback and held the image in front of his face. “See, it’s nothing, you’re not doing anything wrong.”
“Give me the camera.”
She quickly shoved the camera into her backpack. Top Killer started to lunge for her. Avi and the others blocked his path. He snarled, reaching for his baton. Iraq touched his arm, speaking urgently in Hebrew. Chloe signaled to the others to take the moment’s distraction to move back a little, not so much that they would seem to be running away, but just to give them a little more space. Top Killer seemed undeterred. He had the baton in his hand now, and was swinging it over his head the way he had the day Chloe first saw him, at the checkpoint. She imagined how it would feel, coming down on her head.
She heard a car approaching. A cloud of dust appeared in the road, and then a white jeep swept around the other vehicles and pulled up in front of where they stood. Top Killer turned around, as a Druze officer climbed out of the jeep. Chloe let out a deep breath.
The officer was short and swarthy, his pressed tan uniform carrying the insignia of a captain. He did not speak to Top Killer and the others—they simply melted into formation behind him, as if in a dance performed so many times that the dancers’ feet knew the steps without the music. The officer shook hands with Shimon, and then with Abu Shaadi and the mayor.
“I know this is your land and your father’s land and his father’s,” Chloe heard him say in Arabic. Compassion oozed from his expressive face. “It’s a shame, but there is nothing I can do.”
“But you yourself told me, when you came to tell us about the Wall, that nothing would happen to my land,” Abu Shaadi argued.
“I know, I am sorry about that. I didn’t know,” said the captain. “If you tell everyone to move away, we will uproot the trees properly, and replant them for you somewhere else. But if you make it hard for us, then we will have to come back with lots of troops and maybe even declare a curfew, and you and your sons might be arrested, and the trees could be damaged.”
Abu Shaadi was wavering, Chloe could see. His heart said one thing, but his mind knew he would not win this battle. Shimon stepped forward then.
“Wait a minute,” he said. “You are obligated to give a three-day notice of confiscation of land, so that the owner has time to go to court. But Abu Shaadi only heard about this yesterday.”
“I gave the notice to Abu Ziyad three days ago,” the captain said.
“Who is Abu Ziyad?” Chloe whispered to Avi.
“The Palestinian DCL,” Avi whispered back.
“I’ve never met him,” she said.
“You didn’t miss anything,” he said. “He’s a jerk.”
She didn’t have time to ask what made Abu Ziyad a jerk. The c
aptain was getting in his jeep, and so were the soldiers. A slow cheer rose from the collected body, as the bulldozers swung around in a huge circle and headed back toward the settlement. Top Killer’s jeep was now at the back. As it sped off, kicking up dust, Top Killer leaned down from his perch and yelled to Chloe, “Next time I see you, I am going to arrest you.”
“I’ll have to make sure he doesn’t see me,” Chloe said to Tina, who had materialized at her elbow. She hoped her performance here had piqued the other woman’s interest. Tina did seem to prefer her company to any of the other internationals, but that wasn’t saying much. The two French women didn’t even speak English.
When the jeeps and bulldozers were gone, Abu Shaadi’s sons-in-law turned to give high fives to each other, and then to some of the Israeli men. Abu Shaadi seized Shimon’s hand in both his own and shook until Chloe thought the rabbi risked a dislocated shoulder. He went through the same ritual with Avi and then with Jaber. None of them said anything to Chloe. It was like she hadn’t even been there when the action was planned, like she hadn’t spent three solid hours on the phone to the press, not to mention having just been threatened by a crazed border policeman. She joined the women and helped them gather up their belongings.
“The bus is here to take us back to Jerusalem,” Shimon announced in Hebrew, and then it was like a vacuum cleaner sucked all the Israelis out of the area. Chloe tapped Tina’s shoulder as the other woman was about to climb into the van.
“Hope I see you again sometime,” Chloe said.
“Right-o,” Tina responded and then she was gone. The adrenaline draining from her body, Chloe suddenly realized she was exhausted and hungry. She promised herself to stop for a falafel on the way to her flat, a hot shower, and a nap.
Chapter 10
Rania got to work early on Tuesday. She had heard nothing from Benny or Captain Mustafa since leaving Abu Anwar’s house the previous evening and she was eager for news. She peeked into the captain’s office even before she got coffee, but he was not there. Abdelhakim was the only one in ahead of her, reading over some files. He was just out of school, and she figured he was trying to make a good impression. She made herself a coffee and brought him one too.