I used to drive to Jerusalem through Beitunia all the time before this prohibition. It was there on that narrow quiet road that I learned to drive, before Israel constructed the six-lane settler road that connects the northwestern Jewish settlements to the coastal region, bisecting the road on which I used to drive. After I got my licence I would borrow my sister’s Opel Kadett in the afternoon and stop to look at what I called the yellow house. It lay in a sea of dry yellow wheat that surrounded it on all sides, except for the small garden with a meandering path and two tall sunflower plants that stood by the gate like sentinels. In the late afternoon the rays of the low sun on the horizon would be reflected on the dull yellow limestone, making the whole house glow like the moon.
At this time of year, the end of spring, the pond formed by the runoff water in the low plain would have shrunk and all around it farmers would have planted cucumbers of the ordinary and Armenian kinds and tomato seedlings. Soon we would be driving there to buy those utterly delicious and healthy ba’li (unirrigated) organic vegetables. How changed and inaccessible the area has become. Where the yellow house stood there is now an ever-expanding Israeli settlement called Givat Ze’ev, where we cannot set foot. The cultivated plain has vanished and been replaced by an army barracks and the Ofer military court and prison.
Earlier, when I walked past St George’s School, I noticed that the students have yet again scrawled on the wall, ‘Nadeem Nowara we shall never forget you.’ Three years ago their fellow student went to demonstrate against the practice of administrative detention close to Ofer prison and was callously shot dead. A CNN video shows the moment the unarmed youth was shot by an Israeli soldier, Ben Deri, who later said he did it because he was bored. Using live ammunition and pointing straight at Nadeem Nowara, Deri clearly intended to kill. The young man can be seen walking with his arms at his sides, then a soldier standing on the wall shot him. The bullet struck the seventeen-year-old in the chest, causing him to do a somersault, first falling forward on his hands and then, as his hands buckled, falling backward like an antelope shot mid-leap. Near where the first Christian martyr once lay is one of Palestine’s youngest.
The army denied using live ammunition. It was only because Nadeem’s father hid the bullet that had lodged in his son’s backpack that it was impossible for the army to refute what happened. After four years of legal wrangling, Deri was sentenced to nine months’ imprisonment, which the Supreme Court in Israel doubled to eighteen. Meanwhile Nadeem’s classmates had to contend with an empty desk where their friend used to sit.
This seventeen-year-old was too young to have known what the area was like before the settlement was constructed: what habitat it provided for the migrating birds that stopped in Ramallah on their way north to drink and bathe, and what a great attraction for all of us it was to see a body of water in the midst of our arid land. He was too young to have tasted the ba’li organic vegetables that used to be grown there. When I look at the Ofer checkpoint I see both how it is now and what it was like before the area was ruined. For me it was an open road, for them a border. For me and my generation the struggle has aged, become blocked, just like that road is blocked. I know how it used to be, but I don’t know how to unblock it and allow the life that was once there to thrive again. For Nadeem and his generation they never had that memory. They only know it as it has now become. In the intensification of the violence, they have lost one of their classmates, an experience that I never had. They glorify him as a shaheed (martyr) to lessen the blow, yet the fact remains, which they cannot ignore, that he is no more. Had we succeeded in resolving this conflict we would have saved ourselves and the world from its ugly consequences.
Rather than stand at the edge of the pond and watch the migrating birds, their shaheed could see only walls and barbed wire surrounding a military prison where administrative detainees, many as young as him, are locked up, on whose behalf he had gone to demonstrate. Some of the detainees have been there for over a year and none have been on the new road that links the settlement to the northeast of Jerusalem with the coast, where yet another new border has been set up.
The landscape familiar to me as I was growing up is no more; it has changed, as has the cast of characters, both Israeli and Palestinian. The legal strategies we employed to resist the occupation, believing they would bring it to an end, have dismally failed. The changes brought about over the past half-century have created a new overwhelming reality that calls for a different approach and a new kind of leadership. For us who have aged with the struggle, it’s time we recognise our defeat, step aside, hand over the reins to the young and place our hope in them.
I was nearly Nadeem’s age in 1967, when the war that brought about this half-century-long occupation took place. Few Palestinians in the West Bank took part in the fighting. For nineteen years the regime in Jordan made sure that we did not have a single weapon, or any military training to speak of. So what kind of victory was Israel’s? Why be so arrogant about it? It was as though we had been slumbering, had abandoned our fate to others and were looking at ourselves from a distance. Then we were rudely awakened by a strange, short war that did not feel like a war, at least not where I was. It started and ended in the blink of an eye and our unwanted, unrecognised neighbours from across the horizon came and took over our lives.
Even after the passage of fifty years I can still recall so clearly that fateful day when the Israeli army entered my city. It was announced by incessant shooting that began just after sunset, a sort of loud and assertive proclamation of the changing of the guard. From the sound of their bullets I attempted to figure out how close the soldiers were to our house. They must already be at the top of the slope. I imagined them approaching our garden gate. How many of them were there? It was not possible to tell. There was a brief pause in the shooting. Were they trying to enter? As the shooting got closer, I could feel my father becoming more anxious. My mother was quiet but obviously fretful. I remained silent and still, trying my best not to show how scared I was. Between the bursts of gunfire I could hear my parents’ heavy breathing. Was this the end? Would the soldiers shoot their way into our house and massacre us all, or was this only going to be the fate of the men, my father and me? My brother was still too young to be considered a man.
Though the soldiers seemed not to be moving, the shooting intensified. What point could they be making? Why were they lingering at the gate? What did they suspect? Our garden must be covered with empty shells by now. Time seemed to stop. How quickly a safe and friendly place can become vulnerable and hostile. It had never occurred to me that the windows in our house could be conduits for danger. Even the stone walls felt flimsy.
When we woke up next morning everything was surprisingly calm. Nothing in our house was broken, not a single window. The weather was crisp and clear. It was one of those lovely early June days, like today, that Ramallah is known for. At first it seemed like any other June morning – the birds were chirruping, the sun was out – except it wasn’t. We had just been through a war, one that we had lost, and our town was taken over by the enemy.
The army drove around with bullhorns ordering us, residents of the town, to raise a white flag. I can still see Tata’s (grandmother’s) large white underwear billowing on the clothes line on her kitchen balcony.
After they drove away there was a strange quality to the atmosphere that descended. Members of the Jordanian army, with their thick moustaches and heavy boots, had disappeared, their absence leaving a profound silence. They were replaced by last night’s shooters, who now drove around victoriously in their dusty jeeps, announcing curfews. Only when I looked at the ground could I confirm that it was all real, for the garden was carpeted with empty bullet shells, yellow against the brown soil. I had not dreamed the events of the night before.
It was several days before the round-the-clock curfew was lifted, but only for a few hours in the morning to allow us to shop. This was the first time we were able to venture into the centre of town and ex
amine the damage. There wasn’t much. Here and there a few shop windows were broken, with glass scattered over the pavements. Some electricity and telephone poles lay on the ground, with the cables spread dangerously around. This seemed to be all. But it was enough to indicate that the town had been disgraced. It looked stunted and stopped. Not only cables down but also the residents’ spirits. Pedestrians no longer walked with pride. They scurried with their heads bent down, scrutinising the ground before them, anxious to finish what business they had to do in the short time they were allowed out of the house. The magic that had permeated the town before the war was gone. Defeat was painted all over the place. The sense that our town was no longer ours was hard to take.
It was as though the city had been defiled, taken over by foreigners who did not appreciate its charm, worth and uniqueness. In run-down cars the euphoric Israeli civilians drove around, checking how our side looked, describing it as just another ramshackle backwater. The pride I had in my city quickly vanished. It now felt abandoned – even though most of its residents had stayed, they seemed to have disappeared indoors. If a city can look bewildered, this is how I imagined Ramallah to be. Only men walked hurriedly in the street when curfew was lifted. A friend once told me that village men feel embarrassed to walk in the street next to a woman, so you would always see their wives trailing behind. Now the women were nowhere to be seen. They stayed home as the men went out for some relief from their enforced detention in their houses and to check how many had died and assess the damage that had been done to their town. The men looked lost as they walked in the windswept streets. The Grand Hotel, which had been the showpiece of the town, where guests from all over the region flocked to visit, was now the headquarters of the Israeli military in Ramallah. Soldiers slept in the rooms that had welcomed tourists and honeymooning couples. We were not allowed anywhere near the grounds. The post office was also commandeered and all government offices. The cinemas were closed, as was Uncle Sam’s café, where young couples went for hot chocolate. Its coloured-glass windows, through which it was just possible to make out their outlines, huddled over the narrow tables eating pastries and drinking, were now broken. The whole town looked desolate. All those places that I had enjoyed, or was waiting to frequent when I came of age, were now closed. Little was left of the Ramallah I had known. The only people smiling on the streets were the Israeli soldiers.
The question that seemed to worry my father was who would clean up the debris and repair what was broken now that the municipality was unable to take charge. In every sense the town seemed abandoned to those who had conquered it. It was no longer ours.
The town’s elected mayor, Nadeem Zarou, was deported. The soldiers allowed him to stop at our house on his way to the Allenby Bridge, the crossing point to Jordan, to bid my father farewell. Mockingly he told my father, ‘I will be sending you my photograph.’ Although we were not told that he was being deported, we took this to mean that he did not expect ever to return, though he did, after the Oslo Accords were signed. In his place the military appointed a new mayor, a weak yes-man who would do as he was told.
They came from the west, proud and arrogant Israelis: flushed with victory, bragging about how developed, orderly and democratic their country was. It was as though we had exchanged borders. We now became open to the west and closed to the east, exposed and unprotected. In the aftermath of victory, the streets in Israel were full of people basking in the glory of their triumph. Their appetite for the land in the West Bank became insatiable. And yet despite the fact that we were defeated in the war, there was not the usual infatuation with the coloniser, no desire to learn their language or become like them. Nor did Israel encourage this. All they wanted was that we leave.
Many of those who tried to lord it over me, whether it was the military governors of my town, Avi or Roni, or the legal advisers, Axel or Yossi, are either dead or elderly now. They were gone before I had the opportunity to enquire whether they had any regrets about the policies they were enforcing, which are now bringing ruin to their country. Perhaps the confidence of those Israeli colonisers lasted a lifetime. It is folly to think they could have felt any remorse. Those of them who are no more would have died, like all of us will die, thinking primarily of themselves, the world reduced to their failing body, neither proud of their achievements nor harbouring contrition for crimes committed and suffering caused. ‘This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper.’ Weak and frail is the son of man. It is just my unbridled optimism that makes me think it could be otherwise, just another version of believing there is a heavenly place where justice prevails.
And yet a time will surely come when a revisionist history of the conflict will be written revealing how they failed, how their perceived victories, freeing the military and the Jewish settler movement from the shackles of Israeli and international law to facilitate the building of more Jewish settlements, led to disaster. But they will be long gone. To them it will not matter.
At sixteen I was on the receiving end of the euphoria of an enemy who just a short while before had feared for its very existence. I could not have imagined then that I would spend the next half-century of my life under their sway. For many years I raged in anger at my fate. Now, when I look back over my life, I can see that the occupation has provided me with an immense amount of work and great challenges, not only in how to resist but in how to live under its ruthless matrix of control as a free man refusing to be denied the joys of life.
Four
When I was growing up, Ramallah had few restaurants and a number of men-only coffee shops where mainly old men wearing ancient dark suits sat around on low wicker stools and played backgammon, drank coffee and smoked. These days the city is celebrated for its hundreds of cafés and restaurants, and Tireh Road, where I was now walking, had no fewer than nine, plus an ice-cream parlour called Sticks, offering ‘home-made Italian gelato’. Unlike Rukab’s, the solitary ice-cream place in Ramallah in my youth, which opened only in the spring and summer months because it was thought no one would want ice cream in winter, Sticks remains open all year round. Male and female staff serve in these cafés. The first that I came across, just after passing the Office of the People’s Republic of China, was Al Reef, which was established in that strange garden of Abu Ameen’s, in whose house we lived before we built our present home. Just beyond the restaurant is a still-undeveloped plot with olive trees. I remembered that during the Intifada Israeli soldiers cut down the trees to protect settlers who were using this road to get from Dolev to Beit El. A yellow line was painted on the road to lead them along. The line has now gone and the resilient trees have grown back. They seem to produce a better crop than the olive trees in my garden, because the dust and soot from the car exhausts cover the blossoms and protect them from birds and disease. But there’s no doubt that they will soon be destroyed forever and a new building will go up in their place. Then this street will become even busier.
Further up on the left-hand side of the street is an old abandoned house, a likely candidate for demolition. The land around it was being exploited by an enterprising man and his son, who either own it or have reached an agreement with the owner to use it as a herb garden. They have ploughed and fertilised the plot and divided it into beds, where they plant parsley and rocket, which they then sell from a stall on the nearby pavement. I’ve often admired the healthy greens growing there and wondered how they are able to keep them free of weeds. Perhaps the farmer had a way of dealing with the weed problem that I could use in my garden. One afternoon I decided to stop and ask. The man did not take kindly to my question and thought I was either an utter fool or pulling his leg. In a voice indicating what a ludicrous question I’d asked, he said with a straight face, ‘Sit on your bum and pull out the weeds, one by one.’
Two-thirds of the way up this road was the den of the Ramallah scouts, called the First Ramallah Group. It was given this name because it couldn’t get recognition as a scout group since Palestine was not
a state. It now has an Olympic-sized swimming pool and a garden café. In 1971 I participated in the first international work camp in Ramallah that landscaped the garden. The tents where we slept were put up in the area where the pool was later built, organised by Issa Mughanam, a much-loved teacher who always kept his deformed left hand in his pocket, out of sight. Now there are a number of public swimming pools all over the city in the numerous gyms and garden restaurants, some of them even heated in winter. Close by is a house that seems abandoned with a large front garden. It used to be the last house in this northern part of the city. In the garden a patch of irises continues to grow and produce the most beautiful light blue, rabbit-ear irises each April. I’ve frequently been tempted to go in and dig out some of the bulbs.
There was a time when I used to know to whom every house belonged. Across the street from the scout centre, at the corner of Tireh and Jabra Ibrahim Jabra roads, the latter named after the Palestinian writer, is the house where the poet Lily Karniek lived until her death. She led an outwardly uneventful life with her mother, teaching Arabic at an UNRWA school. Her father used to collect the offerings at our church.
Down this road is a semi-detached, single-storey stone house where I lived from 1979 to 1988, after returning from my law studies in London. A few days ago I dreamed of that house. The dream has stayed with me because, unlike the recurring dream when I go in search of a house, this was a return to where I had actually lived in my twenties and early thirties. In this dream I saw Helen, the landlady, sitting with her friend, the mathematics teacher Georgette, chatting and smoking, as was their wont, with the front door wide open. When they saw me coming they began clearing the house to give it back to me. I thought perhaps I would stay. As I stepped inside, a slim leopard leapt out through the open kitchen door as soon as he saw me enter. I walked around the empty house, then decided it was too cold and had no furniture, and so I left to go and sleep at my parents’ house. When I woke I wondered whether the alert animal that I saw darting out represented my younger self.
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