Even after I left him, Ayman’s words about fate and martyrdom kept going round in my head and I thought that surely this was one way of coming to terms with a tragic death.
It was young activists like Ayman and Muhamad who started the second disastrous armed Intifada. The first had been a true war of liberation, a secular revolt, an opening to something new, an opportunity to create a different kind of society; and for me personally, it was my first experience of collective struggle. But then Hamas entered the political arena. At first Israel did nothing: they did not list it as a prohibited organisation and did not stop it from receiving funds from outside. Then, in 1992, soon after the peace negotiations began, they deported a large number of its members to south Lebanon, where they received training in military warfare from the Lebanese Hezbollah. For a long time Israel was desperate to split the nationalist movement in Palestine. They were loath to recognise the PLO before it acquired a Palestinian rival. Now the leadership is split, with Hamas running Gaza and Fatah the West Bank. At last Israel has succeeded, like every colonizer, to divide and rule.
Even our vocabulary has changed. No one can now call death by its name if it occurs in the course of struggle. The other day I went to Kashou’s hardware shop to get a nozzle for the garden hose. I noticed that the proprietor’s son was just opening up the iron shutters, as the other shop owners were doing. I asked why the closure and he said in his slow, calm matter-of-fact voice, ‘Someone died. He’s not from Ramallah but from the outskirts and they asked us to close from ten to eleven.’ As the father was speaking I heard his son muttering ‘istashhad’ (he was martyred) almost with a desperate groan, as if to say, how many times must I remind you to use the right words: istashhad, not itwafa (he was martyred, not died).
I was reminded of this change in the language in how we refer to death when I heard Samia Halaby, the famous Palestinian artist, talking about her drawings of the massacre of Kafr Qasim, which took place on 29 October 1956 in Israel. She was speaking in Arabic about her research, investigations and work on the massacre. Her choice of words and her manner were those of an older time, a time that has passed and been fundamentally changed. She called death by its name, dying by its name, and said that when the soldiers takhu (shot) the Palestinians they matu (died). She did not say istashhadu, or call death shahada or the dead shaheed. Her vocabulary alerted me to how death has been camouflaged and altered to become something else, something more palatable, not final but a noble elevated passage to heaven, in order to help those who lose loved ones endure their loss. Yet however it is referred to, even Ayman knows deep down that death is the final destination.
Now, on the fiftieth anniversary of the occupation, I am again walking up Irsal Street to the Muqata’a, and thinking how this occupation has accompanied me most of my life. It has walked with me like a shadow, stalking me, sometimes posing a challenge but more often a threat. At times I have tried doggedly to shake it off, live as though it were not there, but it always proved stronger and reasserted its presence. And so I’ve come to accept that it is my karma to live under it. When I was young I rebelled against my fate and tried to escape its clutches, but it proved too tenacious. Even when I travelled it came along and refused to leave me alone. And now as I stroll through the Ramallah streets I come across so many reminders that bring everything back. There were times when we hoped that we were getting rid of the occupation and I worked and lived for that moment. But it dissipated twenty-four years ago with the first Oslo Accord, and since then I’ve lived without hope, constantly trying to adjust to life and accept that it will only go from bad to worse as the occupation becomes more entrenched, grabbing more of our land and tightening the noose around our necks.
The lines from Auden’s poem ‘Spain’ about the Spanish
Civil War come to mind:
We are left alone with our day, and the time is short, and
History to the defeated
May say Alas but cannot help or pardon.
Eleven
Near the start of Irsal Street, where one of the tall new buildings now stands, there used to be a house with a green glass balcony and a garden that belonged to a Russian, Dr George Rudenko. He had escaped the civil war in Ukraine and made his way to Palestine, working in a hospital in Jaffa during the British Mandate. There he married a Palestinian nurse and was forced to leave in 1948, ending up in Ramallah. He had a tall and imposing figure and often wore a wide-brimmed black hat. He was a friend of my father’s and we often visited him in Irsal Street. A passionate hunter, he kept white plastic ducks on the table in his living room that he used as decoys when hunting. As a child I enjoyed squeezing those ducks.
Irsal Street used to be called Lovers’ Street. It was lined with old pine trees. From there one could look northwest at the hills and see spectacular panoramic sunsets. A refreshing cool breeze always blew on this elevated part of Ramallah. Not any more. Now the views have been blocked by the tall buildings that hug the street and so too has the wind.
The recitation from the Quran that precedes the afternoon call to prayer starts to come through amplifiers placed on the tall Natsheh building in the centre of town, interrupting this reverie. Coming towards me I see four Palestinian policemen with black masks covering their faces up to their eyes, plastic shields held against their chests, and kneepads. Carrying batons and guns, they are walking down the street to attract attention: a demonstration of strength by the Palestinian security services. The weather is too warm for such attire. The unfortunate young men must be boiling, I think. They are roaming around to make sure that on this fiftieth anniversary of the Israeli occupation everyone toes the line. What did it take to train these young men to shift their view of the enemy, from the occupier to any Palestinian who dares challenge the Palestinian Authority and those in control of our reduced territory?
The young here have no notion of what the city was like before the massive developments that have taken place over the past two decades. They relish its Americanisation and many come from the nearby villages to eat out at the KFC and Pizza Hut across the street from where I stand. These two places are always crowded. Sometimes I wonder where I am. This does not feel like the Ramallah I knew.
The stubbornly dull and sleepy provincial town I grew up in has developed into a flourishing city, with many places of entertainment and a rich cultural life. The city’s population went through a tremendous transformation after most of its original inhabitants left. Now, like most other cities around the world, it has a mixed population. With all my nostalgia for the way things were, life in modern Ramallah is much more exciting and culturally diverse than was ever the case in the past. I might sometimes feel like a stranger here and despondent about the future, yet the young have many more opportunities than my generation did at their age, naïve and unconnected as we were to the rest of the world. They will forge ahead; they might even be more successful than we were in achieving liberation.
Halfway along Irsal Street are the newly constructed headquarters of the President of the Palestinian Authority, built on the site of the demolished Tegart building, or Muqata’a, as we now call it. The Tegart was one of some fifty such structures built by the British in 1938 in various parts of Palestine. They were established by Sir Charles Tegart, a former commissioner of police in Calcutta, who was sent to Palestine as a counterterrorism expert in the midst of the 1936 Palestinian popular revolt against Mandate rule. In 2002, when the compound served as Yasser Arafat’s headquarters, it was bombed by the Israeli army after the reinvasion of Ramallah. Two years later it remained unrepaired. I can still remember how it looked on a misty winter’s morning in 2004 when I went to check whether any work had been done there. I could see the ruins behind a milky-white foreground. The pine trees were still standing, as was the façade of what had once served as the Israeli Civil Administration, where one went for permits and, when summoned, for interrogation. By the gate was a sign pointing to a complaints box which must have been placed there by a cynic
al Israeli soldier as a sick joke. Not surprisingly, the box was always empty. The only possible complaint that any of us wanted to make was against the very existence of the occupation. Remarkably, also still standing were the four steps leading up to the small balcony of the stone building next to the cement Tegart structure. These must have been built later than the rest. Beyond, through the windows of the façade, one could see piles of earth, demolished cement structures, twisted iron and aluminium. Columns that had been severed from the bottom hung from the crumpled, collapsed roof over the courtyard like giant icicles. A few tattered Palestinian flags fluttered forlornly here and there over the ruins. Close to the street on the southwestern side of the compound were the demolished remains of the cubicles which had once served as toilets for those waiting to visit prisoners. They formed a strange sight, with their exposed fronts revealing the porcelain of the toilets, creating a strange glossy seam in the ruins.
Memories come back of an earlier visit, just after the Israeli army withdrew from Ramallah in January 1995. I remember walking into the liberated compound, into the rooms where prisoners were kept, and choking in the stiflingly tiny cells where they were held in solitary confinement for weeks on end, reading the graffiti that, in their desperation, they had scribbled on the walls and the marks they had made to keep track of time. These cells are now empty. There was a prison here and then there was no prison. Yet the prison is all around us.
During my visit I found that the Tegart where Arafat had lived and worked remained in its decrepit state long after he died, the sole physical reminder of what the city had endured two years earlier. This was not without design. It served to highlight the endurance of our leader. There, in the midst of the ruins, the man of symbols lived as the most potent symbol of steadfastness, far superior to any we could ever claim. How could we possibly voice any grievance against his style of leadership or the consequences of his decisions or the fact that little remained of Palestine except symbols, when he had endured such hardship on our behalf? I remember thinking that the luxury of moving forward and consigning the horrors of the past to a building that is turned into a museum was not ours.
Perhaps it cannot be, not until the occupation ends. The suffering we used to endure at the Tegart has only been transferred to what is now the Civil Administration, with its headquarters at the former Jordanian military hospital, which is now Beit El. Yet, as I discovered recently, some of my friends had remained unaware that the Israeli Civil Administration, which controlled so many aspects of Palestinian life, had not been abolished but merely transferred from the Tegart to Beit El. A few nights ago I went to dinner at our neighbour Randa’s house and heard the reactions to the ordeal suffered by Maha, another friend, which she described to us.
‘I had that stupid idea that I would save my son, Ramiz, the humiliation of leaving Palestine via the Israeli-controlled Allenby Bridge into Jordan and take him out through the airport. So yesterday morning I decided to try and obtain a permit. I asked where you got these permits and was directed to the Civil Administration,’ said Maha, who looked exhausted by what she had been through.
‘It still exists? I thought it went with Oslo,’ Muneer said.
‘What do you mean “went”? Where have you been living?’
‘Seriously, I thought it was done away with. Didn’t it used to be at the Muqata’a?’
‘That was a long time ago. Now it is at the edge of the settlement of Beit El. I can’t believe you’re so innocent. You mean you’ve never had the pleasure of going there?’
‘I haven’t left Ramallah for three years.’
‘Well, lucky you.’
‘I haven’t left for five,’ Hani declared.
‘But you will soon,’ Randa said. ‘Aren’t you travelling with Maha and Ramiz?’
‘No, I can’t. They’re going alone. You see, a few years ago I got a green card. But I was unable to travel to the States. It’s now five years since I’ve been there so the card has lost its validity. And I can’t get a US visa because I have a green card. So I’m stuck. But I don’t really want to travel.’
There was something odd about the way that Hani was revealing his situation to us. It was as though he was revelling in his desperate predicament. He didn’t want our sympathy, that was clear. Why, then, was he telling us all this? Perhaps because he wanted to justify leaving his wife, Maha, alone to suffer the humiliation of waiting outside the door of the most dreaded office in the West Bank. Beneath the quiet exterior was an angry, frustrated man.
‘So, let me enlighten you. Just in case, God forbid, you decide to travel. You must first drive in the direction of Beit El. But you can’t drive all the way. The road is blocked. I had to park by the side of the road and walk on the Ramallah–Nablus highway, which is also closed, until I got to the earth mound. I climbed this. Good thing I was wearing my old shoes. Once over this new feature of our landscape, I got to the empty car park into which West Bank cars are not allowed. And there I saw the shacks with the corrugated-iron roofs topped with sandbags and barbed wire, and an empty watchtower, the famous Civil Administration. There it was: four windows with faded signs in Hebrew and Arabic indicating where the different sorts of permits can be applied for. A large crowd of people of all ages had gathered at the windows. At the head of the line I saw the ubiquitous burly young man who immediately makes himself useful. In this case he was acting as interpreter from Arabic to Hebrew. He was also collecting all the permit applications and pushing them through the small openings in the windows, protected by iron bars, so that the soldier-clerks who were invisible to the rest of us could begin to process them. I asked someone close by whether anyone had confirmed that there were people inside. No one knew. Still the efforts to deliver the permit applications continued until the rumour came at ten o’clock that our applications had been processed and the responses were ready. Everyone sighed with relief.
‘It seemed just a matter of time before we would hear back from the invisible soldiers. There was a perceptible reduction in tension. We all just had to wait. For how long, I did not know. I found myself a ledge to sit on and began sweating under the hot sun. There wasn’t any sort of shelter. I regretted not bringing a hat and for the first time in my life envied those women wearing the hijab.’
‘There were other women there as well?’ Muneer asked.
‘Certainly. Why, did you assume I was the only woman? In fact there was an almost exact gender balance. I bought myself a cold drink, sat down and waited. Soon I regretted drinking. There were toilets around but they were filthy, the worst I have yet seen. The swarms of flies, which, alas, had access to both the toilets and us, were beyond belief. I bet the soldiers’ windows had screens.’
Muneer asked, ‘What happened next?’
‘Not much. I was there from nine until eleven thirty, when we heard the announcement that the soldiers were going for their lunch break and would reopen the windows at one o’clock sharp. Lots of comments could now be heard about the kind of food awaiting the soldiers and wishes for their good digestion floated about. And then we waited. One o’clock came and went and nothing happened. No sign of life could be detected behind the barred windows. This silence continued until two o’clock, when we heard a rustle from the other side of the window through which my application for the two permits had been slipped. A huge crowd of hopefuls now pushed ahead waving their identity cards, waiting for their names to be called. But nothing happened. This turned out to be a false alarm. The rustle had not been of any consequence. For all we knew, it could have been the wind or the fan going on for some odd reason inside the shack, or a careless soldier brushing against the curtain on his way in or out. At this point a young man strategically situated at the window told me that he had just seen my papers with the new pile to be submitted when the window reopened after lunch. And all this time I was under the false belief that my papers had been submitted with the ten o’clock batch.
‘Then, at two forty-five, the curtain was pulled asid
e. Within fifteen minutes the soldier received the new pile of applications and the applicants remarked triumphantly that now they have been submitted it would only be a short wait for the results. At three o’clock names were called out, but only from the morning batch. With all the commotion and noise it was impossible to hear the names called in a faint voice from behind the window with the iron bars by a soldier who did not wish to expend much energy in this exercise that he cared nothing about. So it fell to our interpreter of the morning to save the day by shouting out the names as he heard them from the invisible soldier. The most common word uttered after most of the names was marfood [refused]. But the interesting thing was that with every cry of marfood everyone clapped, rather cheerfully, I thought. This lightened up the atmosphere as we watched the subject of the rejection tread away amid consolations offered by the rest of the crowd. Most of those who did not get a straight-out marfood got a provisional rejection. They were told to support their applications with a doctor’s report, employer’s testimony and the like, and to come back with this documentation next day. For these the crowd did not cheer.
‘By four it was clear that my papers had indeed gone with the afternoon batch. There was a quick succession of marfoods and then silence. I was reassured by a young man who seemed to be in the know that they call out the rejectees’ names first. The fact that I had not been called was a good omen. At four fifty I heard my name being called. But to get to the window through the crowd was no easy matter. Some of the men had climbed on top of the railings in order to have a better view of the proceedings behind the iron bars. But as soon as I began to move forward the gallant crowd allowed the right amount of space for a woman to approach the window. Once there I heard the soldier barking out something in Hebrew. What on earth was he saying? I tried English with him but to no avail. By this time a new interpreter had positioned himself where the first had been. He must have already left with his marfood. The interpreter made it clear to me that I was among the marfood crowd and I too got cheered when the word was heard down the line. Seven hours of agony, all wasted. Leaving the shack, I saw a foreign woman driving in confidently where no West Bank cars were allowed. The soldier yelled at her to move the car, but she had enough self-confidence and connections to refuse. I had the sense that she was there to get airport permits for Palestinians invited abroad by her organisation or government. They needed little intercession from the army, so they could depart through the airport and not suffer the indignities of the route through Jordan.
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