16 Family Ties

The old woman and I parted company just beyond the gates—she went home, and I caught a servees back to Abu Dis. Safely back home after a full day at Al-Aqsa and then the hospital, Muhammad and I turned the dial on the radio until we found the Voice of Palestine radio station. I felt a strange sense of relief coming off the adrenalin. My eyes were no longer weeping uncontrollably, but they did feel scratchy from the chemicals. It would take a few days for my throat and lungs to stop burning. The announcer was calling events of the day “The Battle of Jerusalem.” The battle had followed the riots of Thursday, 28 September, when the tension that had built up around the circumstances of occupation was stoked and channelled by Ariel Sharon, his colleagues, and the armed Israeli officers. Hanan Ashrawi, a Palestinian legislator, scholar, and human rights activist, blamed the Israelis for a “massacre” against the Palestinians, describing their actions as deliberately “targeting peaceful worshippers” rather than perpetuating “random violence.” I thought of how Palestinians were portrayed in the news in North America. So often, we were represented simply as Arab troublemakers. During my conversations with people I met, and from reading the papers and listening to the news, I learned that a hundred thousand people had showed up in solidarity at a rally in Washington to protest Israeli occupation, oppression, and the destruction of Palestine. I wondered what the Canadian newspapers were saying, as I had not seen any mention of Canada’s response to the crisis.

When I heard Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak on the radio saying he hoped these incidents “wouldn’t affect the peace process” and that parties seeking peace should “stop fighting now,” I felt a desire to talk to someone like Uncle Yazan back home—someone who could help me understand all the thoughts and feelings that flew through my head like bullets. Perhaps between the two of us we could figure out why Barak would say the things he was saying—he had, after all, approved Sharon’s visit to Haram esh-Sharif. And anyway, how could people stop fighting just like that?

Pretending, hoping, that life would have returned to normal, I went to Al-Quds first thing on Saturday morning. Muhammad came with me. I picked up a newspaper on my way to the bus stop. No city buses were entering Abu Dis, so I had to use a servees. On the way into the city, the driver stopped to pick up a man.

“What’s the situation like in Jerusalem,” he asked as he boarded the bus.

“Bullets flying, people dying,” was the driver’s response.

A youth seated in front of us turned around. “Normal,” he said.

To me, the man was describing a place of carnage; for the children who grew up here, it was the status quo. In Edmonton, someone getting on the bus might talk about the weather. Here, you asked about people’s safety, hoping to find out how strict the Israelis were being as they forced their control over Palestinians.

Muhammad and I read the paper and listened to the radio on the way in. Ramallah, Beit Lahm, Tulkarem, Gaza, Nablus—all were on fire. When we drove close to the police checkpoint just outside the Old City, Muhammad asked the driver of the servees to stop. He did not want to face the Israeli officers. But I told him to keep driving. He stopped at the checkpoint. The officers checked our documentation, then let us pass. How different it felt from the previous day, when children had set up and staffed the checkpoints going out of the Old City.

Al-Quds was ghostlike and littered with rubble from the previous day. There were Israeli soldiers everywhere. Burned-out tires lay smouldering in the streets. They had been rolled into the street as a way to block the soldier’s view when the police fired on protesters—a toxic but ingenuous way for protesters to protect themselves. I was noticing everything, soaking it up. Breathing it in. It stung.

All the shops were closed, either in protest or as a sign of respect for those who had been killed in the conflict. To soothe the trauma of the day, we decided we needed some real Palestinian food. We found a man barbecuing some kebabs on the street. Muhammad and I stood amid the carnage, listening to the sizzle of the meat, watching the smoke from his grill rising into the air. We watched with admiration as he carefully turned the kebabs loaded with vegetables.

As I took in the devastation and ate my kebab, the news about Ramallah gnawed at me. I had family there and I wanted to see for myself what the situation was like for them, so Muhammad and I found a servees to take us there.

Along the way, we passed through several Palestinian Authority checkpoints without incident, much to Muhammad’s relief. We got to the outskirts of Ramallah around mid-morning and pulled up at another checkpoint. As we got off the bus while the authorities checked the vehicle, I made the mistake of pointing my camera at the ambulances and the PA officers. A PA soldier approached and asked what I was doing.

“Just observing,” I told him.

“Are you a reporter?” he said.

“Freelance.”

“Come and meet my superior.”

I think our driver must’ve known what was coming, because he drove off as soon as the PA authorities started speaking to us. The officer asked for my passport. I gave it to him, and Muhammad also handed over his ID. I always felt a twinge of discomfort when I saw my passport leave my hands and end up in the hands of strangers who could do anything they wanted with it.

In the superior’s office, we were asked a few questions, our bags were confiscated, and we were ordered to go and wait in the back of their Jeep. After a while, I was told I could leave but had to come back in the morning for questioning. Muhammad had to stay, they said.

I refused to leave without my friend. “No, I will go for questioning now,” I said.

The officer shrugged. He didn’t seem concerned either way. “The reason we are detaining you,” he said as we walked back to the office, “is because the Israeli soldiers are using camcorders and filming people so they are later investigated—and you have a camcorder.”

“You think I am Israeli?”

The man shrugged. “Sometimes it is difficult to tell.”

I couldn’t help but laugh wryly. I was learning that even here people saw me as different and had trouble accepting me for who I am. In Canada, white Canadians often asked me where I was from, as if I saying I was from Edmonton was not enough. But it felt different somehow when a Palestinian doubted where I was from.

In a reversal of my fortunes, Muhammad now was free to go, and I had to stay. I told him to leave, but he wouldn’t. I threatened to make a big scene if he did not leave, but he stubbornly insisted that he would not abandon me. So they detained him as well.

There we were, detained in one of the PA centres, confined by conflict and my desire to document this mayhem. As we walked in, the officers asked if we were hungry. We said yes and they brought us a plateful of bamiyeh with rice. As we ate, we sat and watched television reports of men and women being killed or finding their way to the hospital. The detention space was like a coffee shop, with no formalities—in fact, the whole thing seemed househ—confused and disorganized.

We were asked questions in an intelligence agency building called the Mukhabarat, which means Intelligence. When we were done, we were told we were free to leave. As we walked thought the front office the officer there said, “Don’t use your camcorder. The Palestinian authorities might imprison you for a month or so.”

We thanked him for the advice and left. As immersed as I was I the unfolding events, I realized, I remained a foreigner. They did not offer us a ride back downtown, so we found another servees to take us into the city. We wanted to be there because we had seen on the television that there was open conflict on the edges of Ramallah, and we thought it might be safer downtown. As we drove into the city, we could see the Israeli soldiers firing at children who were throwing rocks. Beyond them, about 750 metres down the hill, I could see a hotel with some Israeli soldiers standing on the roof, shooting down at the protesters. I asked a nearby PA officer if I could use my camcorder.

“Go ahead,” he said, “but don’t film people at close range and don’t get too close to the hotel—too many snipers.”

It was chaotic. People were throwing rocks at police and soldiers stationed on the ground. Tear gas smoke clung to the air and bullets were flying everywhere. Around me, the wounded fell to the ground. There they sat. Those who could took cover, holding onto their stomachs, legs, or arms—whatever part of their body was injured.

Up against a wall, I heard bullets pinging close to my head—once, twice, three times. Fragments of cinderblock flew into my face. I scrambled to the ground. A man nearby was shot in the leg.

There was destruction was everywhere—tires on cars had been shot out, people were dying around me. A man in front of me was arguing with Israelis and getting beaten right in front of me. I thought of the man who had died in front of me in Al-Quds the day before. I had been standing right there with my camcorder. Even if I could’ve acted in time to film his death, I didn’t know if it was better to record the action, or to respect his moment of passing. I didn’t know whether I could stomach a repeat of that experience less than twenty-four hours later.

When the crossfire of bullets and stones settled down a bit, we left downtown Ramallah and headed back to Muhammad and Wael’s place in Abu Dis. It was a mess everywhere as we drove home. My fingers were itching to take out my camcorder. The driver could tell what I was thinking. “No—don’t do it! It’s trouble!”

On the radio in the servees, we heard that the man who had been shot in the head in Jerusalem was from Abu Dis. He was proclaimed a shaheed—a witness, a martyr.

In the past two days, I had seen the world as I knew it before shatter. As the news drifted over the airwaves, it dawned on me that I had witnessed the making of a martyr. A few feet to one side, and it could have been me.

About a week after my trip to Ramallah, my cousin Reham and her husband, Youssef, invited me to visit for a couple of days. When my family lived in Jordan, Reham’s family lived next door and we visited all the time. In the middle of an exploding world, they invited me to come and visit. A normal invitation, as if nothing unusual was happening. “Hey, Mowafa, come and eat with us, come and stay over. You’re family.” I longed for such a sense of normality.

Reham and Youssef did not tell me about the constant IDF assaults where they lived—bullets, tanks, and gunfire during the night. The noise woke me up. Reham and Youssef were sound asleep. It was like just another night to them.

Whenever I could, I used an online service to phone my dad; witnessing death compelled me to reach out. But our conversations were difficult. Every time, my father would say, “Come back here, come back. What are you doing there? Come back now.” He always said the same thing: that it was dangerous in Palestine and that I’d be better off back in Canada with a steady job. I could not bring myself to tell him that several times I had nearly been killed, or that there was little to draw me back to Edmonton. My father was in an unstable relationship. My mother and brothers were in Vancouver, and I often felt unwelcome in my own homeland.

But I could tell him about Reham and Youssef and my visit to Hebron. I wanted to tell my family where I was and assure them that I was being hosted with care and hospitality in the Arab way. Reham and Youssef let me use their phone.

“I’m fine,” I told my parents. “I am well fed, and I have a good place to stay in Abu Dis, but last night was noisy.” I couldn’t bring myself to tell them the noise was from the fighting.

My parents would have liked to be reunited with some of their family in Palestine. As it turned out, I was the missing link, the connector, and often in surprising ways. Sometimes, it seemed, God would guide me in the most unexpected ways. One morning in mid-October, I stopped a servees to go to Bethlehem, but the driver said he was going to Ramallah. I was getting used to people asking me where I was from, so when the driver asked, I had an answer ready.

“My family is from Lydda,” I told him. We were still talking about Lydda and the fact that he was heading to Ramallah when the radio in the cab announced another funeral for a martyr, a member of the Al-Anati family. That was my mother’s family! I wanted to pay my respects, so I dropped my plans of going to Bethlehem and instead asked the driver if he could take me to where the azza (funeral) would be. He said he would.

Maybe I shouldn’t go, I thought, not knowing who this person was or what relation he had been to me. After all, the deceased was a distant relative, connected to me through my great-grandmother’s second marriage. Still, I wanted to go.

In Ramallah, the cab driver asked around where the funeral was being held. Eventually, we found a child who said he knew where to go, but it turned out to be the wrong funeral. The whole city was grieving. Disoriented, I felt like an idiot, but the family was very friendly. They told me to walk two blocks to find the ceremony I was looking for. I knew everything would be okay. I walked into the place, a local youth club, and the first person I saw was Abu Khalid, my mother’s uncle on her father’s side. My mother’s uncle! I knew his family from Jordan when we used to visit there; they were our neighbours. I was shocked at how close this martyr, the man being mourned, was to me. “I came all the way from Canada to pay my respects,” I said to everyone. I was joking, but also serious.

People were staring at me, nodding and smiling, whispering to each other. I offered my condolences to everyone, and some even remembered and recognized me. They seemed surprised but happy to see me. I went along the row of people, shaking hands, and finally came to my mother’s second uncle. We kissed and hugged, and he introduced me to the family, which was large: “From Canada … Mowafaq Househ, son of Hanan Ghnaim and Said Househ.”

It felt so good. I had not known I would find them when I went to the Middle East, though I had some vague idea of where they were. It was a funeral, yet the mood was not sad. People talked as they normally did, and they were smiling. In Islam, we are taught that martyrs are not dead: they are alive even though we are not with them. The idea is to rejoice because they are now with Allah, safe and at peace.

While I was with my family in Ramallah to commemorate my mother’s cousin’s death, I went to pray in the nearby masjid. I will not forget that day. It was 12 October, and I recall having to clear debris off the floor before I could say my prayers because the Israeli soldiers had bombed the masjid. It was dark inside because the bombing had cut the electricity as well. That was also the day two Israeli undercover agents were lynched in Ramallah. At least I found some comfort in the knowledge that my mother’s cousin, the late Emad Anati, who had been working with the Palestinian Authority, had died defending Ramallah and his family against the IDF—fighting against the oppressor for his homeland, family, and religion. I felt proud and began to understand what death is often like in the homeland. I began to compose a letter to my mother in my mind:

Dear Mother,

I met many people, though some not directly. I have met your uncle, Abu Khalid, and I even met your cousin Emad. He gave his life for Palestine.