15 Violence in the Streets

It was Friday, a day of prayer, the day after Sharon’s appearance at Masjid al-Aqsa. Almost twenty thousand Muslims had gathered at the masjid for dawn prayers, and with them came the rows of police officers. They were clearly there to intimidate the faithful after the events of the previous day.

I was still on the bus to Jerusalem, hoping to be at the masjid for dhuhr prayer time at noon when news began to filter through to us over the radio. As people hopped onto the microbus, they relayed what they had heard: The demonstrations began right after prayers. Youth were throwing rocks as if their lives depended on it—because their lives do depend on this struggle. When the police could no longer handle the barrage of angry youth, the soldiers in full riot gear came in and started shooting at people, live ammunition as well as rubber bullets. The Palestinian Authority had spoken up. On its official radio station, the Voice of Palestine, it had called on “all Palestinians to come and defend Al-Aqsa.” Even though Palestinians often sneered at the PA because they felt the organization was only serving its own interests and working with Israel to undermine Palestinian interests, people listened. Schools were closed and students arrived at the Haram esh-Sharif in buses. Speakers were blasting Arabic beats, almost always including Ahmad Kaabour’s greatest hit, “Ounadikom,” which had recently been re-released.

When I had stood outside Edmonton’s Al-Rashid Mosque with my pellet gun as a thirteen-year-old almost exactly a decade before, I had thought that I might die and had wondered why a mere child should be made to carry a weapon. Now I was on a bus, headed into a battlefield armed only with my curiosity, but I was beginning to understand the questions a naïve young boy in Edmonton could not answer.

Wael, Muhammad and Ali had warned me not to go into the city for prayers, but rather to go to a local masjid in Abu Dis, but I imagined I could use my Canadian passport to get me through blockades and out of trouble if necessary. The bus driver dropped us off as close to the Old City as he could get, and I walked the rest of the way. I was in the thick of things now, surrounded by real heroes—people who faced real bullets. This time, I was not a child standing outside the mosque with a pellet gun mired in self-pity. I could smell the fear, feel it, hear it. It could sense the tension, the courage, and the hesitation. I was tense, scared, and excited. I was finally living the stories I had only heard from others or had read about.

A bullet pinged by my leg. It frightened me and I felt a nauseating rush in my body. This was really happening. Then the action fell into sequence. I could feel my body dissociating from the events and it felt as though I was watching the day unfold in a movie. Detaching myself from the here and now was the only way I could cope with the trauma I was experiencing. I wondered whether I would die a martyr, or whether I would be a spectator only. I was confused, worried, excited, scared. Amid the chaos that was unfolding round me at Al-Aqsa, as I was gasping for breath, I thought, Dad, I love you. I love you and I don’t know how you made it. I never knew what it was like for you and the others. If I die, Dad, Mom, will you be happy I am a martyr?

Two more bullets flew by near my head. I shook myself. I didn’t have to die now. I should be as smart as those kids hiding behind the trees. I could see things slamming against the trunks. There were sounds—crackling, spattering, whining, and popping. Not rocks. I was only a hundred metres away from the soldiers, and I could see plainly that they were firing at people indiscriminately—men, women, children, it did not matter to them. And even as the bullets headed one way, rocks were going the opposite direction. It was raining rocks, hundreds of them, big and small, flying with speed and force that didn’t seem possible. They were hitting the riot police shields, drumming into them, and bouncing off like hail. Bullets continued to whizz by in response.

When I had caused trouble in Edmonton, I could predict possible outcomes and could assess the risks, but here it was different. I had arrived in the Old City wanting to be part of the action, but I quickly realized I was out of my depth. Instead of joining the protesters, I stood on the sidelines and turned to doing what I knew, which was taking videos. As much as I would have loved to be part of the action, I knew that what I could contribute was to create a video record. In the frenzy of the moment, I tried to get my video camera to work so that I could film what I was seeing. It did not help that I could see the Musta’ribeen—the Israeli soldiers that look Arabic and speak Arabic—joining the protesters and egging them on. Then in a split second they would pull black masks over their heads and start arresting protesters.

The crowd kept pushing towards Qubbat as-Sakhra, the Dome of the Rock, cornering the blue uniformed riot police who were stationed at the gates. They started firing rubber bullets at the crowd as they retreated. As they retreated, the green uniforms of the Israeli Defense Forces started to join them, running from the gate closest to Qubbat as-Sakhra. Their weapons weighed heavily on their bodies. I could hear the sound of the gunfire change with their arrival. They were shooting live rounds! Unlike the riot police who fired shots into the ground, the IDF soldiers were aiming directly at the crowd. They were aiming to kill.

The riot police, emboldened by the presence of the IDF, began to push forward again. Now, their fire became more focused, deliberate. This time, there was live ammunition as well as rubber bullets. I knew they were live bullets because people stopped throwing stones and turned to run away when the soldiers dressed in green started to shoot indiscriminately into the crowd. People fell and some did not get back up. With rubber bullets, people got back up and pushed closer. They were not doing that now. Also, there was more blood as the live bullets struck people and exploded.

As I ran for cover under fire of the bullets, I saw people being hit in the legs and in the head. One youth was struck in the forehead. He died instantly. Blood spouted from his head as demonstrators fled. Those who couldn’t get out of the Qubbat as-Sakhra complex clung to the shadow and sanctuary of the masjid, but they couldn’t escape the bullets. I saw blood everywhere. Another bullet flew past. A man died in front of me, three metres away.

I moved along with the crowd. Just outside the masjid, I heard someone yell, “Hey! You!”

I jumped. It was an Arab youth, one of a group who had positioned themselves at the entrance to the masjid to check that no Musta’ribeen were trying to enter. I could see from their faces that they were prepared to hurt anyone who tried to stop the rioters or the people throwing stones from the rooftops. He continued to shout at me in Arabic, fear and anger twisting his face into a grin.

“Where are you from? What are you?”

I began answering him, talking very fast.

“Your Arabic,” he said, “it sounds foreign.”

I couldn’t believe it. In this hell, he was criticizing the way I spoke. He had others with him. I thought they were going to kill me. I found myself scrambling in my pocket and bag. “Here, man, look at my Canadian passport.. I’m not Israeli. I have an Arab name.”

While the youth was interrogating me, I caught sight of Adnan among the crowd outside the premises. I shoved the camera into his hands and told him to shoot videos of me, just like he had the day before.

“It’s okay,” said the youth at the checkpoint. “If you don’t have weapons, go and find cover, and don’t be some idiot from Canada.”

I wanted to find shelter more than anything else at that moment, but I was fighting my way through a cloud of tear gas, and unable to get out. The allegedly non-lethal gas ripped into my nose and eyes and tore through my mouth and lungs as I struggled to breathe. I felt an asthma attack closing in on me again, just like the day before. I needed to close my stinging eyes. I was blinded.

I managed to crouch behind a wall. In the chaos, I’d lost sight of Adnan. I gulped and wheezed, fighting the tear gas. I remembered how, as students, we joked about the information that was printed by the university to manage risk from usually peaceful rallies on campus: If you are in a crowd that is being dispersed involuntarily by the police, it is important to leave in larger groups so that you will have witnesses and support. Some tactics used by police are pepper spray, tear gas, etc. Right now, I thought, I could use a support group to get me out of here. What I knew about tear gas came from student information sessions and pamphlets. Its effects wear off quickly, the pamphlets said. It wasn’t just babies and old people who could suffer more permanent damage. What they didn’t tell you, or what I couldn’t remember, was how to stop the searing pain.

I don’t know where it came from, but all of a sudden, like a blessing, there it was—a long piece of cloth stuffed into my hand. I was still trying to be an international observer, looking out from my refuge with tear-streaked eyes as I was wheezed and choked—and this scarf came to my rescue out of nowhere. I slapped it against my face and tied it behind my head. This was not Dickinsfield High in Edmonton, where I had put on a show with a misunderstood scarf. This keffiyeh was a lifeline.

In 1987, during the First Intifada, I was just beginning to understand what being Palestinian meant. I was only ten years old, and in Canada, when the Palestinian uprising erupted in the Israeli-occupied territories. It began with violence and fighting as intense as in 1948 and 1967. Whenever I heard about it, in bits and pieces, it was from my family or other adults. They had come to Canada for a better, safer future. By 1993, the sixth year of the First Intifada, it seemed the Palestinians had at last received some recognition and respect from the Western world—but there was little from Israel, and no commitments for change. Now, in this moment, as I crouched behind a wall in Old Jerusalem, I did not think of myself as Canadian. Yes, I had grown up and had lived there most of my life, but right then I felt as if Palestine had been my lifelong home. I felt the loss of loved ones more closely than ever before and could imagine having had my home bulldozed. I felt that I personally had been suspected, arrested, and tortured and was always watched, taunted, and targeted. In that moment, it was as though I had lived for years under Israeli occupation, trying to keep the family together, seeing violence many days in the year, hearing about wars and demonstrations. A citizen of nowhere, someone who knew only occupation.

When people experience the barrage of injustices as Palestinians have endured for generations, they will double their efforts to achieve justice for themselves and their children. Being victimized generation after generation was not making Palestinians cower. On the contrary, that was what made my people a threat to Israel. In this moment, I realized, I was witness to the crimes committed against us, and as my breathing eased under the keffiyeh, I thought how our survival incriminated our oppressors.

I’d first seen the Palestinian flag—red, green, black, and white—at home in Canada, in a parade. There it was simply a flag, a symbol of identity among many others. Here, every time the Palestinian flag was raised, bullets were fired. At one point, I could hear a man shouting over the loudspeakers about a massacre, calling for ambulances. Back home, I had heard about massacres in Palestine. Now I was in the middle of one.

How quickly would the ambulances get here? How efficient would things be? I thought of my eye injury as a child and being rushed to hospital by my father, driving like a madman, the police helping us get there even faster. That was not going to happen. Not here. Not today.

Children were running behind cars, their feet pounding, raising clouds of dust, some trying to use slingshots, their hands frantic and angry. They were like any guerrilla army, working with the little they had. I saw makeshift weapons thrown at their targets, bottles smashing, gas igniting into a blossom of fire. I couldn’t believe these children, how brave and brazen they were. One of them, about thirteen years old, was being beaten by grown men. Not far from that horror, I came across a woman in her sixties, wearing her traditional embroidered Palestinian abaya and a white hijab. She had a wound on her leg but was still cursing the soldiers as she threw the stones that other women were collecting for her. I don’t know which was more terrible, the look on her face or the wound in her leg. Seeing her power reminded me of the strength of Palestinian Muslim women—the strength of my mother, who walked through dark city streets putting up her Herbalife® posters to generate income as a single mother of five children. In her own way, my mother was fighting to preserve her culture and religion in Canada, and I knew she would have been formidable here in Palestine.

Many of the Israeli soldiers on that terrifying day in September 2000 looked younger than me, perhaps eighteen or nineteen. They did not look like a formidable Israeli force. Surrounded by an angry mob throwing rocks at them, they simply looked frightened. I struggled to understand why they were so frightened fighting civilians who were mostly throwing rocks at live machine-gun fire.

The live ammunition kept coming, and people kept running and crawling through the gates. As we ran outside the gates, I heard the thud of Israeli clubs falling on the heads and backs of people behind me. Most of the people at the back of the crowd were women, both young and old. A woman fell down in front of me, but no one could get to her—there was too much chaos. As I saw her disappear under the feet of a fleeing crowd, I felt the oppression and the pain, my parents carried.

The loudspeaker put out a call that hospitals were looking for blood donors to help treat the wounded. Muhammad and I decided to find a servees that could take us to the Makassed hospital, which was the closest and easiest to get to from the Qubbat as-Sakhra. It was the one concrete thing I felt do to help. Every step Muhammad and I took away from Al-Aqsa seemed to lead us into further protests. Both Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat were fools if they thought they could stop things now. It was madness—in some places, it was action that didn’t end.

How quickly the children I’d seen on the streets in the days before had become warriors. Children! Just the age I’d been while trying to discover where I belonged in Edmonton. They had set up checkpoints on the periphery of the Old City and looked more like adults than I had when I had defended Al-Rashid Mosque against vandals and violence. If I couldn’t stand up outside a mosque for more than one night, what would I have been like at a checkpoint?

As we arrived at the hospital, we saw soldiers on top of the hill and demonstrators at the bottom. Some of the protesters had the keffiyeh wrapped around their face and neck—to prevent having themselves and their families recognized and targeted by Israeli forces. I had pulled mine off my face and used it to wipe off the sweat and dust. If my asthma got worse, I could surely get help at the hospital. Muhammad and I laughed nervously about that. The emergency rooms were filling up with the crushed and bloody humans being carried and pulled through the crowd—rushing to be treated at a backlogged, undersupplied hospital or to be wrapped in an outlawed flag as a funeral shroud. We doubted that an asthma attack would be considered an emergency.

As a Muslim and Arab in the West, I’ve had my own kind of suffering, and no doubt others who have immigrated to North America or who were born there will understand. Those who had always been here in the Middle East might have doubted me if I had told them that Canadian officers, such as members of the settler-serving RCMP or Constable Case Model from the Edmonton Police Service, had some things in common with the Israeli forces.

In the end, my efforts to get to one of the hospitals came to nothing. Even though I had donated blood in Canada, they would not accept my blood in Jerusalem, not even on a day when the Palestinian blood that flowed in my veins was being spilled not far from me. They said it was because I had asthma, but I found that hard to believe, as it had not prevented me from donating blood in Canada. There was no direct transport back to Abu Dis, which meant that we first had to go back the Old City to get a ride home. On the way back from the hospital, I again saw the elderly woman who had been throwing stones during the protests. She was still wearing her traditional embroidered abaya and was walking along, despite her wound. The man driving our vehicle was not slowing down, but I told him, “No, stop … pick her up. She is an old woman and deserves respect.” To me, this woman was a revolutionary; she brought tears to my eyes. The driver stopped. When we arrived at a checkpoint, the driver was tense, because he thought the kids there might begin throwing rocks at his bus. It certainly looked as though they might. The woman opened her window and yelled at them. It was like their mother or grandmother screaming at them. Embarrassed, they stopped what they were doing, and let our bus pass undisturbed. It was almost humorous.

The servees driver stopped a little way from the gates and the old woman and I walked the rest of the way to the Old City. “I have been shot twice,” she said as we went through the gate, “But every time they hit me, I come back stronger.”