17 Surrounded by Family in the Middle of a War

After I had offered my condolences to family in Ramallah and had prayed at the local masjid, I returned to Abu Dis. Wael and Muhammad had gone home to visit their families, so I was alone at home. In a way, I was glad to be alone because I needed the time alone to process recent events. When I got home, I discovered the power in our apartment had been turned off. To sit in the darkness with the power cut off, listening to the battery-powered radio and learning about events that are occurring outside your doorstep, is a surreal experience. There were no streetlights that could shine even a sliver of light into the apartment. I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face until my eyes adjusted to the blackness. Whatever identity I had was stripped away, blacked out. Alone in the darkness, I replayed the memories of soldiers using rockets, tanks, machine guns, and bullets during protests. Now they were moving beyond the city centres, encroaching on the suburbs of Palestinian towns and refugee camps. The Israelis were shooting at houses, sparing no one.

On the radio, a Palestinian from Ain al-Hilweh refugee camp in Lebanon had called in and was crying on the phone, saying, “I want to be with my Palestinian brothers and sisters … to help them.” Would the Israeli soldiers enter Abu Dis at night? the caller asked. Would they assault the town? Were we all suspect here? Is this why the power had been shut down? To offer them the cover of complete darkness? Under the agreement of the 1995 Oslo Accord, Abu Dis was under joint Israeli and Palestinian control. This meant that in most of the city, the Palestinian Authority took care of civilian matters, while Israel was in control of security. Clearly, electricity was considered a matter of security, for the Jerusalem Electricity Power Company provided electricity, and power cuts to our part of the city were not uncommon. Israeli needs came first. Abu Dis overlooked the Haram esh-Sharif from near Jabal al-Zaytun, the Mount of Olives, so its proximity to Jerusalem made the city a contender for becoming the capital of a Palestinian state. Was it a target now? My mind whirled with questions in the darkness.

With the IDF patrolling the streets and shooting indiscriminately, everyone was staying home to protect themselves. I hoped things would calm down and that the Israelis would get the message that Palestinians would continue to fight for our freedom until our death.

The news reports were filled with accounts of conflicts between Israeli soldiers and Palestinians, and the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Barak, had asked the troops to withdraw, but people were still being killed and injured severely by his forces. Conflict was heating up, with the many Palestinians who lived inside Israel leading demonstrations against Israeli forces.

During the azza I had attended in Ramallah, I had met my family, one after another, all in mourning, yet defiant and proud that their family’s blood had been spilled for the Palestinian struggle. One cousin had spent ten years in prison. He was arrested when he was sixteen for killing a collaborator and was sentenced to life imprisonment but was released after a decade in prison and several appeals to his sentence.

When I began meeting some of my own family and discovered that we had a martyr among us, the conflict had become personal, and I felt the effects of Israeli brutality even more. I realized that it could easily have been me who had died battling Israeli forces, defending Ramallah and working with the Palestinian Authority.

I went to bed in the dark with my head bursting with images and thoughts. I woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of gunfire. A truck with a blaring loudspeaker drove by our apartment: “Oh men of Abu Dis, come out and defend your town, the Israelis have invaded.” I turned on my radio but couldn’t find out anything to give me more information about what was happening outside. In this Israeli-controlled town, when Arab citizens were attacked by settlers, the Israeli state did not seem to consider this a matter of security, and so did nothing. Citizens had to defend themselves. I could hear people coming out on the rooftops and opening their windows to see what was going on. The commotion went on for three hours after the announcement of an invasion. Then, in the early hours of the morning, a minor invasion of mosquitoes began, and I knew I wouldn’t be going back to sleep. I felt attacked and itchy all over. I got dressed and sat waiting for the sun to rise over Al-Quds and bathe the Qubbat as-Sakhra in gold.

Over the next few days, the violence continued in Jerusalem and Abu Dis, in Ramallah, in Hebron, everywhere I’d been and where I had family. Through it all, the family connections grew stronger. I returned to my cousin Reham’s house in Hebron, where I was wrapped in the warmth of traditional greetings and hospitality. Reham’s husband, Youssef, was a dentist. He was an intelligent man who had lived for nineteen years in the West, mostly in Romania. His father was the most welcoming and generous elder I met in Palestine. Every time I visited Reham and Youssef, the old man would take me to his tiny vineyard and give me fresh grapes off the vines. Many people found it hard to believe that I was here, that I had wanted to come and live among “honourable people,” but Youssef’s father was not one of them. Every time we spoke, he encouraged me to stay in Palestine.

I had an aunt who lived in Mukhayyam Balata, the refugee camp adjacent to Nablus in the northern West Bank. Aunt Huda was my mother’s half-sister. She was very poor and had no relatives left in Palestine. Her children had left or were in prison. One of her children was killed by an Israeli soldier. As a result, Aunt Huda felt very isolated and lonely. She could not contain her excitement when I contacted her to ask if I could visit.

I travelled alone to Nablus, stopping off again in Ramallah on the way there. It was chaos. Settlers were throwing rocks at Palestinian cars, and the streets were littered with rocks and glass. Nablus was closed off. To get there, I had to hitch a ride with the locals, who would speed through the mountains and villages, taking irregular routes. They knew every nook and cranny of this land. I had little choice but to trust them with my life and simply be a stunned passenger. In some ways, I had been the daring one back home in Edmonton, sticking my neck out, taking risks, but it was nothing like this. Back then, I sometimes thought I could feel my spirit dying, but here it might be my body departing along with it.

I was not the only one trying to get into Nablus. Several of us crammed into in an old Mercedes bus. The driver took us through mountain villages and back roads. My fellow passengers feared that settlers would act against us and that we might be killed by a soldier in one of the helicopters that circled above. As we crept through the empty streets of a village that was under a twenty-four-hour curfew at the time, we were stopped by Israeli soldiers. They ordered us to get out of the car and demanded everyone’s identification. “Where are you going?” they asked.

One man, Muhammad, who was about twenty, was asked whether he spoke Hebrew. “Aní lo medabér ivrít—No, I don’t speak Hebrew,” Muhammad replied, in Hebrew.

The soldier looked at him for a moment, turned away, then suddenly spun back around and slapped him across the head. Muhammad staggered from the force of the blow. The rest of us stood frozen to the ground, stunned and unable to rush forward to defend one of our own.

Muhammad’s eyes looked shiny but stayed fixed on the soldier. A tear slowly formed in one eye and squeezed its way out. He fought back more tears and stood defiantly straight in the sun. The soldier stared back, and we thought he was about to hit Muhammad again when one of the other soldiers said to his colleague in Arabic, “Khalas.” Enough.

Then they let us go. We got back into the car and started off again. We were all silent, a hundred unsaid things hanging over us. Finally, the old man next to me broke the silence. “Not to worry son, all your mistakes will be forgiven, to this day, for that slap you received.” All of us then consoled and congratulated him.

Eventually, we got to Nablus. As soon as I sat down my troubles left me and I felt spoiled by the generosity my aunt extended to me. I did not want to sleep at her place because I knew that when Arabs have guests they have to buy and purchase a lot of things and I did not want to overburden Aunt Huda and her husband because they were poor. As the evening approached, I bid them farewell and found a hostel nearby where I could sleep the night. When I woke in the morning, my money was gone. Fortunately, the person was an honourable thief with enough compassion to leave me money to get back home to Abu Dis.

I found a servees that was headed back to Jerusalem and settled into my seat. When we arrived in Ramallah, there were more helicopters overhead. As I listened to the radio, I began to understand why we had encountered helicopters on the way to Nablus. It all had to do with the two Israeli soldiers who had been killed. Israel was exacting revenge. Ehud Barak’s government claimed that the soldiers had taken a wrong turn when entering Ramallah and had not seen the Palestinian checkpoint flags. Usually when Israeli soldiers were caught in Palestinian territories, they were returned, but this was during the height of the Intifada and the soldiers were lynched, set on fire, and dragged around the streets of Ramallah. Their death reflected the tensions of the time.

Above us, the Apache helicopters and airplanes continued to circle over Ramallah, dropping bombs on the city. The streets had erupted with violence, and the electricity was shut off, reminding us that the Israelis controlled everything—from roads to water and phone lines. I felt overwhelmed. I had just made my way back to Ramallah from Nablus by criss-crossing a maze of roads that ran through the fragments of land that made up Palestine. I kept hoping for the situation to improve, but things just seemed to get worse and worse. All around the vehicle, I could see buildings that had been attacked, and burned-out cars. When a house is destroyed—whether because tanks and helicopters in Beit Jala fired shots at it or because it was bulldozed in Hebron, so much more is lost than just the building. I had recently learned about one home that had been destroyed by a missile, killing the father, and seriously wounding his family. Just like that, the family’s future had been shattered, and the children have to grow up without the guidance of their father. I felt that this same violence had taken part of my parents from me, that this home-destruction program had caused the stress that split them.

I thought of what my grandfather’s home in Lydda had meant to him, how Uncle Faisal had worked hard to find a new home in Canada, how my mother and father had created a home for a growing family in Edmonton. A family home should be filled with pride as well as love, and the small objects that make memories, like family pictures, heirlooms, and images of the Qubbat as-Sakhra. These objects of memory would all be lost in the flames of Ramallah. The thought saddened me.

The roads from Ramallah to Jerusalem were closed, but I found a car and driver to take me back to the city through the back roads. We were stopped at one checkpoint, and I was asked for my passport, but we were allowed through. Back in Jerusalem, at the Internet café, I phoned my dad and my mom, relieved to be connecting with people I knew—people far away who were important to me. Both my parents begged me to come back, but all I could think as they spoke was, I don’t want to run away from war like the previous generation did. I wanted to stick it out.

As I made my way back to Abu Dis, hitchhiking where I could find someone to take me part of the way, and walking the other stretches, I passed by soldiers without being asked for ID. This happened to me often, and at those times, it troubled me that I was allowed to move around with ease while innocent old men and women were stopped and checked.

The past few days had been filled with strange contrasts—from peacefully picking and eating grapes in my relatives’ garden in Hebron to the chilling shock of nasty encounters with soldiers on the road, and nightly gunfire no matter where I found myself. The gunshots would start at around 7 p.m., and people would begin to close their shops, though some remained open, not seeming especially concerned. “How can you be so cool when the firing is so close?” I asked shopkeepers time and again.

And each time, they’d say something like, “Today is nothing. You should have seen yesterday. For the last two weeks, every night there were helicopter machine-gun attacks. It becomes the daily routine. People are used to it.”

A day or two after returning from Nablus, I sat at my cousin Reem’s place watching TV. The news broadcaster reported that eight Palestinians had been arrested in connection with the deaths of the two Israeli soldiers in Ramallah. But the report did not say how they were apprehended. It did not say anything about the hundred Palestinians who had been killed, or about the hundreds who had been injured. Either there were no arrests made for crimes like these, or the soldiers were given light sentences. Court proceedings, it seemed, were only formalities. Arabs living outside the area of conflict, like many in Iraq, were donating food, supplies, and equipment to provide relief for Palestinians. They had sent a legion of doctors to nearby Jordan to help the wounded who could make it out of occupied Palestine and across the border.

As Reem and I were eating, I told her how I’d sometimes go to a Western fast-food joint to soothe my homesickness. When I did that, every bite, every sip, every crunch reminded me of times in Canada, and I longed to be back there. I was craving fast food more than ever, I said to her. She understood: It was time for me to go home. I didn’t want to lose my sanity here, and I sensed that it could happen.

I told Reem a story about the time Uncle Faisal and his family had gone to the McDonald’s at Northgate Centre mall. Someone called them “fucking Pakis” and told them to “go back to your country.” My Aunt Khadija had taken off her shoes, and ready to use them as weapons to defend her family from these hoodlums. Reem laughed.

When that incident occurred, Uncle Faisal had been in Canada for many years and was doing well. All his kids had been born there, but the honeymoon was over. They didn’t look like white Canadians, so a “happy meal” experience meant being dished up a healthy dose of racism and bigotry on the side. And yet, even as I told the story, I knew that the racism we experienced in Canada was different and that many Palestinians would never have the luxury of living in a country like Canada.

As we spoke and watched television, I decided I could deal with being here for a bit longer. I had some strength, and I wanted to observe and record everything. For now, just having a burger and fries was a real treat. In those moments of homesickness, a taste of my “Canadian” culture meant dipping salty fries in puddles of ketchup.