Fireworks over Bethlehem

July 12, 2005

At 11 AM on July 12, I was awakened from a doze by a fist pounding on the door followed by eight gunshots. Although it was the first time I had ever heard a gun fired at such a close range, I was not alarmed; in Dheishe Refugee Camp and throughout the whole Bethlehem area celebrators had been setting off firecrackers and firing guns since seven that morning. This was the day that the results of the high school Ministry exams or Tawjihi, were made available and announced on public television.
Palestinian students in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip end their secondary school education with the Tawjihi examination, a weeklong series of tests issued by the Palestinian Authority’s Ministry of Education. To properly prepare for these tests, students must memorize textbook after textbook.
In my host family, Majd "was tawjihi," as they say; she had just completed her last year of high school and taken the Tawjihi exams.
On the morning of July 12, the whole family, except for my "Aunty" Miyasar who was already at work, rose early and gathered around the TV where the newscasters were reading off the results school by school. We hadn't been in front of the TV for more than ten minutes when the phone started ringing. "Allah ibarak feek, thank you, but we don't know the score yet," we would reply to the aunt, uncle, or cousin who had phoned.
Everybody was certain that Majd would get a top score. She had risen to being the top student in her class three years ago after being in second place for years. When the Israeli Army dynamited the family's house in November 2004 for collective punishment, everybody feared that her grades would fall with the upper stories of her house. No, she was at school the very next day and sailed through her senior year with a laugh in her belly and, she told me, a pot of coffee by her side for the long nights she stayed up studying for the Tawjihi.
After we spent half an hour anxiously watching the TV screen, a cousin of ours called. He was one of the few people we knew with internet in his house. He had looked up Majd's score on the Ministry of Education's website: 93.3! At the news, tears like pearls tumbled off Majd's and her sister Sana’s cheeks and then disappeared. For five minutes there was nothing but hugging, kissing, and shouting. Their father had to wipe his eyes several times. Majd had gotten the highest score in her school!





Days before the Tawjihi results came in, my Palestinian sisters were warning me, "You have never seen anything like this; there will be guests from the dawn to late into the night. You have never seen work like this in the house." Images of scrubbing up to the ceilings and cooking elaborate Arab meals passed through my mind as if I were flipping through a roll of photos fresh from the lab. Not the case.
That evening when I came home, I saw the veranda filled with Hammash family sitting in a circle, the younger ones on plastic deck chairs and the old ones cushioned on a mattresses on the ground. I went around and greeted everyone, giving the women kiss after kiss on their cheeks and the men a handshake. Half way through, I started talking with an old aunt that I hadn't met before until my Aunty Miysar reminded me of my manners, "Say hi to everybody else!" I had forgotten that it’s rude to linger and converse before I had greeted everybody.
The men stayed outside and talked while the women filled the living room. The policeman cousin who had fired the celebratory shots that morning had brought his stereo and the whole house quivered with Arab pop. The living room became a women-only dance space. Everybody danced, from the babies who tripped around, heavy with their diapers, to the young women often dancing in pairs, to the older women who would step in and join in the circles. The room got hot and I went out and stood in the kitchen to catch my breath, closing the door behind me. I came back in, and showed Haala, a neighborhood girl, how to use my camera. Then I thought better of it because I saw all the other kids' eyes follow the way I helped Haala hold my heavy lens and told her how to compose a shot. I shouldn't play favorites.
I danced through the music, in the music, and with the music. Everybody kept urging me to dance; they hadn’t expected an American girl to dance like them! My sister Fairouz took my camera and shot over a roll of me dancing. I overcame my shyness and got Majd to dance with me; it was her night, after all!
Then, as I was going out to change my film, the TV caught my eye. It was Al-Jazeera news footage of the suicide bombing in Netanya, a city in Israel. The bomber had killed one person. That image killed my craving to dance. Earlier that day my sister Sana' had told me about it, "There's been an operation; somebody blew himself in a mall in Natanya."
"Oh, my God," I said, "How many are dead?"
"One. Walla, I swear, I hate it when they do this; it makes me sick, walla, I hate it," Sana' said, "It's stupid when they do this and things are going so well."
I called Bertha and Alex, an old Israeli couple who are like my grandparents, to see how they were. I was glad that they didn't hang out in malls. Bertha was happy that I called and that I was safe in Bethlehem. For that moment I was safe where I was but at that time nobody knew where the suicide murderer, as Bertha called him, was from. If he was from Bethlehem, we could be sure that there would be an Israeli operation in a few days. As it turned out, he was from Tulkrarem, a city on the Green Line in the north of the West Bank. In the next few days, the communities of Tulkarem and Nablus in the West Bank and Rafah in the Gaza Strip buried their own dead, this time shot by Israeli guns.




After the guests left, I went out onto the veranda to get some silence in my ears. It was after midnight, and the firecrackers and guns had quieted down. A wild dog would bark, a confused cock would crow. In an hour it would be unsafe for me to be outside: I had just learned that Israeli Army jeeps drove though the Camp between one and four AM, arresting anyone they found on the streets. Enforcing a quiet curfew.
I looked to the west, past the village of Al Khader to the passing lights of Route 60. We lived far enough away for the roar of the highway to be lost in the wind but close enough to see the lights go north and south like a quiet drizzle through the night.
Route 60 is the main highway through the West Bank, but it is an Israeli-only road. A Palestinian West Bank resident is forbidden to use this road to go from one city to another, even though it is almost always the most direct route.
This is how the Occupation looks from a distance, I thought. On a day where there's "peace," when there are no martyrs on either side, it looks like a string of twinkly lights from America or whoever else cares to glance over the surface. The world calls it "peace" if nobody dies, but that's not the case. By making complex laws that dictate where various groups of people are allowed to go and where they are prohibited, the Israeli government encourages the people of its land to imagine “the other” as an enemy.
"Lulu, what are you doing?" my little sister Fairouz came out of the house. “You didn’t help me with the dishes like you said you would.”
Thank God that in my experience the walls between people are the easiest to break.