"The pain of the people out there is not the pain of statistics."
-Desmond Tutu
Last Wednesday I visited the Balata Refugee Camp in Nablus for the first time. The high, olive tree-tarraced hills of the West Bank cradle the four thousand year old city, the industrial capital of Palestine. Along with being the industrial capital, Nablus is also one of the most militarized areas of the West Bank right now; it has sustained nightly invasions from the Israeli Army since the beginning of the Second Intifada in September 2000. Some American friends of mine were going to Nablus so I decided to go with them and see three of the kids from Picture Balata that I had met on their US tour.
In the van to Nablus, an American friend and I talked about the surreal experience of traveling in the West Bank as people with first-world passports. Palestinians with West Bank IDs are required to obtain permits from the Israeli Army to go to another area of the West Bank, let alone to travel out of it. Although there are some exceptions to this rule, it generally holds, and West Bankers stay in their hometown areas as much as they can to avoid trouble and harassment from the soldiers at checkpoints. Israeli citizens traveling in the West Bank can use roads especially built for them that connect one illegal Israeli settlement to another. This policy is easily enforced because Israeli license plates are yellow and Palestinian ones are green and white. Areas in the West Bank which the Palestinian Authority is said to be in control of look like blobs on a map, separated by areas of illegal Israeli settlement or countryside which, under the Oslo Agreement, were marked for full to partial Israeli control. If there is to be some sort of Palestinian state according to the current "facts on the ground" it would resemble the Bahamas. On a map. It is an archipelago. As people traveling from one Palestinian urban area to another, we essentially were on a boat. A yellow boat with four wheels.
At my friend Hadil's house, she and her mother remembered one of the last times they had tried to go to Jenin, the northernmost city in the West Bank. The soldier had asked her brothers and sisters where they lived and they all answered, "At my father's place." Then one of them said, "Balata Camp [in Nablus]," and the soldier told them to turn around and go home.
As we waited for lunch, Butch, a high-school kid from Picture Balata, turned to me and said, "Last night my friend was arrested."
I did not know what to say. "How old is he?"
"He's in my grade." Butch is a junior in high school. "The soldiers come every night," Butch told me; we looked up at the window above us. Like almost all the windows I saw in Balata Camp, it was covered with a mesh fence that made diamonds that were a little smaller than one inch square.
"They are your guests here?" I asked, trying to deflect my horror, my disgust with humor.
"Yes," Butch laughed.
"What do they drink?" I imitated a question that I had been asked many times as a guest at a Palestinian house, "Coffee or tea?"
"Blood," Butch informed me of the Israeli Army preference.
"I knew somebody who they took to prison that was ten years old." Over 350 teenagers and children under the age of 18 have been arrested or detained in the Nablus area.
I was shocked. In Dheisheh, the refugee camp in Bethlehem where I live, the Israeli Army comes between three and four in the morning and walks around. But they are quiet. In Nablus, they come and shoot and arrest people. Dheisheh used to be like Balata with incursions and violence every day, but now the soldiers simply take early morning walks here.When I asked why there was hardly any Israeli operations or arrests in Dheisheh, I was told that because there isn't any resistance in Dheisheh. The fighters are all in the martyrs' cemetery or in prison.
On the shared taxi ride from Balata Refugee Camp to downtown Nablus, I asked the woman next to me how much it was to the balad, as downtown is known. "One and a half shekels," she told me.
"No, no," said my friend, Taha, "Put your money back."
"No, it's fine," I said, holding a 10 shekel coin at him.
"No, I'm paying," he insisted.
"It's better to let the men pay," said the woman next to me. I chuckled and agreed. Ah, the advantages of being a woman!
"Are you from the country ?"she wanted to know.
"No, I'm American," I told her.
"And you, you're from the country?" I asked.
"Palestinian," she answered proudly. I smiled back at her, she smiled at me. She had a cuddly, proud, motherly smile that made her glow.
"What do you think of the situation here?"
"The situation is very hard--it's not good at all because of what the Israelis do."
She turned her wrist to me and pointed to something that I mistook for an almost-healed cigarette burn. "Bullets. They [the Israeli Army] came to our house and killed my brother." I had just been in Balata Camp, where she was from; I had just been in people's houses that most certainly resembled hers. Everybody has a house, or at least some place she considers home or dreams of as home. "That's so wrong," I said, "God rest his soul."
Then she took out a picture from her purse. In the picture, two young men lay on a stone tile floor, several other people surrounded them. "This is my brother," she pointed to the young man on the left. The pool of blood next to him was smaller than the pools of blood next to the one on the right. I wanted to ask, your brother isn't dead there, is he? But another part of me replied that he was, the woman had introduced the subject with his death. "This is my father," she pointed to a man in the foreground. He was crouched, his hand raised just enough to obscure his face from the camera. It was this gesture of despair that confirmed the woman's words to me. I have never seen shooting victims except in photographs. I am not sure what signs of life I should scan the young men for. But the father's gesture of utter despair assured me of what the picture clearly showed. These two men were dead. Their death was violent and they would never come back to life. And next to me was a woman who had witnessed this shooting of her brother. She wasn't yelling at me, she wasn't angry; she was talking to me in a calm, quiet, gentle voice. I didn't really know what to say. I hope it showed in my face. I asked her what she wanted to do.
"What can I do?" she asked a question that I have heard so often here. When someone asks it, it is a statement, not a question.
I told her it was so bad. And then, because I couldn't get my mind around it; being shot in one's house, a place that one considers a haven, I had to ask her again, "In the house?"
And the woman confirmed for me, "Yes, in the house."
We passed the rubble of the Palestinian police station that Israeli F-16s had bombed some years back. She invited me to visit her and her family and eat mansaf, a traditional lamb and rice dish, with them any time I wanted. The whole interaction was conversational, when she showed me her scar and the picture, she was serious, as the subject merited, but not hysterical; calm. I took her number and she told my friend Taha to bring me to their house next time I came. "Take care, sweetie," she told me as we parted ways at the market.
"You too, take care," I said.
Of the over 4000, Palestinians killed by Israeli forces since the beginning of the Second Indifada, 1000 of them have been from Nablus. I have known these statistics for many years; I have many friends here whose brothers, sisters, uncles, fathers, and grandfathers have been killed by Israeli Occupation Forces. I had understood the loss; I have been sad for my friends' pain but until that moment in the taxi, I had never been able to feel the sudden shock and pain of having someone as close as a brother being taken away so violently, and forever. Death is a place people do not return from.
I felt like I had been living in a rosy Palestine, in a lovely state of denial in the NGO bubble of Bethlehem-Jerusalem-Ramallah. This area hosts most of the foreign-sponsored non-governmental organizations and thus it hosts a large number of foreign people who work in these NGOs. From 2000-2003, in various operations such as Operation Defensive Shield, Israeli forces and aircraft besieged and crushed Bethlehem and Ramallah. Everybody in Bethlehem has siege stories of the Forty Day Siege of Bethlehem in which Israeli forces besieged militants in the Nativity Church. Now, however, Bethlehem, Jerusalem, and Ramallah appear calm and happy to the Western eye; the presence of guns is minimal and the color on the martyr posters that cover the walls is faded and dull.
In my American mind, it is strange for typical conversation topics to be that one's brother was shot and is dead or that one's teenage friend was imprisoned last night. It is not normal to have to ask permission of an army to go to another city. My idea of "normal" is contained in the UN Declaration of Human Rights; my idea of "normal" is taking a subway to school, having enough money to buy what I want for lunch, being able to participate in politics, and to be lulled to sleep by the sound of a city: car horns and noisy people--not by gun fire. In my "comfortable" life in Bethlehem, I was not really aware of other parts of the Occupied West Bank; I was not even aware of the extent of the suffering that happens when somebody now in the Bethlehem area is killed or some teenagers are taken to prison. I focused on the many beautiful parts of my life here.
The conversations I had with people from Balata made me realize, even though I live with a Palestinian family, how little I understand what it means to have an ID issued by the Palestinian Authority.
www.picturebalata.net
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nablus
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