EYEWITNESS  FROM  BETHLEHEM

ARTICLES & REFLECTIONS WRITTEN BY TOINE VAN TEEFFELEN

BETHLEHEM DIARY (26)

April 23-May 14, 2001

At the end of April the Dutch representative office in Ramallah organizes a little “Queen’s Day” party for children of Dutch citizens living in Palestine. Mary, Jara and I thoroughly enjoy the spacious garden and home of the Dutch representative and his family in the Jerusalem Wadi Jooz neighborhood. The weather is beautiful and Jara plays with the other children. I talk with a Dutch journalist married to a Palestinian doctor. As usual, the conversation easily slips to the question whether to stay or to leave. She prefers to leave to Holland, for her children mainly, but her husband who is an experienced surgeon feels a strong responsibility towards his people who need medical attendance right now. A few weeks ago he did surgery on the two-year girl from Bethlehem who lost an eye. The problem is that most people from the West Bank cannot travel to the relatively well-equipped Palestinian hospitals in Jerusalem like Augusta Victoria or Makassed, where he works. Sick people go to the poor government hospitals in the West Bank who lack the advanced facilities her husband needs in order to do surgery. We conclude by saying that the considerations pro and con leaving are simply incomparable and that in the final analysis the decision is always an emotional one.

The party is one of those occasions, rare nowadays, when we freely play with children and try to do some small, aimless talking. I’ll hear from people who have an international passport that they take a weekend off and go to Eilat, the Red Sea resort, where the atmosphere is relaxed. Hania, from The Youth Times, tells me laughingly that she is now suspicious of people who do not come to their work on the grounds that they are ill “because of the situation”: Take care, they might be in Eilat! Our neighbor, too, goes to the resort. She takes a time-out needed for thinking about whether to stay or to leave. In Eilat she consistently speaks English and Hebrew in order to avoid people thinking that she is Palestinian. To openly show yourself being a Palestinian in mainstream Jewish-Israeli towns is nowadays not advisable. Recently, Mary heard from a colleague about what happened to a Palestinian from Bethlehem who started to speak Arabic in a shop in West-Jerusalem. The woman in the shop told him, “Wait a moment, ” went to the backdoor room and returned with a burning chemical substance which she threw into the customer’s face.

For Mary, the moments of escape are still there but restricted. She says that she either has to bring Jara or her mother with her in order to guarantee passage through the Jerusalem checkpoint. Last week she went with Jara to Ramallah to buy shoes in a favorite shop. The shop was supposed to open after four but the shopkeeper did not appear. Mary did not want to wait long with Jara in front of the door and decided to go back before any possible shooting would start. Near the Jerusalem checkpoint, she saw an Israeli soldier along the road who apparently for nothing else than provocative purposes was shooting in the air with heavy ammunition. Mary comforted Jara on her lap, lost in a deep sleep.

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A good way of escaping the tension is talking about the little funny things of the day. Suzy tells that she lately was with some Greek Orthodox officials in a van on the way back to Bethlehem. Soldiers checked whether they had permission to be in Jerusalem. Most of them didn’t have. An elaborate sketch was performed to suggest that all the passengers were Greek Orthodox or foreign church visitors. The officials, with beards and in long black robes, busily talked Greek with the Palestinians who gesticulated and nodded back in agreement, while another Palestinian looked aimlessly and non-communicatively at the ceiling of the van. To complete the picture, a big dog in the car started barking loudly. A grotesque scene with which the exasperated soldier did not know how to deal. Twenty meters further, after the van was waved through, the passengers broke into loud laughter.

Sawsan tells her own checkpoint stories. She is still offering the soldiers an old French student pass that she obtained when she did her PhD studies in Paris years ago. She refuses to speak any other language to soldiers than French, and usually finds her way through as well.

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Teacher rooms provide moments of relief. Maher, the math teacher at St Joseph who lives close to the shelling area in Beit Sahour, tells his colleagues in a characteristic self-mocking voice how the chain of command and reaction works in his family at moments which require decisive action. When in the late afternoon or early evening his mobile rings, he immediately looks at the telephone number in the display. If it is his mother, he knows without even opening the phone that she calls from the Aida refugee camp area in order to tell him that shelling has started. So he concludes that the shooting and shelling will soon arrive in Beit Sahour; he gives a quick sign to his wife - still without opening the phone - who then immediately shepherds their children into the safety room. In minutes, they hear the shelling and shooting coming over their house. While carrying the phone in his one hand, Maher used the other to put on the local TV station so as to locate the exact spots of the shelling.

Psychologists call such a predictable pattern of behaviour a “script.” Even under the worst and most unpredictable circumstances, life can take on a mathematically precise form.

Suzy tells that at another occasion a student in front of her class recited a “flirtatious Shakespeare sonnet.” When shelling started, the students in the front row quickly hid themselves under their tables but the reciting girl, in full concentration and perhaps with a 16^th or 20^th century prince in her eyes, continued the poem in her best Shakespearean English.

During the following mornings I see some pale faces when bringing Jara to school. I conduct a little research among colleagues and friends, asking them whether or not they sleep. Half of them sleep, half of them don’t sleep or “not really.” Many are ill, it seems in part due to the tension and in part to the uncertain weather. These weeks we had it all: rain, thunder, wind, storm, sunshine. In the Freres School courtyard I see students with open mouth gazing at a tropical rain shower as if it is a true miracle. Mary hears from colleagues that they are sometimes mixing up uncommon sounds: Is it thunder or shelling what you hear? (Or, what once happened to us: Is it the washing machine or the shelling?) An acquaintance complains that doctors, in their attempts to explain persistent colds and other physical problems, have nothing else on offer than telling about vague “viruses”. We hear that several people in the Bethlehem area are loosing hair in a small round spot on their skull. This seems to be related to the tension. I myself have stomach problems for a few days and have to vomit in the middle of the night under the sound of heavy machine gunfire.

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The worst shelling days are Sunday and Monday 6/7 May. Gunfire and shelling start already in the morning. A Tanzim leader, an uncle of one of Suzy’s students, is killed in Beit Jala. The Israelis take over some hundreds of square meters of area A (the “Askaan” ridge) near the Talitha Kumi school, and subsequently almost destroy several villas there. Sana’a, who lives close to that area, tells how her mother goes out on the balcony and starts to shout in panic at the Israeli soldiers when she sees them approaching their house. More than twenty Palestinians are injured, some of them seriously. That morning Mary brings her mother to a doctor in Jerusalem. They are accompanied by a girl in her twenties who brings her six-year old injured brother to Mokassed hospital. He is shot in the shoulder. The girl cries all the way long, fearing that her brother’s arm will be amputated. There are a lot of similar stories. Shireen tells that a friend of her, a nurse, upon going out of an ambulance near the shooting area was himself shot in the leg.

On that Sunday, Fardoos, a member of the institute’s board, visits the targeted Askaan area where she and her family are building a house. She is in the board of the institute and as a counselor at the YMCA in Beit Sahour involved in programs to heal the psychological wounds of traumatized people. Her husband Akram works for a Palestinian-Israeli “People-to-People” program. The family happens to find themselves in the middle of the crossfire. They barely escape their burning new house, shelled by the Israeli army. Fortunately, it is not beyond repair.

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I am interested to visit Al-Khader, the village to the south of Bethlehem the name of which commemorates the possible imprisonment of St George there. Al-Khader, the “green one,” is a Moslem holy man who is mentioned in the Koran as an advisor to Musa or Moses, and in popular imagination considered to be the same as St George. St George’s feastday happens to be on Sunday 6. During that day Christians and Moslems are coming to the Greek Orthodox church in the village to baptize their child or to make an offering for the saint. In the agricultural calender, St George’s Day is the day of “the last rain of the season,” and, indeed, there is roaring thunder in the air these days – according to local folklore St George riding on his horse in the sky. I am collecting popular narratives about the saint and want to see whether the festivities are still on. Mary tells me I should stay home and not expect St George, with or without horse, to protect me against the shelling in which the village of Al-Khader is usually targeted too. It turns out to be good advice. Shireen tells me later that the few visiting pilgrims had to improvise their way out of the church, some of them even running with their children across the street in front of the church in order to find a safe way out.

Giselle tells that her uncle has a house in that part of the Askaan ridge which is still under Israeli security control (area “B”). He was told by the Israeli army to evacuate his house in 48 hours before it would be destroyed. A quick intervention of the Latin Patriarchate saved the house.

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After the heavy shelling, my Arabic teacher complains that she feels that there is no political leadership among the Palestinians. Who are those Tanzim from the Taamreh area, many of them even illiterate, to decide to shoot from Beit Jala? Should the Bethlehemite population receive orders from those young people who have no other experience than shooting? My teacher however strikes a note of ambiguity when saying, not without admiration, that more Moslems, such as the Taamreh, are willing to die for their country than Christians. Why is this so? she asks. She quotes a Tanzim who says: the Bethlehemites may loose their houses but the Taamreh people loose their lives. But, I tell her, to what extent is risking one’s life for one’s country a human standard? And what is the prospect of an armed struggle against one of the most advanced armies in the world?

It is undoubtedly true that there is a political leadership vacuum in Palestine. In leaflets people protest that by shooting from inhabited areas, the Tanzim expose the houses to Israeli mortars. Moreover, I have the feeling that the leadership vacuum and despair spills over into Palestinian society itself. On my way to the institute, I see a Bethlehem University teacher warning some youth not to throw bottles at passers by, and I observe another youth kicking the goods of a street peddler. Are the Tanzim a type of macho role models for these youth? And how do they see their own future? What is their future?

I have the feeling that at least the schools and university provide some moral leadership in the broader society. I check with various schools whether they are able to follow the regular program and prepare their students for their exams in time. They are. Sawsan tells me that at Talitha Kumi the principal is very strict with the teachers and the students, even to such an extent that some of the parents complain about the administration’s “lack of flexibility” given the students’ difficulties in traveling. According to my Arabic teacher at the Freres, the teachers there are able to maintain a sense of order among the students and they expect to hand out roughly similar grades as previous years. In fact, more than ever teachers here are convinced of the need to complete the regular academic program. During the first Intifadah, over ten years ago, students basically lost several years of schools. You can still see the disastrous consequences of that in the higher classes of secondary school and the university.

With the latest morning and early afternoon shelling there is now a risk that the schools once more become directly affected. On Monday 7, parents came to schools to pick up their children from the classes after hearing rumors that the Tanzim would start shooting early. Suzy tells that on that day some students were kept at her school because due to the shooting and shelling their parents could not leave the Aida refugee camp neighborhood. She also heard that the kids of a school in that area had to stay and wait inside for an extra hour until the shelling stopped. No doubt, these are ominous signs. If shelling is going to frequently occur during the day, we may reach a qualitative change in the situation, a further deterioration. Institutions like schools would not be able to function.

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Jara makes a drawing of “her sister” whom she loves very much. When Mary asks her rather to eat, she says that she still has work to do. She is taking care of her sick children, the puppet bears that she gave the names Marie and Toulouse. The shelling is expected to intensify on the eve of the commemoration of the Palestinian Naqba (disaster) of 1948 and we stay at my mother in law’s to comfort her. Upon hearing the sounds of gunfire, Jara shepherds all the family to the kitchen, our safe room. When Mary starts to argue with her about the need to do so, Jara cuts her short, telling her “Uskuti (Don’t say anything). Do you want my children to complain about me?”

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