EYEWITNESS  FROM  BETHLEHEM

ARTICLES & REFLECTIONS WRITTEN BY TOINE VAN TEEFFELEN

BETHLEHEM DIARY (31)

June 11 – June 18, 2001

The sad stories of obstructed traveling don’t stop coming in. At a checkpoint a sick woman laying on a stretcher was taken out of the ambulance and brought over the rocks to another car. Al-Quds newspaper describes how in Gaza some particularly cruel soldiers whipped a woman and her children with some plastic wire until the kids were bleeding and had to be treated in hospital. A husband from the West Bank was not allowed to visit his newborn baby because his wife, who has an Israeli ID, delivered in an Israeli hospital.

Mary and others at Bethlehem University are affected by what happened to a lecturer crossing the Jerusalem-Bethlehem checkpoint on his way to the university. Crossing the checkpoint is his daily duty. Sometimes he passes by without problems, sometimes not. This time the soldiers stopped him and ordered him to run after a man whom they wanted for some reason. First the lecturer asked another passer by to do it for him. But no, it was he who had to run. The soldiers took his ID and he ran and ran for hundreds of meters till he caught the guy. During the first Intifada, over ten years ago, it was common to see people doing errands for soldiers such as wiping out graffiti slogans written on the walls in front of one’s house.

Ramzi is again not able to concentrate on his designer’s work because he hears that two computer companies have been closed and some dozens of employees dismissed. Each time when he hears about closures of companies he runs into a depression. With the continuing siege – we don’t feel yet much change on the ground as a result of the ceasefire – many companies or shops cannot operate. Mary buys a cheap dress for Jara in the mainstream street of Bethlehem. She manages to strike a bargain but feels remorse when the shopkeeper sighs and says there is nothing left for him to do. Why not kill himself in a suicide operation in Tel Aviv? He is not serious, of course, but the despair simply runs deep. Mary says that after the suicide bombing in Tel Aviv ordered books again don’t arrive at the university library. “The Israelis control everything, our mail, even our breathing space.”

                                                            * * *

There is a momentary shock among the population when they hear that a man from ‘Azza camp, a small refugee camp located in the heart of Bethlehem, has killed an Israeli intelligence officer before being killed himself. Everybody expects some kind of Israeli reprisal. But it seems that it is considered to be an isolated incidence. The man was an Israeli agent, a collaborator. He killed his Israeli boss either out of remorse or despair or because of possible pressure from a Palestinian agency. The night before he had informed his family and friends that “something” would happen to him and that they should take well care of his children. Next day, his picture hangs on the walls of the street. The former agent has now become a martyr for the Palestinian cause.

The event illustrates the almost unstoppable tendency to categorize people as friend or enemy. A dramatic case of misplaced categorization happened last week when a Greek monk, Georgios, was killed in a drive-by shooting near Jerusalem. The perpetrators are not known but may well be Palestinians since the monk was driving in a yellow-plate Israeli car near the settlement Ma’ale Adumim. I am saddened hearing the news because I knew the monk well. He lived in a Greek Orthodox monastery almost in the middle of nowhere, in the desert valley Wadi Kilt not far from Jericho. In better times I was used to hike there with visiting family and friends. The monk was quite open and generous towards visitors; you could have an easy-going theological conversation with him. Once it happened that my niece, her friend and I were attacked and stung by a cloud of large bees suddenly appearing out of a bush in the wadi. We were shouting and gesticulating, something we better should not have done. After reaching the monastery, Georgios treated our wounds with pieces of garlic fixed by plasters. We might have died, he told us with a big smile, and showed us his biological-medicinal cupboard for the treatment of bites of snakes, serpents and other dangerous animals. Garlic is the best, he said. His corpse is now buried next to the bones of monks who lived in the desert monastery in the beginning of the seventh century and were killed by invading Persians.

One cannot categorize this monk other than as a friend. For no special reason, the week showed more cases of mistaken identity, fortunately not all with deadly consequences. Our neighbour was on a holiday trip these weeks. During her return journey in an Air France carrier, she sat next to a Jewish lady from Argentina. At one point the plane started to become unsteady due to weather conditions and it was announced that the plane might have to land in Cyprus. Recently Air France had announced that it would cut short some of its flights to Tel Aviv for safety reasons, and the lady thought that the possible stop in Cyprus was an example of that policy. She started to complain about the “anti-Semitic” attitude of France and sought for comfort from our neighbor whom she thought was Jewish. In fact, it is often difficult or impossible to distinguish Jewish-Israeli from Palestinian faces. Who other than Jews go to Israel these days, the lady might have thought.

During a workshop this week, teachers discussed Moslem-Christian relations. There is always a certain reluctance to discuss this topic because people do not feel that their Moslem and Christian identities are so problematic that they need discussion. In the past Palestinians often did not know from each other who was Christian or Moslem. One teacher, Ri’baal, said that he is often mistakenly considered to be a Christian because of his blue eyes and somehow Western outlook. However, he has a Moslem-Palestinian father and a Jewish mother from Austria who lives in Beit Jala. Sana’s, who is Moslem, tells that it sometimes happens that people in the countryside and Hebron think that she is Christian because she does not wear the veil. The problem, she says, is that outside Bethlehem and Jerusalem there is rarely a visible presence of Christians so that Palestinian Moslems in the villages are not familiar with the Christian cultural identity. I myself remember cases that when Mary and I walked in a village, some youth were calling shalom, thinking we were Jewish.

One of Ismail’s students from Al-Arroub camp is Mahmoud. He has a beautiful voice appropriately hoarsened by, I suspect, much smoking. He displays his talents in a mixed Moslem-Christian music group organized by the Freres School. Lately I found out that he has a brother who lives in the camp together with a Jewish wife and their children. Both of them had met each other in a supermarket in Jerusalem. It was love at first sight. The wife always says that she is a Jew married to a Palestinian but has lately downplayed her Jewish identity towards Palestinians whom she does not know.

                                                            * * *

I think that such border-crossers in fact provide a healthy unpredictability towards the society. It is disastrous when youth think that with just a few clues one can categorize people as friend or enemy, or as Christian, Moslem and Jew. In this way one brings up very simple stereotypical images of the other. Instead it is more rewarding to acknowledge people’s multiple identities. Fuad is used to say that he is first of all a Palestinian, then a Christian, then a Bethlehemite. (He always introduces me to others as a “Dutch Bethlehemite,” or a “Dutch Palestinian.” Once this elicited the question whether I had a Palestinian mother or father). Towards students I purposefully tell stories of people who cannot be easily classified. One example is the Bethlehem member of the Palestinian Legislative Council, Salah Ta’amari. He is from semi-Bedouin origin, went – he once told me – with his mother to the mosque as well as sometimes to the Church of Nativity, studied English literature at Cairo University, and married an early wife of the late King Hussein of Jordan. During the 1970s he climbed into the ranks of the PLO hierarchy in Lebanon and was chosen by the English thriller author John Le Carre to stand as model for the main Palestinian character in the novel The Little Drummer Girl. Later on, during Sharon’s invasion of 1982 in Lebanon, he was imprisoned in the notorious Ansar camp where he became the informal leader of the prisoner movement. After going through this hell he wrote a book together with the Israeli journalist Nahum Barnea and set up non-violent youth programs for Palestinians in the United States. Now he is a regular face on local TV although he too does not escape the general skepticism with which the Palestinian population approach “politicians.” His life story, as of so many others here, is a suitable antidote against easy classification.

                                                            * * *

Last evening I played with Jara. As usual we look out over the hills of the desert to detect the little lights of Jordan some 40 kilometers further. She points to the slender tower of the mosque in ‘Azza camp, close to where we are going to live in the near future, and says: “That [mosque] belongs to sido (grandfather), not to me.” I am puzzled by her remark. Mary tells me that some twenty years ago her father, who died recently, had given a financial contribution to a committee who was going to establish the mosque. At the time, it was quite normal.

Return back to HOMEPAGE  

Return to the INDEX of all the DIARIES