Letter from Bethlehem (33)

July 25, 2002

Toine van Teeffelen

Each evening Mary puts the TV on and off in anxious anticipation of a most important announcement. When will be the opening hours the following day? Sometimes the news comes late in the evening, sometimes early in the morning, or there is a last minute change. Many institutions, such as Mary’s Bethlehem University, are following the rule that when there are opening hours everybody should work, including the weekend. The rule is invented in the face of complete unpredictability. In my agenda this week I scribbled down the closing and opening hours: Monday – closed, Tuesday – open from 9-13:00, Wednesday – open from 9 – 15:00, Thursday – closed, Friday – announced open from 7:00 – 19:00 but at 9:30 closed, Saturday – open from 7:00 – 19:00 (a record for Bethlehem!)

As soon as the news is in, people start to make plans and rush. Half an hour before the actual opening time begins, cars appear on the street; in no time there are queues, drivers become even more frustrated than they already are, small accidents happen. Also in no time, institutions become inaccessible because everybody uses the phone simultaneously. The word ‘bottleneck’ gets its full meaning here. People flood into the main Madbasseh street so that one can hardly walk.

Rushing has its price. An acquaintance in Ramallah tells me that people there now tend not to socialize with each other anymore. During the evening there is a curfew anyway, while during the day, if there are opening hours, people don’t have much time for each other either. Even the visits to neighbours during curfews are rather superficial, she says; the sense of community is lost. I see in my own environment that people are so depressed that they tend not to talk about other things than the daily practicalities. Why should you make each other more depressed than you already are? Lately I conversed with the Israeli pharmacist on Yaffa Street in West-Jerusalem whom I regularly visit and who stays very friendly despite the bombs which exploded close to his shop. He wanted to know me a little better, said that he thought I was German, and upon my correction apologized emphatically, as if withdrawing an accusation. Upon his question, “So, how is it in Bethlehem?” I honestly answered that people are barely able to confront the summer heat; especially when they have a big family and do not have a garden, the walls close in on them. “That is not what I mean, how do the people look at the Israelis, are they more for peace, or not?” I again honestly said that at present many people do not have the energy for political discussions but are mainly concerned with family survival.

But surviving is not enough. A basic problem all face is how to get the pent-up energy out. A neighbour points out the black dust all over the ground in front of our house. It’s from the tanks, she says. A lot of work to keep it clean, I say, but she says that she does not mind to clean every day. Many women try to get their energy and anger out by way of persistent home cleaning.

Is there a way to get out of our closed bottles, with or without a message? Very hesitatingly, some dare to follow the children who already are on their scooters and bikes; and tread the streets for a walk. In fact, Imm Hannah, my mother in law, must walk for her health. She lately had serious problems in standing up because she could not do her regular walks outside. Mary’s sister Norma, who came over from Paris for a few weeks, says that people should not be so afraid. What is the problem with going out on the street for just a hundred meters? On my usual journey from my home to their home, I see them together, four women shuffling along the street, breaking the curfew, unable to hide or run away when soldiers would approach. Afterwards Mary told me that the other day her legs started trembling when she was out and suddenly saw a tank at the end of the street. A man in front of her who was selling watermellons hid himself with his cart behind a garbage container. A shame that common people are bossed in such a way.

Although some people tresspass the curfew, there is no large-scale challenge such as in Nablus where the inhabitants barely had any opening hours the previous weeks and simply had to go out to get food. But Wednesday the army came back there in full force shooting at anybody who dared to peep out of the door.

* * *

At least there are no snipers on the rooftops, so you feel not taregeted from an unknown place. These weeks I regularly leave Bethlehem for my work in coordinating the United Civilians for Peace group, a monitoring mission. A journalist told me that it was possible for foreign passport holders to walk under curfew, at least when the army does not declare the areas a closed military zone. When at one point I left my house, I saw an army patrol forcing people who had tresspassed the curfew to sit down on the pavement. They waved me to come over and asked for my passport. I showed them my work permit and a letter saying that my passport was at a Palestinian Ministry for visa extension. They told me that if I work and live in Bethlehem I should stay at home. “Why?” “If you live here, you can leave the town and come back to bring a weapon and give that to your family.” “But any visitor can do that,” I counter. “No, a journalist would not do that.” Me: “But yesterday the army allowed me passing the curfew.” Him: “Do you want me to show a paper from the commander? Please, go home.” End of argument. I had the feeling the soldiers wanted to show the youth sitting there that they were not being mocked at. Afterwards, I took my way through the gardens but frightened some people who suddenly heard a man climbing down from their roof. They thought I was a soldier.

The following days, there was no problem in going and coming back through the main Jerusalem-Bethlehem checkpoint. At one point, soldiers waved their guns from afar to indicate that I could not pass. Frustrated, I did not want to return home and took the bypass route through the ecumenical center Tantur next to the checkpoint. Next day I tried to take the same route, but (army?) dogs barked and some soldiers ran to the Tantur fields where they caught a few girls who were trying to enter Jerusalem. They saw me as well. Surprised after seeing my papers, they said: “But you’re not an Arab! Please, always take the main checkpoint.” The following day I showed my papers to a soldier who inspected them carefully. One paper, proof that my passport is processed for visa extension, has as heading ‘State of Israel – Ministry of the Interior.’ However, the Palestinian Ministry where I left my passport, not having its own document, had crossed ‘Israel’ out, and had replaced it with ‘Palstien’. The soldier who inspected my documents gestured his colleagues to come over and said half-seriously, half-mockingly: “That is very bad. And they even don’t know how to write ‘Palestine’. I said that the Palestinian ministry should have their own forms in the first place, and that anyway they should not split hairs.

* * *

During curfew the main checkpoint resembles a desolate, hot and sandy Wild West warzone. Nobody is there, except soldiers hanging around. During one of my checkpoint adventures, a soldier shouted ‘stop’ at 20 meters from the hut, let me wait for a minute, and then waved me to come over. He was a Falasha, an Ethiopian Jew. Palestinians, I know, are afraid of them. One theory is that they often do not communicate well at checkpoints because of lack of language knowledge; moreover, they are discriminated against in Israel by Western Jews and in compensation transfer their anger onto the Palestinians they meet. I asked him whether he spoke English, a question he took wrongly. He gave the papers to a colleague but meanwhile kept an eye upon me, asking me brief questions such as “What is your work in Bethlehem?” pronounced as if he was giving an order. I could not help to pity him even though that was exactly how he did not want me to feel towards him. I pondered how young the kids were who were standing here, many of them eighteen, some of them seventeen; child soldiers according to international standards. I could easily be their father. On the way back, when they were contacting their commander by phone to check my credentials, I started conversing. “So, you are here all alone, the whole day, doing very uncommon things like checking people, how do you feel doing so?” One soldier turned his head away, the other answered: “I just don’t think when I am here, just talk a bit with the other soldiers.” Me: “Is that not difficult, not thinking all the time?” He did not know what to answer.

“Indeed, they are very young,” an older reservist told me at another occasion. He saud that he had volunteered to be at the checkpoint, not because he liked it there but because it was better to have an older man there present, “better for the Jews and better for the Palestinians.” He was like a father to them, he said, he wanted to smoothen the contact between those who crossed the checkpoint and the soldiers. While he was talking, the other soldiers looked a bit embarrassed. Their English was not sufficient for a real conversation, and I could see that they preferred to fall back to the uncomplicated pattern of giving one-line questions and getting one-line answers, the pattern to which they are used when dealing with ‘Arabs’. But the reservist, courteously, wanted to show them in an exemplary manner how to conduct a correct conversation with a foreigner, and waved me through after the distant commander once again gave his approval by phone. I felt strangely uplifted and embarrassed at the same time.

* * *

On Sunday I meet Albert Aghazarian, the well-known PR-man of Birzeit University, together with some visiting Dutch journalists. We sit down in lazy chairs in his ancient home in the Armenian quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem. For him, checkpoints have two faces. “On the one hand, they are mechanisms of control, factories of humiliation and hate. On the other, the people waiting there feel an egalitarian atmosphere. The professor and the student, the VIP and the worker, the local and international, the capitalist and the anti-globalization activist - they all queue there. At the checkpoint, Palestine stands at the cutting edge of humanity. At the checkpoint, people – any people - are challenged to take a stand. Are you for or against? The checkpoint can split people but can bring them also together. Two internationals of the International Solidarity Movement,, a Palestinian and a Jew, found each other at a checkpoint. As to express this egalitarianism, the Portuguese winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature lately commented on a visit to Ramallah that ‘we are all Palestinians’.”

Aghzarian is still recovering from the teargas which he inhaled during the times he joined the internationals crossing the checkpoint to Birzeit. “As I am an Armenian, and therefore stubborn, I did not want to take another route [the settlers’ bypass road which can be taken by Jerusalemites] to the university, even though it meant that I had to queue and suffer. I did not want to show myself a coward when those internationals are taking risks to support us.”

As always he gives a joke. “Hell and Heaven argue their case in front of the High Court of Justice. It is always Hell who wins. Do you know why? All the lawyers are in Hell!” The Israeli High Court is known to routinely embrace the security arguments submitted by the army.

* * *

Tamer is moving all the time with his hands and legs. No lack of energy. A neighbour told that it was because Mary had eaten a lot of dates during her pregnancy. If that is true, it would suit Tamer’s name, which means ‘holder of dates’.

“If Tamer would not be here, I would not know what to do,” says Mary with her head between her hands. “My head explodes.” Lately she has been depressed because of ‘everything’ but especially because our holiday to Cyprus is in doubt due to problems at the bridge to Jordan. The TV images remain the same: a kid in Jenin shot while eating chocolate, a kid from Dheisha camp who is so battered that he cannot speak, the children in Gaza mercilessly bombed. Mary also feels with the students killed at the Hebrew University. “Why do they earn this?”

* * *

Jara tries to kill curfew time together with a new, older friend, Serena, a somewhat shy girl who accepts being led by Jara. In the garden, Jara plays that she is a musical conductor while Serena is the audience. She starts nicely with a popular love song, but then brings her voice to a pitch, shouts the phrase which I cannot hear anymore, “mamnu’a tajaawoul” (forbidden to go out), and turns to sing a nationalist march. She is naughty these days, does not want to go to the summer camp when the curfew is lifted. We suspect it is because she rather likes to give orders than to take them. If she is home, she is the splendid center of the neighbourhood gang of children who roam the empty university street. She even changes clothes four times a day. “Take care, she will be spoiled, and you will not be able to handle her later on,” Norma says. We decide that when the curfew is lifted she should stay under family house arrest. However, she once again escapes us, and the next days visitors, unaware, give her presents.