Finding one's humanity in Nablus

They seemed to find some common humanity in me. They were smiling and joking, machine guns slung to their side, asking me where I was from.

"Weren't you scared of what would happen if they caught you" the cute young soldier with the big brown eyes said with a smile, a sly knowing smile, a smile that seemed to say we're on the same side.

I was leaving the Huwara checkpoint, outside of Nablus. This was the same checkpoint where a Palestinian university student had his arm broken by an angry soldier the day before. Before leaving, I met the student, his arm in a cast.

Possibly they were confused because I wasn't waiting in the designated "humanitarian line" to the right, where women, "internationals", and men over forty could stand. I felt I was in the 'inhumane' line. The way the soldiers composed themselves, pointing their guns here and there, joking with one another, and looking at us like we were a bunch of animals left a searing feeling in my stomach.

Yet the feeling was not new. I had just spent much of the week in Nablus, a city overseen by a military base on a mountaintop, adjacent to the largest refugee camp in the West Bank, surrounded by checkpoints and settlements, where a foreign army enters every night to imprison, intimidate and kill (two were killed in a dorm room on my second night there).

Yet for me this overwhelming structure of violence was punctuated by the stories, the deeply personal tragedies which I heard every day from new friends, the stories which so deeply color the lives of this embattled community, the stories of the nameless and faceless 'collateral damage' here.

Ali* took me on a tour of the Old City on my last day in Nablus. Narrow, winding roads cutting between shops jammed tightly together, delicious and colorful spices sold in loud voices, the Old City awakens all of the senses. Especially all of the bullet holes.

Ali is my age and has recently graduated from An-Najah University in Music Studies. He plays seven instruments and wants to move to Spain next year to begin a Masters Degree in International Relations. He has only been speaking English for two years which is quite impressive, as his command over the language is almost perfect. He tells me he learned English through watching English movies and listening to English songs. He demonstrates this by singing a line from "Quit playing games with my heart" by the Backstreet Boys.

I laugh.

I stop laughing when he points to the scar on his right hand. In 2002 soldiers killed his friend in front of his eyes. He describes raising his hands to show the soldiers that he was not dangerous. In response one of the soldiers pierced his right hand with a bullet. He tells me how they left him to die.

Ali also volunteers three days a week as an ambulance driver. He points to a shrine where a house was bulldozed a couple of years ago by the Occupation Forces. Ten members of the Shub'i family were inside the house at the time and the building was demolished over their heads. Eight family members were killed. After leaving the city, I researched these murders on my own and learned through Amnesty International that those killed included three children, their pregnant mother and 85-year-old grandfather.

Ali wants people from around the world to see Nablus for themselves. He offers to take any of my friends on a tour.

While in Nablus, I spend a lot of time with Professor Sa'ed Abu-Hijleh. When I ask Sa'ed how his father coped with his mother's murder by the Occupation Forces in 2002, he has few words:

"They met in a love story. The soldiers ended their love story. Right there"

With these words, Sa'ed points to the spot on the door where the broken glass is taped up. The shattered glass that has still not been replaced is the result of the fifteen bullets fired at his mother without warning while she was embroidering on the porch of her house. Being home at the time, Sa'ed was injured in the neck from the glass debris and his father from a ricochet bullet that grazed his skull

The murder received international condemnation, to which the Israeli government responded by promising the International Committee of the Red Cross, the United Nations, human rights organizations, journalists and even the White House, to conduct a serious investigation. To date no one has received any official results of the investigation.

The day she was killed, Nablus was under a full day curfew. The World Bank has analyzed every hour that passed between late June 2002 and the end of that year. It has found that for nearly four out of every five hours, the residents of the city lived under military curfew.

Sa'ed is an American-educated professor of social geography and a poet. He takes me to the cemetery where his mother was buried and tells me story after story of lives lost and loved ones left behind. While there, Sa'ed recognizes a friend of his walking through the cemetery, head down, scribbling something on a piece of paper. It turns out that the man is a poet as well. After Sa'ed introduces us, his friend conveys a message to me:

"In most places in the world, people go to the mountains, oceans, and forests to write poetry,” he says, through Sa’ed’s translation. “In Palestine, we go to the cemetery."

The stories of Ali and Sa'ed are examples of this poetry that is echoed by everybody I meet in Nablus. While each story is unique, they all share the brutal poetry of those who suffer through the seemingly unbearable, yet impossibly maintain their humanity.

Considering all the friends made and stories shared in my brief time in Nablus, the soldiers’ treatment of me at the Huwara checkpoint became unbearable. They seemed to sense some humanity in me and my Canadian passport not shared by the dozens of Palestinians waiting behind me in the hot sun, waiting to go home.

If this is the Zionist conception of humanity, we should all be honored to stand with the ‘inhumane’ any day of the week.

*Ali's name has been changed.

Palestinian Superman - A poem by Sa'ed Abu-Hijleh

You must be Superman to be a real man in Palestine...

You must use all your senses 24-hours a day in order to stay...

You must hear the gunfire, then the screams that fade away...

You must see blood, again and again, and still see red...

You must hold the barbwires in your hand and smile for the elderly woman trying to bypass the Israeli checkpoint...

You must smell the teargas and cry as if there aren't enough tears in this "Holy Land'...

You must taste the humiliation and eat Nabulsi sweets all in the same day... And...

And still think of the olives and thyme...

And think of ways to end this endless crime...

Oh my beloved... do we still have time...

To hold hands and kiss... and raise our children in a cosmic bliss...

The occupation of time

A couple of days ago, I boarded a bus in Ramallah to find three smiling children sitting with their father behind me, all squished into two seats, giggling about something I couldn’t understand.

Minutes later, our bus stopped outside of the checkpoint separating Ramallah from Jeruslaem. The thought that these smiling children were about to enter this frightening structure just didn’t seem right.

The Palestinians in the bus slowly filed out in order to walk one hundred meters past barbed wire and strewn garbage into the checkpoint compound. The artificially magnified voices of Israeli soldiers yelling orders from a guard tower above created a surreal environment.

“Internationals” like myself are given the option to stay on the bus and avoid the ugliness of the checkpoint, as it appears that only Palestinians should be humiliated when traveling throughout their own land.

When I arrived in the checkpoint and waited for the electric turnstile to let another three people through in front of me, I didn’t talk. I didn’t smile. I didn’t frown. I knew I was being watched by the security camera on top and the soldier in the booth to the left.

Why would I want to be in Ramallah?

I had been told that its best to pretend to know nothing of Palestine or Palestinians as such ideas are considered subversive. If the soldiers rifled through my bag and found the booklets I just received from Palestinian University students describing the “Right to Education” campaign, what would I say?

How frightening would this feeling be if I did not have my international privilege? If I was Palestinian?

I found myself unable to concentrate. I kept looking at these three children and wondering what they were thinking as they joined the frustrated mass behind these turnstiles? Or when they passed through the turnstile, only to have it abruptly stop before their father could do the same?

A couple of months ago a friend of mine told me that the occupation steals time from Palestinian society. As I experience the apartheid system of transportation here, albeit with the privilege of an ‘international’, I’m beginning to understand what she was referring to…

A professor at Bethlehem University told me that it used to take approximately half an hour to travel to Ramallah. The last time she went, it took her two and a half hours including over an hour waiting at a checkpoint in the hot sun. Standing on a stone university terrace she pointed out the relatively new Jewish-only settlements of Har Homa (see left) and Gilo, which surround the campus. Two parallel fences have been created infront of Har Homa with a road in between for army patrols. She tells me quite matter-of-factly that if a Palestinian were to step on that road, they would be shot. As I was leaving, I asked her what she was seeking, and she answered quite simply “Justice. Nothing More. Nothing less.”

To link these and other Jewish-only settlements and to ensure that the settlers are able to completely avoid the millions of Palestinians living in their midst, an elaborate apartheid road system has been created. This road system, which Palestinians are prohibited from driving on, cuts through and divides the West Bank. To ensure some degree of movement throughout their land, ‘Palestinian roads' have been built, which are poorly maintained, circuitous, and checkered with checkpoints manned by the Occupation Forces.

Seeing the flash of the green light, I was able to move through the turnstile, past the metal detector, and outside to re-enter my bus forty-five minutes after I originally left it. I ended up sitting beside this same family, and we spent the rest of the ride trying to communicate without any common language, exchanged contact information that will likely never be utilized, and had passerbys take pictures of us with our cameras.

Throughout our disjointed conversation I couldn’t help but wonder about these three children, born and raised under occupation, and oppressed in their own land for the simple fault of not being Jewish. I wondered how this loss of time and movement affects them? Instead of freely playing and exploring the world they are forced to wait, every day, while the occupation seeks to strip their humanity from them. When such discrimination becomes the banal day-to-day routine, what happens to such children?

“Justice. Nothing More. Nothing less.”

This seems like something worth working towards before more time is stolen from these childrens lives.

The absurdity of it all

When passing through the checkpoint between Bethlehem and Jerusalem, a middle-aged man guided me a couple of steps to the left, ensuring that I entered the checkpoint as opposed to the taxi stand.

I was only a step behind as I followed him through the metal one person-deep maze that snaked its way into the checkpoint compound, all the while noticing the razor wire and watchtower in front, and the graffiti on the wall to the left.

The checkpoint compound itself was enclosed on either side by the Israeli "Separation Wall" which has been deemed illegal by the highest court in the world, the International Court of Justice. It is simultaneously a concrete manifestation and symbolic reminder of Israel's ongoing colonization of Palestine. Even as a Canadian who does not need to fear the Wall annexing my home, preventing me from attending school, or separating me from my community, I found it to be immensely intimidating.

After entering the checkpoint compound through an electronically-controlled turnstile, operated by armed teenage soldiers sitting in a booth barking orders through a loud speaker , I witnessed and took part in a scene that subtly told a powerful story of privilege, power, and discrimination. This gentleman, who likely must wait at checkpoints like this multiple times each day, took out his belongings, put them on a conveyer belt and walked through a metal detector. After it beeped, he went back, took off his belt and shoes, and repeated the process. He then showed his passport to the seemingly disinterested soldier sitting behind a glass booth before placing his hand on some sort of finger-print identification device.

Following after him, I walked through the metal detector, flashing my Canadian passport and thereby avoiding any hassle.

After showing my passport to another soldier behind another glass booth twenty meters away, passing through another electronically-controlled turnstile and leaving the checkpoint compound, I caught up with the man as we waited for the bus to ask him what the finger-print mechanism was.

No it’s only for Palestinians,” he responded. He then asked, in a deflated, distracted tone: “You know about Israel’s occupation of Palestine?”

His response was striking for for its utter lack of irony…

In my short stay here, I have witnessed a great deal of absurdity: The settler roads that cut through the heart of illegally occupied Palestinian territory which Palestinians are not allowed to drive on...The illegal wall which cuts through Palestinian villages, splitting families in two, separating child from classroom, community from hospital, farmer from land...The settlers who immigrate to Israel from countries around the world and colonize Palestinian land to create Jewish only ‘settlements’

Nevertheless, despite all of this, I considered this gentleman's question, as to whether or not I knew about the occupation, to be the most absurd question of all.

Had we not just walked together past a concrete barbed-wired topped wall, through a military compound staffed by teenage soldiers from an occupying military? Did he think I didn't realize that as a Palestinian, native to his land, he was harassed, made to wait, and fingerprinted, while as a foreigner I could zip by?

But then I thought more about this. Maybe it wasn't such an unusual comment. This man must be used to people working at checkpoints, constructing the wall, demolishing homes, driving on apartheid roads, and defending this racist system in it entirety.

I guess in this 'conflict', where people around the world look without seeing, where Orwellian political discourse is the norm, and a racist ideology has become celebrated national narrative, this simple question - which was loaded with the assumption that I was incapable of seeing what was right in front of my eyes - wasn't so absurd after all.