Gifts from Nablus
by Sam Messier**
August 18, 2002
I just finished viewing the contents of three CD’s smuggled in the bottom of my backpack from Nablus. Less than two weeks ago, I witnessed their careful retrieval from a pile of rubble on the roof of a family’s home in the Old City. "Please take these", says Marwan*, a young university student, "I have been hiding them from the soldiers. They tell about the Intifada." After watching the video stored on these CD’s, I feel chilled and numb.
One is a documentary on the massacres at Sabra and Shatila. It begins with scenes of corpses littering the streets. This was 20 years ago, but it is a vivid and terrible reminder of the deeds Ariel Sharon is capable of – the person whom George W. Bush refers to as a "man of peace".
Another is a documentary entitled "Al Quds" (Jerusalem). It ends with scenes of the Intifada and contains nauseating images of soldiers throwing a man with an infant in his arms to the street, a soldier beating a woman with a club, and numerous clashes between stone-throwing boys and the well-armed Israeli military.
The third appears to be a home-produced but nicely edited record of the destruction of Nablus during the April invasion. It includes views of a ruined ambulance riddled with bullet holes. "If the soldiers find these," he says, "don’t tell them where you got them."
He is a serious and friendly young man, and like everyone in Nablus he seems to have an understandable need to talk about the occupation and what it has done to his friends and family. I met him on the street while waiting for more Internationals to arrive at the emergency clinic that had been set-up in house in the Old City. "See up there", he says, "that’s where my friend was shot."
He points to the roof which Jill and Fiona had tried to cleanse of blood the day before. "He was going to get married after a week. The
soldiers forbid the ambulance to come when he was shot. It didn’t come to get him for 12 hours. He is a martyr now". In Palestine, everyone who dies as a result of the conflict is a martyr. I ask him about the posters of the martyrs pasted on the walls. "They are all from Nablus," he says. "That man", pointing to a poster of smiling man with warm eyes, "he was my friend also. He was shot for walking across the street."
"They hurt my father also," he says. "They came to search our house, and they hurt his arm when they came in. They took our ID cards and called us terrorists. We are not criminals. We want to live in peace side-by-side with our neighbor. We just want freedom and a good future for all the children." Despite the loss and indignity he has suffered, Marwan, like so many Palestinians I met, still maintains an incredible capacity for compassion. He really does want peace for both sides, but he wants justice too. "I disagree with the suicide bombings," he says. "Many Palestinians disagree with this. It is wrong to kill civilians. But Sharon can’t stop the killing with his army. He can only stop it by giving us our independence. There is no reason for Sharon to punish all the people"
He invites me upstairs to see his house, where just days ago the soldiers forced him to make a hole in his own wall and then the wall of his neighbors. "I didn’t want to make the hole in the neighbors’ house where the soldiers wanted because it was early in the morning, and I knew this was the wall of their children’s bedroom. I was afraid it might hurt the children, but the soldiers said they didn’t care. They said do it anyway."
I photograph the damage he was forced to do at gunpoint to his own home. I thank him for sharing his story with me and promise I will share it with people in the United States and else where. This is when he retrieves his CD’s that have remained hidden in the rubble on his roof and asks me to share these too. Both of us almost have tears in our eyes. We shake hands, and I leave to join the Internationals outside the clinic, who are now waiting for me.
I left Nablus with many gifts – these CD’s, a T-shirt from the Union of Palestinian Medical Relief Committees, a lovely brass plate with a picture of the Dome of the Rock. I also left with a deeper faith in the strength of the human spirit. The people of Nablus, like all Palestinians, have struggled for decades against oppression. Within the last two years things have gotten even worse with the destruction of their cities, the killing of many civilians, and collective punishment that has stifled their economy and kept them imprisoned in their own homes for weeks at a time. Amazingly, Marwan and so many others like him refuse to let their humanity be beaten out of them and hold on to an especially warm and open generosity that I will always associate with the people of Palestine. Thank you to all the
people of Nablus for your generous gifts. I will always hold Nablus in my heart.
If anyone would like copies of the CD’s, please let me know.
-Sam
* I have substituted a fake name to protect this man’s identity.
** Sam Messier recently returned from Palestine where she joined hundreds of internationals in solidarity with Palestinians nonviolently resisting Israel's illegal military occupation. More on Sam's trip at www.ccmep.org/palestine.html