And They Wonder Why We're Angry
By Muhanned Tull*
The Washington Post Sunday, August 26, 2001
ARRAM, West Bank -- It was a normal family conversation; my wife was talking about her brother who lives in the Netherlands, and how happy he was, and our 6-year-old daughter interrupted. "Let us go visit him," she said. She thought for a moment, though, and added casually: "But we can't, the road is closed."
There was no tone of sadness or disappointment in the child's voice. To her, this is normal. All through the summer holidays we have been repeating "the road is closed" to our two daughters to explain to them why we are not taking them anywhere this year.
The swimming pool, their grandfather's house, the Netherlands, the moon are all equally out of reach.
She and her little sister accept this without question -- and that is painful
to me. Occupation, soldiers, checkpoints,
restrictions, dominate their lives. This is the context that CNN does not convey
when it shows the tragedy of a suicide bombing: We have become a people with so
little freedom and so little hope that suicide seems a reasonable weapon.
The restrictions were harsh enough before the bombing of the discotheque in Tel Aviv on June 1. Since then, however, 3 million Palestinians have been besieged within their own communities. Our cities and villages are prisons with blocked entrances guarded by armed soldiers in armored personnel carriers. Israeli troops have made it almost impossible for people to carry on their everyday lives -- to get to work, to buy food, to see a doctor, to visit a friend in a neighboring town.
And Israelis wonder why we are so angry. What do they expect?
Listen: I live just eight kilometers from Ramallah, the city at the center of
Palestinian life and culture these days. The only
road on which a Palestinian is permitted to drive into the city is blocked by a
checkpoint. Every car is stopped. We line up by
the hundreds and are let through one at a time. Passing takes between two and
three hours. So my round trip to the city, which
used to take 25 minutes, now takes four to six hours. I can hardly bring myself
to speak to the soldiers when they approach
my car window.
They might ask you where are you from, where are you going, what you do, and after they take a look at your ID they let you go.
That is it. Ninety percent of the time your ID is not checked against any
list of wanted people, your car is not searched, and
in many cases they don't even ask the stupid questions. Do you understand how
infuriating that is? It shows that roadblocks and checkpoints are not intended
as a security measure at all. They are just punishment and humiliation of a
whole population.
Nowadays the best option is to leave your car somewhere before the checkpoint and to walk across. Then the only risk you take is being subjected to tear gas and stun grenades. It usually happens like this: Hundreds of people are crossing -- workers, students, old people, children. Suddenly something will trigger an Israeli guard -- you don't know what, you can't see -- and the air fills with gas. It is not a pretty sight, women running, covering their infants' faces. This is a daily event here. It happened to my brother-in-law Wednesday, and we had to take him to the hospital; he'll be all right.
The road from Ramallah to Bir Zeit, home of Palestine's most respected
university, can't be driven at all: It is permanently
barricaded by concrete blocks and earthworks and guarded by an Israeli APC. So
students and others who need to get back and forth do so in stages: They drive
or ride out to the barricades and get out of their cars; then they walk, about a
kilometer, to the other side; then they get another ride.
The road to Nablus is passable by car, but Palestinians aren't permitted to
take it, whether driving or on foot. At this
checkpoint, the soldiers don't just block your passage. They keep you waiting
for several hours -- standing in the sun, and
sometimes, if you are a man, you have to keep your hands on top of your head --
before they turn you back. They don't want you to try to pass again, and most of
us do not.
For the past six months I have worked in Salfeet, about 40 kilometers from my
home. To reach my workplace I have to cross at least three Israeli army
checkpoints; how the trip goes is largely dependent on the soldiers' moods.
Sometimes one lets me
through only for the next to deny me access. But I usually get to work -- after
all, I get special treatment because USAID gave me an ID card. That's not true
for other Palestinians who dare to travel between cities.
And these are not criminals. They are just the thousands of Palestinians who
were born here, lived here all their lives, and
are just trying to lead a normal life: going to work in the morning and coming
home in the afternoon, going to the best
hospital or the most experienced doctor for treatment, distributing goods or
shipping materials from one town to another
to make a living.
Last Monday I was driving to work when I saw a man of 45 or 50 sitting on a
rock beside a small van with four flat tires. He
asked me for a lift. His name was Nafez TaHa and he had been on his way to
Ramallah to buy flour for the grocery store in his
village; this is what he does for a living. He took an "illegitimate"
detour to avoid spending useless hours at a checkpoint. Israeli soldiers stopped
him, and since they didn't have a bulldozer to dig up the detour, they blocked
it with his van, let the air out of its tires and took away his key. And, of
course, the soldiers did not waste the opportunity to humiliate him: They forced
him to lie on the ground face down, stepped on him and called him names.
We had hardly gone a kilometer when we were stopped again at an ad hoc checkpoint. TaHa could not produce his ID because the soldiers had taken it. As he started to try to explain, this middle-aged man burst into tears. He began to have trouble breathing, so he got out of the car and sat down under an olive tree and I gave him some water. I walked over to the soldiers to ask them to let us through, but they said we had to wait. When I came back, he was still crying and now complaining of chest pain.
He'd had a mild heart attack. That's what the doctors say at the Ramallah hospital, where he remains, "between the hands of God," as we say in Arabic. Before the ambulance took him away, he said to me: "They can take the car, but why on earth did they have to insult me like that?"
Apart from these hardships and humiliations, there is actual fear. Dozens of
Palestinians, including women and children, have
been killed or injured as a result of the Israeli army's "accurate"
operations against suspected terrorists.
In Nablus two children were killed when Israeli helicopters targeted the offices of a newspaper in the center of the city.
Israel said that the people inside were Hamas leaders planning a terror
attack. The two dead children are, according to Israel,
acceptable collateral damage. In Gaza, a 4-month-old infant was killed when an
Israeli tank shelled a residential neighborhood.
Also in Gaza, three Bedouin women were killed when their tent was shelled by an
Israeli tank. In Beit Sahour, two Palestinian women were killed when Israeli
helicopters assassinated a local leader of Fatah.
All that happens, and much of the world remains silent. Western media in
general and American media in particular have even
helped Israel to cover up all its crimes against Palestinians. In the eyes of
CNN, all Palestinians killed are terrorists, or
terrorists to be -- or, of course, acceptable collateral damage.
Israel is only practicing legitimate self-defense. It is as if the whole
thing is happening in a vacuum, stripped of any historical reference, as if we
were soccer hooligans going crazy instead of real people, with real lives that
are being relentlessly, purposely destroyed. It is as if all reporters have
forgotten the basic issue: Israel is an occupying power and the
Palestinians are a people under occupation.
The reason behind this world silence and one-sided media coverage is of
course suicide bombers -- a phenomenon that is very
worrying for me as a Palestinian. It is this level of desperation among my
people that really frightens me. I cannot even start to
think of the impact it will have not only on innocent Israelis but also on our
own society when young people actually believe
that death is a better option than the life they are leading.
What scares me more is that in the last few months -- as the crackdown has worsened, and as I drive those 40 kilometers every day to Salfeet -- I am beginning to understand where this desperation comes from. I see it in the eyes of young men stopped at checkpoints and waiting in the sun for hours. I see it in the eyes of old men and women walking for two kilometers on rough roads to bypass a checkpoint to get to work on time. And I felt the desperation myself when my daughter made that innocent remark about the road. Into what kind of world are we bringing our children? What ways are left for Palestinians to change the world we live in? Or will we all need to kill ourselves before the world understands the justice of a people's cry for freedom?
* Muhanned Tull works for World Vision, a Christian humanitarian
organization, as manager of a USAID-funded rural-development program in the West
Bank.