Message from Bethlehem
Alison Nassar
November 7, 2001
NOTE: Alison Nassar writes about the aftermath of Israeli incursion into Bethlehem region. Reading most media reports, one gets the impression that it is over when the soldiers leave. From emails it sounds like the amount of damage is immense. One visiting American stated that nearly every home water tank had been purposed ruined by gunfire.
Alison Nassar writes of her own experience. Earlier this year they moved from an apartment in Beit jala to Beit Sahour for safety. Here is her account.
As bad as the ten days of the invasion were, last week was in a way worse. On Monday, as we were released from the imprisonment of our homes, we began to understand the true extent of the destruction and the slaughter. It seems to have touched, in one way or another, every single household in Bethlehem, and their stories, though they will for the most part never be known beyond the local community, are full of sorrow, helplessness, anger, and indignation.
Monday was spent exchanging greetings (“Alhumdulilah Salamah” meaning “Thank God you made it through the ordeal in peace”) and stories, and visiting the areas of destruction. As I walked through Manger Square on my way to work, I gazed at the hundreds of memorial posters which had been plastered throughout the old city to commemorate the dead. Groups of small boys gathered around pictures of the slain fighters. Images of recent victims mixed with others from months past, their posters ragged and blanched of color.
I recognized many, including the little Jawarish boy killed last October while walking home from school, his backpack still on his back. George had attended that funeral. That was back before the Palestinians had started shooting back, back when the Israelis were still picking off twelve-year-old rock throwers and convincing Americans that it was their own parents who were to blame.
What has all this death meant, and what has it accomplished? And when will it be enough?
The uncle of Mathilda’s classmate Jihan was the one killed by a sniper as he drove to the central wholesale market. Her friend Samih’s father, who was “detained” by the Israelis in the 80’s, was taken from his house for “questioning” and for several hours the family did not know his whereabouts. He was beaten up, but allowed to return home. Nadine’s classmate and best friend Majd lives just up the street from our old house in Bet Jala, and her house was damaged by both gunfire and tankfire, with the family inside at the time. For ten days they were without electricity or phone lines and they could not leave the house to bring food. Melvyn Barhoum’s home next door (which had been evacuated), caught fire either from an exploding shell or from a pierced gas bottle.
Rescue crews did not dare approach the area because of the tanks and snipers, and the house burned out of control all night and into the following day. Now it is uninhabitable.
On Tuesday I took the girls to a birthday party in Bet Jala and sat with one of the mothers while we waited for the party to finish. 22-year-old Rania Khouroufeh was their next door neighbor and they had been to the house several times on condolence visits. She said the children (two and four) looked bewildered and scared by all the grief they had had to witness. The tanks had passed several times in front of their house and had been firing on downtown Bethlehem from a position just up the street. The sound was unearthly, and her youngest Sami (age 3) would literally blanch and hold his hands over his ears.
The older girls (11 and 8) had started wetting the bed at night, and refused to be left alone, even to go to the bathroom. Her husband had been in an Israeli jail in the 80’s as well, and he was constantly in fear that they would find some pretext to “come for him again”.
The house of Abu Samir, our neighbor across the street in Bet Jala, had been occupied by 25 soldiers and the couple (both in their 50’s) had been held hostage in one room for five days before the UN (with whom Abu Samir is employed) intervened. They told George that every hour or so, one soldier or another would step up to the window facing into the refugee camp and spray machine gunfire toward it (toward Majd’s house on the next street up). They vandalized the furniture and furnishings,
stole personal items including money (but fortunately no large amounts were in the house), and littered the floor with garbage and food. They knocked down the corner portion of the stone wall in the garden so as to position the tank facing the camp. Our neighbor Mazen and his extended family (five families plus the elderly parents, or a total of about 33 people) live in the house directly faced by the tank, and were in the process of building an extension onto their house.
They own a small grocery and a vegetable store. All of it was damaged by the tank fire and indiscriminate shooting, but alhumdulilah salamah, none of the people were injured. They also had no electricity, phone lines, or food supplies for ten days and did not dare step outside or even move toward the front of the house until the soldiers had withdrawn.
I stopped by to greet Abeer, who has a pharmacy by my mother-in-law’s house. She lives in Al-Madbasa in downtown Bethlehem. They too had been imprisoned without electricity or phone lines, in an area of some of the fiercest fighting. Much of the time had been spent in the bathroom at the rear of the house. As I stood talking to her about their experience, her three-year-old daughter was climbing on a stool.
A car passed by and made a backfiring noise just as it passed the door. The little girl startled so badly at the sound that she lost her footing and fell off the stool, crying hysterically, not from injury but fear.
George’s friend Imad lives in Azza camp, just across the street from the college. Or rather, he lived there. His house is now a blackened shell and looks as if an earthquake struck it. The four families occupying the house were huddled in a back bedroom when their gas bottle was struck by a bullet and exploded. Since Israeli snipers were positioned in a high building directly next door and had been shooting down on the camp from their seventh floor vantage point continuously since the beginning of the invasion, they could not evacuate immediately.
One child’s eyes were damaged by the toxic smoke and fumes coming from the fire and his face is now wrapped in bandages in the hopes that he’ll eventually recover his sight. George went to sit with Imad on Monday and said that not a single possession is left. They lost everything except what they were wearing. Imad had a garage at the side of the house and has often worked on the electrical wiring for our car; this too was damaged beyond repair. Next to the garage, his brother had a small shop for butchering chickens, also destroyed. Now they have nowhere to live and no source of income. And winter is coming.
On Wednesday I needed to change a few dollars, so I took the opportunity to stop by our moneychanger. He had the misfortune of being located across the street from the Paradise Hotel, where the worst destruction took place. On Thursday night, in anticipation of an imminent withdrawal (which did not take place), army bulldozers plowed into the shopfronts all along the street causing unbelievable damage.
The wreckage along the Azza camp side of the street was by far the most appalling of Monday morning’s sights, and many shops—a grocery, a watch repair shop, a pharmacy --were utterly destroyed. Our man the moneychanger was lucky. Although the metal door was bashed in and the entryway torn up, the counter at the back was not reduced to splinters, and on the day I stopped by he had pulled it out into the sunshine and was sitting casually behind it.
I walked up, extended my hand and said, alhumdulilah salamah, and for just a moment I thought he would burst into tears.
By then I had said alhumdulilah salamah enough times to expect a certain typical sort of response combining restraint (a Palestinian will always minimize his troubles), humble courage, and gentle humor. It took this man just a split-second before he could compose himself and respond with the standard reply, and the expression I saw on his face was pure unmasked pain. And he was one of the lucky ones.
My sister-in-law Nisreen was another lucky one. Unlike the pregnant woman from Husan who went into labor and died trying to get to the hospital in Bethlehem, Nisreen and her daughter (alhumdulilah salamah) survived the invasion. As soon as the tanks entered Bet Jala, she and her husband fled to my mother-in-law’s house in Bethlehem’s old city, usually a safe location. This time it was the site of intense fighting and they were forced on most days to descend to the basement. Nisreen’s due date (20 October) came and went. Finally, early on Thursday morning 25 October she went into labor. Nisreen had registered for delivery at the French hospital, but the French hospital had been hit by both tank and gunfire. So they cut through a thorny field leading from the basement down to the street below and took her to Doman clinic in Bet Sahour (where Phoebe was born). The baby (named Lubna meaning “place deep inside the heart”) was born at three that afternoon. That night I drove through the deserted streets distantly echoing with gunfire to say alhumdulilah salamah to mother and baby daughter.
Upon discharge the following day, they could not go home and indeed, they could not even return to my mother-in-law’s. They had to spend two nights in Bet Sahour. But they were grateful to be safe and alive and together.
This is what Palestinians have had to become accustomed to. The Israelis have taken so relentlessly that every small act of giving back is turned into a gesture of magnanimous generosity for which we must be grateful, even though none of it was ever theirs to take and it is not theirs to give back. They have taken so much land that we are supposed to feel thankful for the scrap which is left to us. They have appropriated so many of our basic civil and human rights that we are supposed to be grateful on that rare occasion when we are permitted to pass, unimpeded, to school or to work or to the doctor or to our land. They invade and batter us for ten days so we’ll be thankful when they’ve gone, even though we find ourselves in the same miserable situation as before they came. Endless internal closure. Anxious of violent eruptions every minute of every day. 50% unemployment. Every second household living below the poverty line…….
It’s a logical progression. Soon the only thing we’ll have left to be grateful for is the fact that we have not yet been wiped out of
existence. And when there is nothing at all left to take from us but our cheap cheap lives, will it finally be enough?