[WCUSP] Fwd: [Anna in Palestine] Existence is Resistance: Challenging the Assault on Ordinary Life in Palestine

[Odile Hugonot Haber]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: travelinganna <anna.baltzer at gmail.com>
Date: Mar 19, 2007 3:33 PM
Subject: [Anna in Palestine] Existence is Resistance: Challenging the
Assault on Ordinary Life in Palestine
To: annas_peacework_palestine at yahoogroups.com


One week after I left Nablus I found myself again looking out across
 the city's majestic sunlit hills, this time from one of the highest
 mountains in the West Bank. In all my reporting on Israel's invasion
 and human rights violations, I never mentioned how beautiful the
 ancient city is, from the surrounding mountains to the enchanting Old
 City, so easy to get lost in. Both remind me of Damascus (one
 pessimistic Palestinian pointed out the comparison early during my
 stay, claiming that the Nablus invasion was practice for an attack
 against Syria). My last day in Nablus I got to discover another one of
 the city's gems: Al Najaa University. I immediately took to the old
 architecture mixed with modern sculptures on the main campus, but what
 inspired me most was watching thousands of students return to the
 frantic bustle of daily university life so soon after soldiers had
 released the city from hostage. Resilience is a defining character of
 Palestinian identity in my experience, and I was more impressed than
 surprised to see Palestinians asserting their determination to get an
 education even in the most difficult circumstances. Just another
 example of the ever-pervasive Palestinian nonviolent resistance.

 The night before visiting I had passed by the empty campus abandoned
 since the Army took over and classes were cancelledin a taxi driving
 home with the family that was hosting me. I had grown quite close to
 the warm family with Leninist communist leanings, and felt happy and
 comfortable in their home covered with posters of Che Guevara, David
 Beckham, Shakira, and others idolized by the three teenage daughters.
 As we were driving and chatting after having visited some friends, we
 were suddenly surrounded with jeeps driving through the city to and
 from seemingly every direction. We panicked. Was there curfew? Would
 we be shot for being outside? Screeching to a halt, we tried to back
 up to the neighborhood we’d come from, but jeeps were swarming in that
 direction as well. Where were we supposed to go?

 The jeeps left as quickly as they had come. Apparently they were doing
 a practice invasion, presumably to train new soldiers, as they have been
 doing a lot recently in a village called Beit Lid near Tulkarem (even
 though nobody in the village has been accused of threatening Israel's
 security). I will never forget that feeling of being suddenly
 surrounded, the confusion and panic, the helplessness. There was
 something about sitting together to a cheerful family breakfast the
 next morning that felt like a kind of nonviolent resistance too: the
 insistence on ordinary life and pleasures no matter what havoc
 Occupation Forces are wreaking just outside.

 I returned to the Nablus region a week later to accompany a teacher
 named Addawiya and her family to plow land they haven't been able to
 work for six years due to soldier harassment. The next plot over
 hasn't been plowed in 26 years for the same reason. There are Israeli
 military posts on all the highest West Bank peaks, among them the
 mountain where Addawiya’s land lies. As we cleared away stones that
 had overrun the land over the last half dozen years, Addawiya told me
 about the day she was picking olives with her brother when the
 soldiers came and threatened to shoot her brother if he didn't leave
 the land immediately. He persisted in picking olives until the
 soldiers began shooting into the air to show that they were serious,
 at which point he ran off terrified. Addawiya was left alone, and on
 her hands and knees pleaded for her life, all along sure she was going
 to die. Her fear was not unjustified. Three years ago, Addawiya’s
 sister was taking a walk on the family's land near the village with
 her husband when a group of soldiers popped out from the foliage and
 open-fired on him. The 33-year-old teacher died instantly

 The Israeli Army came and apologized to Addawiya’s family. Apparently
 they were intending to assassinate a wanted man and shot the wrong
 guy. Addawiyaâ's sister, who was 23 and pregnant at the time, is now a
 26-year-old going on 60. With nobody to support her and two young
 children to raise, she had to move back in with her mother.
 Incidentally, the mother invited me to move in too when we returned
 from plowing (as an unmarried, childless 27-year-old woman, I’m
 practically an old maid around here). I declined politely, and we
 began the journey back to Haris.

 Our first stop along the way was Huwwara, the southern checkpoint out
 of Nablus city, where as usual hundreds of students from Al Najaa and
 other universities were waiting unhappily, squished together like
 cattle as it began to rain and everyone squeezed under the roof to
 wait behind metal detectors and turnstiles to leave the city.

 I remembered passing through Huwwara a few days earlier on a trip
 accompanying other farmers in the area. Since the solidarity effort
 was organized by the Israeli group Rabbis for Human Rights, we were
 driving in an Israeli car with yellow license plates, so we didn't
 even slow down as we breezed through on the Israeli-only road parallel
 to the one where Palestinians had been waiting for hours if not days.

 On the way back from Addawiya' s land, a colleague and I decided to
 stay at Huwarra to do Checkpoint Watch, i.e. witness and document any
 human rights violations. There was already one sick man whom the Army
 had refused to let pass and we took his story. At first the soldiers
 didn't seem to mind our presence, but after some time one soldier told
 us we weren't allowed to stand where we were. He pointed to a line
 drawn on the floor nearby and said we could stand behind it. We began
 to protest, but quickly realized a fight would translate into longer
 waiting time for the Palestinians being processed by the same soldier,
 so we walked a few paces to the other side of the line. Ten minutes
 later, a different soldier informed us it was illegal to be observing
 the checkpoint at all, so we would have to leave immediately. We
 didn't even dignify his absurd claim with a response. He stood next to
 us awkwardly repeating himself a few times and then eventually went away.

 We were approached by a third soldier, speaking only Hebrew. When we
 said we couldn't understand, he told us in broken English that it was
 illegal to be there if you didn't speak Hebrew. This was a new one.
 Another soldier showed up to translate the soldier's original message,
 namely that in fact we could look but not take pictures. The soldier
 regretted to inform us that he would have to delete my photographs. At
 that point we decided we preferred to leave rather than lose the
 photos, so we began to walk away. As expected, the soldier didn't
 chase after the supposedly illegal pictures. Just before we left, we
 saw the sick man previously denied passage try his luck with a
 different soldier at a different machine and get through.

 Israel claims that its checkpoints are for the security and safety of
 its citizens. What makes this claim so difficult to believe for those
 observing the institutions is how inconsistent and seemingly arbitrary
 the Army's actions and laws so frequently are. The sick man got
 through on his second try. Had that failed, he could have sprung for
 an expensive taxi ride to an alternative checkpoint 10 miles north
 that is scarcely monitored at all (when we passed through on the way
 to Addawiya's land there were no soldiers in sight). The whole trip
 north and then around again would cost him several hours and
 paychecks, but he could exit his city with relative certainty. Anyone
 who's spent time in the West Bank knows that if you're desperate, you
 can get anywhere. There is always an alternative road, even into
 Israel, even with the Wall, which is full of holes so as not to
 disturb settlers commuting to Israel. Israel is not stupid. It knows
 that Palestinians can get around the Army's blockades if they just
 drain enough energy and resources to do so. So why does Israel do it?

 As our shared taxi from Huwwara to Haris left the checkpoint, the
 driver pulled up next to several drivers to ask how Zatara was. Zatara
 is a permanent checkpoint between Huwwara and Haris, but there's an
 alternative road through Jama iin village, which drivers take when the
 checkpoint line is too long or slow. The ride takes much longer, and
 is painfully bumpy and curvy. When our driver chose the detour, the
 woman next to me grimaced and took out some plastic bags, which she
 spent the ride vomiting into. I rubbed her back, not knowing what else
 to do, thinking about the short, straight, paved road that could have
 eased her suffering if it were not rendered so endless for non-Jews.

 The taxi eventually dropped us off near the Haris bus stop, which
 soldiers have surrounded with large concrete cubes leftover from the
 roadblock that used to block our village. The blocks mean that waiting
 Palestinians cannot easily get from the sheltered bus stop to the
 road, so at least one traveler must wait always wait on the road to
 spot and flag down cars, even when it's raining. Each time I'm forced
 to drench my backpack and jeans waiting to start a day's journey, I
 think about what Israel has to gain by making even a bus stop
 inaccessible without struggle, by rendering what could be a smooth
 drive home into a nauseating miserable ride. I think about why the
 roadblocks were set up to begin with outside Haris, when villagers
 either had to drive their cars to the entrance, park, walk around, and
 take a taxi the rest of the way to work or university, or they had to
 take their cars along a strenuous unpaved detour through the
 countryside to reach the same outside road. What's the point of making
 life so frustrating that people reconsider even going to work or
 school? What happens when daily life in Palestine becomes just too
 unbearable?

 My questions are answered almost every day when strangers call or
 approach us desperate for help getting a visa to Europe or North
 America. They say they can't take it anymore: First Israel took their
 land, then their sons, and now their dignity. What Israel wants more
 than anything isn't to harm Palestinians; it wants for Palestinians to
 leave. Israel is the first to admit that the demographic problem of
 too many Palestinians in an exclusively Jewish state threatens Israel
 more than any suicide bomber ever could.

 Addawiya told me she wanted to leave as we were walking back from her
 groves. I asked her where, and she told me it didn't matte she wasn't
 going anywhere. Because no country will give you a visa?” I asked,
 and she shook her head. Because that's what they want us to do. They
 want us to flee as we did in 1948, so that the Jewish National Fund
 can again expropriate our land and reserve it for Jews only. But I
 won't leave. I will stay here because it's my right and it's my duty,
 to myself and to my children. For Addawiya, even staying in her
 village and working her land is nonviolent resistance, the kind almost
 every Palestinian partakes in. It's not the type of resistance that
 will make it onto headlines or the six o'clock news, but it is there,
 it is strong, and it is not going away.

 In struggle,

 Anna

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