Spring 2005

In this section, you will find follow-up pieces written by previously published authors.

Rush Rehm
"Fatal Occupations", Winter 2005

Fatal Occupations — Nablus and the West Bank
September 2004/March 2005

I take a series of servis (shared taxi vans) to reach Hawara, the main checkpoint outside Nablus.in the West Bank of occupied Palestine. Vehicles with non-Israeli plates (i.e Palestinian vehicles) cannot drive through either direction, meaning that pedestrians pour out from cars, buses, taxis, even Palestinian ambulances (several women have died in childbirth, or lost their newborns, or both, at Israeli checkpoints). They crowd within a fenced area trying to reach the turnstile (like a gated 8-foot high subway entrance) that allows one person at a time--signaled by the IDF soldiers on duty--to pass through. You walk down a waist-high cement corridor 20 yards long to the soldiers with their rifles aimed at your stomach. Sometimes they look at your passport, occasionally they search your belongings, but I never saw them check a name against a list, or take a passport into the guardhouse to search electronically. The checkpoints and military presence are not there for security. Rather, they control your movements, your schedule, your life, punishing Palestinians and fellow travelers by reminding them who runs the occupied territories. If you get to the other side (sometimes they deny entry, sometimes they close the checkpoint completely), you walk another 100 yards or 500 yards or 1 km, and there are cabs or buses waiting (or not) to take you on.

Hawara checkpoint opens at 6 a.m. and closes at 7 p.m., after which no one crosses except the Israeli military. I know this because when I was not permitted to cross on my first visit in September. "Nablus is too dangerous," the soldiers insisted. I pleaded, mentioning Sebastaya, an ancient Greek site north of Nablus that I was hoping to visit. The soldier had me stand aside, someone made a phone call, the answer was NO. By this time it was 3:30 (a good day, I'd waited only 50 minutes; leaving Nablus a week later for Jenin--a city virtually destroyed by the IDF in 2002--I waited almost three hours but did get through). I had the phone number of an Israeli taxi that had had success bringing in foreigners, and I begged a mobile from a Palestinian in the back of the line. A voice bounced off a satellite: "Wait there till the checkpoint closes and it's dark; I'll pick you up by 9:00 p.m. and take you in another way."

I read (eventually by flashlight) Graham Greene's Lawless Roads, a bitter, dismissive account of Chiapas in the 1930s, reminding me of my time there after the Zapatista uprising. Then Chiapas suffered its own "internal occupation," invaded by 30,000 Mexican soldiers, boarding buses, searching documents, removing indigenous men (what happened to them?), deporting internationals who had come in solidarity, a tactic now popular in Israel. Looking up from my book, I watched the life drain out of this bizarre gathering place in the desert, this non-oasis that stopped the flow of people and their lives. As it got colder, I put on the three shirts I'd brought with me (I hadn't planned on sleeping out), nervous that it was past 9:00 pm and there was no sign of a taxi. Israeli armored cars roared by, army trucks, more armored cars, maybe 30 while I was still awake. On the other side of the checkpoint, down the road to the right, lies an Israeli military base, and up the hill (on every West Bank hill, it seems) an Israeli settlement, fenced in, protected, and (as I would see later) with green grass and tennis courts. I slept and woke on the tarmac, lying low behind the barrier, afraid that if I were seen now, the IDF might shoot. By 2:00 am, the military traffic had stopped, and two hours later a cab arrived, not Israeli but Palestinian, to be first in line when the checkpoint opened, ready to fill with passengers leaving Nablus and heading south. The driver invited me sleep in the back of his cab (Palestinians are hospitable at any hour), and I awoke at 6 to try to cross the checkpoint again. This time I was told forcefully: "No foreigners get into Nablus." Vowing to try another day, I shared a cab to Ramallah.

People call this bustling mess of a town the ersatz capital of Palestine, given Israel's illegal annexation of Jerusalem. You can see the bombed-out compound where Arafat hung on against all odds. He died between my first and second visit, and now lies buried there. Abandoning a lucrative business career to lead the Palestinian cause, Arafat spent years in resistance and exile, fighting, posturing, rising time and again from the rubble. After selling out the cause for personal power at Oslo, he re-emerged after Israel's brutal repression of the second Intifada as the aging symbol of Palestinian resistance. Continued respect for Arafat suggested to me how cornered and desperate Palestinians had become after 56 years of exile or life in a refugee camp, or 37 years of occupation for those who stayed. The daily degradation and economic hopelessness (50% of working-age Palestinians are unemployed, and more than two-thirds of the population live on less than $2 a day) have taken their toll, as have the leveled villages, the thousands of demolished homes, the hundreds of thousands of uprooted trees (mostly old olives), making way for Jewish settlements and the monstrous wall that surrounds what is left of Palestine. At the Al-Weddeh hotel (a run-down place, with no other visible guests), I tried using the two phone cards I'd bought in East Jerusalem, only to discover that neither worked in Ramallah. Having declared Jerusalem its capital (against international law and UN resolutions), Israel has arranged it that phone cards there don't work anywhere else in the West Bank, except in (illegal) Jewish settlements. A bike shop near the hotel, with little more than old patched tires, also sold phone cards, lined up in a dusty shoebox like the baseball cards I collected as a kid. These would work in the West Bank, but not in Israel proper. I called taxi driver who was to pick me up the previous night. He explained that the IDF had placed Nablus under curfew, and no one could drive in last night, from anywhere. I then phoned Aisha, my contact in Nablus who worked with a community group near the Balata refugee camp. "Good morning. How are you?" she asked, solicitous as always about my well-being, although she sounded upset. I learnt why: "Last night the IDF attacked here, killing five people, and they're chasing another one who escaped. They destroyed the house at 4:30 in the morning. Are you sure you want to come?"

Like other extra-judicial assassination of "suspected terrorists," the Israeli government offered no evidence, no trial, and no apologies, even when--as in this case-- one of the victims was an 11-year old girl. The US supplies the equipment and the aid, some $5 billion a year, Democrat or Republican Congress, it doesn't matter. I understood why "Nablus isn't safe." It isn't safe from the occupying army that can kill whom it likes, when it likes, with the US government providing the arms, the finances, and the geopolitical cover. "Of course I want to come, now more than ever." I phoned Aisha back later that morning, and she'd arranged another driver. "On Friday, after Rosh Shoshona, he can get you through. You can trust him." I had time to see Ramallah, then head down to Bethlehem before meeting my ride into Nablus. I took a cab looking for a solidarity organization whose name had been given me in London. The cabbie, Ahmed, was a recent graduate from Bir Zeit University in Ramallah. He explained that the Israeli authorities had closed the university for several years during the second Intifada, but classes met in homes, mosques, churches, cafes. Driving a cab was the only job, and not a very good one; it was noon, and I was Ahmed's first fare that day. His broken front teeth had come from the boot of an Israeli soldier, as well as his 3 broken ribs--ugly raised bumps under his shirt, like stones on his chest (he had me touch them). As a young teenager in the first Intifada, he was arrested after throwing stones at some IDF vehicles and beat beaten. He never saw a doctor until they released him from prison a year later. Ahmed was one story among thousands--since 1967, over 400,000 Palestinians have been imprisoned. Ahmed dropped me off at a tall unfinished building, but there was no sign of the Palestinian Friendship Council. I passed a door with Al Fatah Organization stenciled on the glass, and thought, "well, why not?" An older gentleman invites me into his office for coffee. An engineer, not a politician, he represents the Palestinian Authority in their (fruitless) negotiations with Israeli over water resources. He spoke of his son who lives now in San Jose (I promise I'll call him), and how his own generation had failed. "We gave it all away, and the youngsters look at us in disbelief. What happened? What hope do we have?" I ask him about water in the West Bank, and he gives me the position paper that lays out clearly--with maps and statistics--Israel's land and water grab, set in concrete by the annexation wall surrounding the West Bank. It divides the Palestinian territory into non-viable Bantustan outposts, surrounded by armed Israeli settlements. Welcome to the reservation, I think. No wonder the resistance straps $150 worth of explosives to desperate souls ready to kill and die for the cause, the poor-man's response to $150 million Apache helicopters raining down death from the sky, insuring the daily expropriation of Palestinian land, livelihood, and life.

From Ramallah I return to East Jerusalem, then head straight out to Bethlehem. The checkpoints make the 10 km. journey into one of hours. The closing off of Bethlehem offers one of the most shocking examples of the effect on Palestinian life of the checkpoints, the settlements, and the wall. Thousands in Bethlehem who used to work in Jerusalem are not even allowed to enter the city now. Without special papers issued by the Israeli authorities (rarely given), they're cut off from employment, family, and friends. As for heading south, the road that used to run from Bethlehem to Hebron just stops, dead-ending into a mound of rubble raised by the Israelis, fortified with guard posts and an army camp.

The feeling of living in a prison is acute, and the negative economic impact operates both ways. After Jerusalem, Bethlehem had been the main Christian pilgrimage site in the West Bank. But now the hotel recommended in my 2003 Let's Go: Israel ("right on Manger Square!") was boarded up for lack of business. I learned later that a nearby (illegal) Israeli settlement, with the help of the government, had gained a monopoly on running bus tours into Bethlehem. By housing tourists in Israeli hotels in West Jerusalem (Israeli buses pass right through the checkpoints), these tours siphoned off one of the few revenue sources left to Palestinians. After having the site of the Nativity virtually to myself (was there a quieter time since the first shepherds came?), I took a local bus to visit the Aida refugee camp. There the remarkable Abed Fattah Abu-Srour runs the Al-Rowwad Cultural and Theatre Training Center, an all-volunteer community program for Palestinian kids (see the website alrowwad.virtualactivism.net). Lost in the maze of this crowded, treeless urban jungle, the tiny building of Al-Rowwad, with barely enough room for a class to meet, holds out a lifeline of hope. Based on their own experience of the occupation and the Intifada, the kids--with Abed's help--develop plays they perform in Bethlehem and on tour, even traveling to France where Abed got his PhD in engineering (doing theater on the side). As he put it, "We try to hold onto our humanity, difficult as it is. If not, the only future for these youngsters is despair and violence." Abed's work has caught the attention of the great American playwrights Naomi Wallace and Tony Kushner (who earlier that year had spent a night on the couch where Abed and I were talking). But what can the theater do in the face of Israeli power, and the US power that lies behind it?

The trip to Nablus the next day was memorable. As the IDF still had orders to let no foreigners into the city (Israel does not like outsiders to see their dirty work), my driver took me "another way," eventually moving on foot, under barbed wire, dodging Israeli patrols, until I found myself walking down the mountain into the dazzling but beleaguered city of Nablus. I checked into a hotel, and as I was eating lunch I heard automatic rifle fire in the distance. I went out and walked down a few blocks, where some young kids were throwing stones at IDF armored vehicles moving up and down the empty street, vehicles that only a bazooka or a bomb could have penetrated. I learned later that a few streets away a girl of 18, a student at An-Najah University, was shot and killed by an Israeli soldier as she was looking out her window. At her funeral the next day (Nablus has seen hundreds of these in the last few years), a crowd marched behind the litter that bore the body to the cemetery. I spoke to a young man walking nearby, who turned out to be the fiancŽ of the sister of the girl who'd been killed. He'd come back from the US only two months before, having graduated from the University of Miami. I expressed my sympathies, and apologized as an American whose tax dollars had paid for this murder and many others. Like every Palestinian I met, he told me how much he liked Americans, that they just didn't know what was happening here, that they were misinformed, that it wasn't their fault. If only that were true. I thought of a similar experience I'd had in my first week in Estel’, Nicaragua, in 1987. Five campesinos from the town (one a pregnant girl of 17) were blown up by a landmine set by the Contra. I went to that funeral too, and couldn't stop crying, face to face with the horrible violence committed by US clients, done in the name of "freedom" and "national security." In the midst of all that killing (the Contra murdered some 10,000 Nicaraguans out of a population of 3 million, proportionately equivalent to 900,000 Americans), Nicaraguans always made me feel welcome, just like this grieving Palestinian, who differentiated me from my government. The US hate crimes against Muslims after 9/11 suggest we have much to learn from the people we are so bent on attacking.

I finally met Aisha, who'd helped so much in getting me to Nablus. I'd gotten her name from Harry, an elderly Belgian I'd met in Amman the week before, where he'd gone for stomach surgery. Fluent in Arabic, he'd lived in Nablus for years, and with Aisha's help had started a project providing residents in the old town with plastic window boxes and flower seeds. They called the project "Nablus--City of Hope, City of Peace," such a sweet response to an impossible situation. Aisha took me to the Balata camp and to the community organization where she worked. Walking through the old city, we saw some of the flower boxes that she and Harry had provided, bringing color to the dilapidated windows and a smile to the two of us. We visited her father's stall in the market, where he sewed pillow cases and bedspreads, but business was not good. Across the alley from his shop stood a rubble-filled lot, where an Israeli missile had struck three years before. Happily he was not there at the time, but many people were killed. At An-Najah University, where Aisha studied English, I met several professors, and I offered my services should I be able to return next spring. In March 2005 I did come back and spent an intense week teaching English classes and giving public lectures on how the US government and media have "framed" Palestine, making the victims of violence look like its principal perpetrators.

It felt like something of a homecoming to see Aisha again after six months, and find Harry fully recovered, back in the town he loved. After the election of Abu Mazzen (following Arafat's death) and the proposed pullout of Jewish settlers from Gaza, tensions had lowered somewhat, although nothing had really changed, in spite of the political posturing. Crossing Hawara was easy this time, but a conversation in the servis undersored the reality. A Palestinian woman, born and raised in Nablus, who now lived in Baltimore, had returned after many years to visit her mother in the hospital. The day before she had not been allowed to cross the checkpoint, but was told to go to another checkpoint 3-hours away. Today there was no trouble. "So today we can travel, with no problem at the checkpoint. We're happy. We forget about everything else, our land, our homes, our country, our dreams. Just say Ôthank you' to the people who make our life hell, because today they chose not to." Another Palestinian chimed in: "What can we do? There's no point getting upset. We're not going anywhere." Far from defeatism, he was echoing what I'd heard time and again from Palestinians, that Israel wants them to go away, to disappear. But they won't. They have no place to go. They will live in their homes, farm their land, raise their children, work what jobs they can find, dream their dreams, struggle for the same rights that others have, including the right to self-government in a country free from military occupation.

At An-Najah University, I met Saed, a professor of geography and geopolitics, and we talked almost every day, sometimes for hours. Although he'd gotten his degrees from the University of Iowa, but he, too, wasn't leaving Nablus. He described an early evening three years ago, when he was sitting with his mother on their front porch. An Israeli sniper fired from a police car across the street, and she died in his arms. We visited her grave twice, in the cemetery on the way to the university. My own mother died in November, between my first and second visit to Nablus. She was 85 and died in a hospital bed. Although hard for me and my family, we knew that her death was part of the story everyone is born into. What happened to Saed's mother was not.

We spoke of Islam (after her murder Saed started praying again regularly at the mosque), politics, the US (I talked in his class about the myth of the American melting pot), anti-semiticism, Zionism, Israeli settlements, suicide bombers. In all my lectures at An-Najah I had emphasized non-violent struggle. But the longer I stayed, the more I wondered what I would do if I lived here, under this brutal occupation. Saed described a peaceful protest in Nablus that he had helped organize some years ago. The IDF told them to disperse, then opened fire, killing a man next to him, and 11 others by the end of the day. What chance did non-violent resistance have here? That question still haunts me. On the way back from Nablus, I stopped in East Jerusalem and joined Mordechai Vanunu for dinner. I'd met this heroic man on my first visit in September, after he'd been released under house arrest having spent 18 years in an Israeli prison for treason. He blew the whistle on Israel's nuclear weapons program (now the fifth-largest in the world) by giving an interview to the London Times. At the restaurant were two other remarkable activists, Daniel Ellsberg (of the Pentagon Papers) and Jennifer Harbury (her Bridges of Courage and In Search of Everardo describe the indigenous people's struggle in Guatemala). They had come to testify at a hearing on Mordechai's behalf, to no avail. Last week (April 18) Mordechai was denied permission to leave Israel for at least another year. Among the evidence used against him was an email I'd sent in October inviting him to speak at Stanford. The Israeli authorities had seized his laptop, and argued that contacts outside of Israel violated the conditions of his release from prison. They claim that he will jeopardize national (nuclear) security, this man who has not set foot near an Israeli nuclear facility for nineteen years.

To save money I had flown (from Berlin via Budapest) into Tel Aviv, cheaper than flying to Amman and crossing the Jordan River as I'd done in the fall. But in Nablus I heard the horror stories about the Ben Gurion airport. Harry had been questioned four hours once trying to leave from there, and a German friend I'd met in Nablus (admittedly with an Arab-sounding last name) was interrogated for 15 hours in the basement of the airport, where the Israeli Ministry of Defense tried to convince him he was a member of Hezbollah. I felt lucky that I got out with only 20 minutes of questions.

It sounds like madness, but it's real. And the source--in my view--lies here, in the United States. If we stopped our massive aid to Israel, stopped vetoing UN resolutions, stood by our "international responsibilities" (as our Secretary of State is so fond of telling others to do), the occupation would end. And we should take heart. Campaigns to divest from Israel are growing. The Presbyterian Church has done so, and campus groups across the country are pressuring their universities to do the same. A boycott of the US-based Caterpillar corporation is underway, for their equipment demolishes homes in the West Bank and Gaza, rips out trees, kills peace activists like Rachel Corrie. We should remember that when governments act like tyrannies, we have the right to change them. And we can draw courage from the Palestinians, who live their resistance every minute of every day. And they will not go away.

Rush Rehm
Professor, Drama and Classics