November Reflections From Palestine

by Layla Kaiksow

November 5, 2003

Today we tried to go out to get some Knaffe from Bethlehem; it was supposed to be a simple trip with everyone from the house. There is sometimes a lack of things to do here because of the limited mobility so as we all piled into the van for our small outing we were happy to be leaving the house with a small mission: sweets! The best place to buy sweets in Bethlehem is very near to the checkpoint leading to Jerusalem. As we neared the road we were stopped, not by soldiers thankfully, but by a new road block. Apparently for some three-day Jewish Holiday the Israeli army decided to close the checkpoint leading to Bethlehem. There was no warning or notice to anyone. This road is the only way out of Bethlehem; essentially all of us in Bethlehem were trapped until the Israeli army decides they are ready to staff the checkpoint again.

The husband of my friend Nada (I live in Beit Sahur with Nada's mother) was driving, he is a taxi driver and was concerned how he would conduct business until the checkpoint was opened again. We drove all the way through Beit Jala (a neighboring village) to the checkpoint there so we could inquire when the checkpoint would be re-opened. They assured us after two days it should be open again. Needless to say we had to go somewhere else for our sweets since we could not reach the shop due to the closure. The whole experience just illustrates how daily lives and livelihoods of Palestinians are in the total control of any Israeli whim. The roadblock was removed and the checkpoint re-opened two days later.

November 15, 2003

I want to rent a car but I can't rent one with Green (Palestinian) plates because I can't get from Bethlehem to Jenin through the West Bank due to closures and checkpoints. If I rent Yellow (Israeli) plates I can't enter the West Bank in some area preventing me from reaching Jenin (this is of course for my "safety" not because there are actually places where Israelis can't go). It is all very frustrating and pissing me off. I compromised by renting Yellow plates from a Palestinian company in Beit Hanina (inside Israel).

November 17, 2003: Jenin, Palestine

I am staying in Jelama with a family friend. Jelama is a small village of about 1,500 located just north of Jenin. Jelama has now become a border town, with many people's land recently stolen with the development of the new Apartheid Wall being built by Israel. The mother of my friend is in her 80's and she remembers a time when there were no Zionists trying to claim her land. She told me that one of her daughters lost around 625 acres of land from the construction of the wall. There is also land that the family owns that now lies in a labeled "no-man's land" where they can no longer claim it to farm or build on it. Jelama has a checkpoint that allows Israeli plates in so that they may reach their settlements. Less than half a mile down the road is another checkpoint to reach the area known as Jenin. Supposedly this area is not allowed for yellow plates but our American passports got us a green light to go through. We told the soldiers we are doing research on "Cultural Cross-Over" at the university in Jenin.

The solider seemed surprise to hear that there even was a university in Jenin. He made me open the trunk of my rental car and them he wanted me to open the hood. I couldn't figure out how to open the hood on my cheap little rented Ford Fiesta so I ended up having to call the car rental place. It turns out that the latch was broken and you needed a wrench or some sort of tool to open it. I tried to pull on the wire; my friend tried to pull on the wire. We both told the solider that it wasn't working and he was welcome to try to open it. He came over to my side (driver's side) of the car and leaned in, I was out of the car at this time. He was pulling on the wire (underneath the steering wheel), he said to me "I am afraid it is going to go boom." I assured him that it was not "going to go boom" and that it was just a cheap rental car and the latch was broken. He fiddled with it some more and then let us go, having been unsuccessful in the process.

The whole scene was quite funny, the solider was terrified, throughout the day my friend and I laughed about the whole sequence of events. He was the one holding the machine gun, he was the one with the protective gear on, and yet he was still scared of us. My friend told me that this solider has been giving him lots of trouble recently at the checkpoint and one day he asked the soldier "do you ever stop to think about why there is a bomb and not where there is a bomb?" My friend said the solider looked at him strangely and didn't respond. But that was the irony of the whole thing, here was this guy, an obviously European Jew, so scared for his safety, but not stopping for one second to think why he lives in fear or why he carries a gun. He just knows this is his life; he has to look for bombs at checkpoints and be wary of crazy Americans wanting to detonate themselves at checkpoints (I hope you can sense my sarcasm.) He knows he is a thief and that is why he carries a gun and creates checkpoints.

By the way everyone who said I couldn't take my rental car into Jenin because it had Yellow plates was wrong. But on the flip side my friend and I were not too happy about being looked at in Palestinian areas with Israeli plates. Although it gave us mobility it also made us enemies among our own people (Arabs, and even more specifically for my friend, Palestinians).

As the call to prayer for breaking fast was uttered my first night here in Jelama I heard my friend's mother utter a prayer for Allah to take the Jews away from here. It was not with an anti-Semitic tone at all but rather out of mere desperation of 55 years of oppression by a Jewish state.

November 18, 2003

Today my friend and I got through the checkpoint into Jenin no problem. Later we went into "Israel" to travel around and see some of the Palestinian history there. We went to visit villages that were destroyed in 1948 whose ruins still remain; these villages are uninhabited and have the feeling of an old ghost town. It literally broke my heart to see this, I thought of families packing up to leave their homes, thinking they would return soon after the Jordanians fought off the Zionist forces. I pictured the brutal Zionist gangs forcing people out of their villages claiming this land as their own. We also went to Umm al-Fahm (mother of coal) to meet with a Palestinian-Israeli man there who we will work with to create a fair-trade olive oil market in the US. This project will be a big one and we will benefit a lot of people if we can make it work.

After this we went to Tabariya, a town that is now mainly Jewish residents but has the proof of Palestinians heritage and claim to this land that still lie there. In the city center there is an old mosque that was built in the 1850's, it is quite a site to see and proves that there always were Palestinian here. The mosque is no longer in use and is sadly boarded up and signifies the ways that Israel tries to close off and deny Palestinian history. Ironically, right across from the mosque, not more than ten feet away is a shop with a wall painting of good old Bill and Hillary Clinton; in the scene bill is happily playing the saxophone while Hillary enjoys a glass of white wine and in the background one can see the White House and the Capitol. It disgustingly confirms that Israel is indeed the 51st state of the US.

As we walked further along to the boardwalk near the lake we came upon another old mosque, it appeared to be built in the same period and was also abandoned. Towering behind it was a Sheraton Hotel that stole the landscape and sunset from the old mosque. It was quite a site, the old mosque, the minaret, and towering behind it the hideous hotel. You could really see how one country was literally being built on top of another, stealing Palestine's history and trying to settle a "modern" Zionist entity on top of it.

On this trip I also learned about the Lebanese Arabs who are now stuck in Israel, trapped as foreigners and not able to return to their own country. In the 1980's when Israel was occupying Southern Lebanon there were Lebanese who collaborated with the Israelis to gain power. They were financed and armed by Israel and worked as a militia in the so-called "buffer-zone" that was being labeled by Israel.

When Israel had to finally pull-out of Lebanon (although in reality still does occupy some villages in Southern Lebanon) these Lebanese had to take refuge inside Israeli borders and Israel was forced to grant them citizenship. (There was however a debate among the Israeli government on how to deal with these collaborators, they were not welcomed with open arms into Israel). I suppose they are not the kind of people you should feel bad for considering they consorted with Israel and sold-out their own people only in the interest of keeping the upper-hand but in all honesty I did fell bad for them as I learned of their story. Now they reside in Israel and have to live as Arabs in a society where they are not really welcome and have also lost their Arab identity (or at least Arab nationality). I don't see their actions as right or just but it would be very interesting to me to figure out how they perceive their situation, their Israeli citizenship and the state of Israel in general. And also how their children, born with Israeli identities, perceive their identity.

November 20, 2003

Today we chose to avoid the checkpoint completely by using dirt roads and side streets to avoid the checkpoint going into Jenin. These "roads" are very rough on the car and they do not get any better by the increased traffic, especially the large trucks. It is actually really ridiculous; all these trucks carrying supplies are allowed through the Jelama checkpoint and then denied at the Jenin checkpoint (which is about one half mile after the Jelama checkpoint). They only allow trucks carrying gasoline, some other supplies through the Jenin checkpoint, the rest are forced to use these back roads that many people use in order to reach school, work, family and friends. It makes no sense at all, the soldiers know that the trucks are going on these roads and they know that people are using them as well. So they know that both people and supplies are by-passing their checkpoints and they don't do anything to stop it. This illustrates their desire to simply make life complicated for Palestinians. They just want to make people go out of their way so as to complicate daily life until Palestinians get the message that they are worth less and deserve less rights in their own land.

And often I think: Haram how can all this be going on in the Holy Land? I am not extremely religious or attached to any particular faith but historically this land is associated with all monotheistic faiths and it does sometimes seem a little ironic, depressing, and strange, that we now have this huge historical injustice going on in this land.

November 22, 2003

Today the UNWRA came to Jelama to distribute their rations to 1948 and '67 refugees and to so-called "front-liners:" people who are not refugees but lost a lot of land and resources in 1948 or '67. They came to the center of town with two big trucks and everyone gathered to collect their rations. They give people supplies of flower, oil, sugar and hydrogenated milk.

November 25, 2003

EID MUBARAK!! "kuul sana wa inti bekhair" (may every year be good). Today I enjoyed a very nice Eid with my friend and his family. Everybody came around to visit each other; we traveled in a pack to see the family around the village.

I had an interesting experience with the soldiers today. We passed through the Jenin checkpoint into Jenin to visit my friend's sister Nawal. After this visit we all piled in the car (Nawal, one of her daughters, and her granddaughter), we were going to see another sister in a nearby village.

It was very dark but we noticed a tank up ahead so we slowed down and eventually stopped because the tank was flashing a big spot light at us. We discussed amongst ourselves as to what to do, we edged forward a little bit and the light flashed at us again. They were signaling for us to turn back, it wasn't clear to me but to the others more used to Israelis controlling their lives knew what the signal meant. We contemplated continuing anyway, and in fact Nawal wanted us to continue, I think she felt the presence of Americans would allow us to pass. But my friend insisted that we turn back, he didn't want Nawal and the others to get into trouble. Later my friend and I discussed how if we were just the two of us we could have investigated further why they were stopping us. So there we were on the Eid unable to visit family due to unreasonable Israeli control.

On our way from Jenin to Jelama we must pass through a checkpoint, even though the two areas are very close. Jelama is now considered a "border-town," since it lies close to 1967 borders and it is also now very near to the apartheid wall. As we passed through the checkpoint we saw the same group of about 6-8 men waiting at the checkpoint, they had been there on our way into Jenin as well. We noticed that they were still waiting so we asked them why. We assumed on our way into Jenin that they were simply waiting to pass but we realized then as they told us they had their IDs taken and had been waiting there since 2pm. They were caught trying to pass through the fields to Jelama from Jenin to visit their families on the Eid. All of the men were older and were trying to visit their daughters who had married people outside Jenin and were now living in their husbands' villages. We had already passed through the checkpoint towards Jelama but we stopped and parked the car to inquire about these men.

I had developed a relationship with the soldiers because I had passed through the checkpoint at least once every day for the past 19 days; they were friendly with me and curious about me (I don't want to give the impression that they are my friends but just that most of them became familiar with my face.) I walked towards the soldiers to inquire about the men. I tried to take a calm, and friendly approach so as to succeed in getting the men back their IDs, although I really wanted to just rant and rave about injustice and human rights, it is indeed a violation of their human rights to leave them sitting all day without food, water, or any information about the time they will be held. I asked the soldiers why the men were being held and when they would be released. The soldiers told me the men were caught sneaking though the field "illegally."

One of the soldiers asked me: "why do you care, you are not Muslim."

"I am not Muslim" I said, "what does that have to do with anything? I am a human and I have compassion for them as a human."

He told me that they were human too and I assured him I didn't say and wasn't insinuating that they weren't. He asked me again why I cared so much, he didn't understand and wanted what he viewed as a legitimate reason. I told him it was the Eid and I felt bad for them, they were only trying to visit their families, they weren't trying to do anything bad. One of the soldiers assured me that they were checking their IDs and then they would be released, I asked when that would be, and what was taking so long. One of the soldiers, who is actually Canadian (born there and lived there as a small child) said to me, well it takes a while to check their IDs and sometimes