The normal sense of community is lost

Toine van Teeffelen from Bethlehem
July 25, 2002

Each evening Mary puts the TV on and off in anxious anticipation of The Announcement which determines everybody's mood: When will be the opening hours next day? Sometimes the answer comes late in the evening, sometimes early in the morning, or there is a last minute change. Many Bethlehem institutions are following the rule that when there are opening hours everybody should come to work, including the weekend days. The rule has come into being in the face of complete unpredictability. In my agenda I scribbled down the irregular closing and opening hours of the last week: Monday - closed, Tuesday - open from 9-13:00, Wednesday - open from 9 - 15:00, Thursday - closed, Friday - announced open from 7:00 - 19:00 but at 9:30 closed, Saturday - open from 7:00 - 19:00 (A record for Bethlehem! Mary comments that we should hold a ceremony to thank our benefactors).

As soon as positive news is in, people start to make plans and rush. Half an hour before the actual opening time cars already appear on the street; in no time there are queues, drivers become even more frustrated than they already are, shout at each other, small accidents happen. Also in no time, institutions become inaccessible because everybody uses the phone simultaneously. People flood into the main Madbasseh street so that one can hardly walk. Jara always clamps on my legs when she is engulfed by people. The word 'bottleneck' gets its full meaning.

Rushing has not only waiting as its price. An acquaintance in Ramallah tells me that people there now tend not to socialize with each other anymore. During the evening there is a curfew anyway, while during the day, if there are opening hours, people don't have much time for each other either, they just say 'hi'. Even the visits to neighbours are rather superficial, she says; the normal sense of community is lost. I see in my own environment that people are so depressed that they tend not to talk about other things than the daily practicalities. Why should you make each other more depressed than you already are?

Lately I conversed with the Israeli pharmacist on Yaffa Street in West-Jerusalem whom I regularly visit and who stays very friendly despite the bombs which exploded not far from his shop. He wanted to know me a little better, said that he thought I was German, and upon my correction apologized emphatically, as if withdrawing an accusation. Upon his question, "So, how is it in Bethlehem?" I honestly answered that people are barely able to confront the summer heat, and especially when they have a big family and don't have a garden, the walls close in on them. "That is not what I mean, how do the people look at the Israelis, are they more for peace, or not?" I again honestly answered that at present many people do not have the energy for political discussions but are mainly concerned with family survival, with keeping one's head above water.

A basic problem all face is how to get the pent-up energy out (although there are also people who say that they have become lazy because of the curfew and are unable to stay at work the full time). A neighbour points out the black dust all over the ground in front of our house. It's from the tanks, she says. A lot of work to keep it clean, I say, but she says that she does not mind to clean every day. Many women try to get their energy and anger out by way of persistent home cleaning.

Is there a way to get out of our closed bottles, with or without a message? Very hesitatingly, some dare to tread the streets for a walk following the children who already are on their scooters and bikes. In fact, Imm Hannah, my mother in law, absolutely must do movements for her health. She lately had serious problems in standing up because she could not do her regular walks outside. Mary's sister Norma, who came over from Paris for a few weeks, says that people should not be so afraid. What is the problem with going out on the street for just a hundred meters? On my usual journey from home to my family in law's, I see them together, three sisters and their mother shuffling along the street, breaking the curfew, unable to hide or run away when soldiers would approach. Afterwards Mary told me that the other day her legs started trembling when she was out and suddenly saw a tank at the end of the street. A man in front of her who was selling watermellons hid himself and his cart behind a garbage container.

Although some people tresspass the curfew, there is no large-scale challenge such as in Nablus where the inhabitants barely had any opening hours the previous weeks and simply had to go out to get food. Wednesday the army came back there in full force shooting at anybody who dared to peep out of the door.

At least there are no snipers on the rooftops, so you don't feel targeted from an unknown source. These weeks I regularly leave Bethlehem for my support in coordinating the United Civilians for Peace group, a monitoring mission from the Netherlands. A journalist had told me that it was possible for foreign passport holders to walk under curfew, at least when the army had not declared the areas a closed military zone. When at one point I left my house, I saw an army patrol forcing people who had tresspassed the curfew to sit down on the edge of the pavement. A soldier waved me to come over and asked for my passport. I showed him my work permit and a letter stating that my passport was at a Palestinian Ministry for visa extension. They told me that when I work and live in Bethlehem I should stay home. "Why?" "If you live here and leave the town you could come back to bring a weapon and give that to your family." "But any visitor can do that," I counter. "No, a journalist would not do that." Me: "But yesterday the army allowed me to pass a checkpoint during the curfew." Him: "Do you want me to show a paper from the commander? Please, go home." End of argument. I had the feeling the soldiers wanted to show the youth sitting there, our audience, that the army was not being mocked at. Afterwards, I took my way out through the back gardens but frightened some neighbours who suddenly heard a man climbing down from their roof. They first thought I was a soldier.

The following day, the main Jerusalem-Bethlehem checkpoint did not pose me problems going out and coming in. But another day, soldiers waved their guns from afar to indicate that I could not pass. Frustrated, I did not want to return home and took the bypass route through the ecumenical center Tantur next to the checkpoint. Was I becoming reckless? A few days later I tried taking the same route, but (army?) dogs barked and some soldiers ran to the Tantur fields where they caught me as well as two girls trying to enter Jerusalem for their university class. Surprised after seeing my papers, they said: "But you're not an Arab! Please, always take the main checkpoint, there is no problem."

The following day I showed my papers to a soldier who inspected them carefully. One paper, the proof that my passport was processed for visa extension, had as its original heading 'State of Israel - Ministry of the Interior.' The Palestinian Ministry where I had left my passport could not use its own letter head (since that would not have been accepted at Israeli checkpoints), had crossed 'Israel' out, and replaced it by 'Palstien'. The soldier who inspected my documents gestured his colleagues to come over to notice the scandal and commented half-seriously, half-mockingly: "Look, that is very bad. And 'Palestine' is even wrongly written."

During the present curfew the main checkpoint to Jerusalem resembles a desolate, hot, sandy Wild West warzone with a few metal beasts present. Nobody is there, except a few soldiers hanging around. During one of my checkpoint adventures, a soldier shouted 'stop' at me at some 30 meters from the army hut. The order sounded like a shot in a uncommonly silent environment. He let me wait for a few minutes, then waved me to come over. He was a Falasha from Ethiopia. Palestinians, I know, are afraid of Ethiopian Jews. One theory is that they often do not communicate well at checkpoints because of a lack of language knowledge; but the main reason seems to be that they are discriminated against in Israel by Western Jews (they are at the lowest rung of the ladder, just above 'the Arabs') and that they transfer their resentment onto the Palestinians they meet and check. I asked him whether he spoke English, a question he took wrongly. Full of scorn, he gave my papers to a colleague but meanwhile kept a derogatory eye upon me, asking brief questions pronounced as orders such as "What is your work in Bethlehem?" I could not help but pity him even though that was exactly how he did not want me to feel. I pondered how young the kids were who were standing there, many of them eighteen, some of them perhaps seventeen; in fact, child soldiers according to international standards. I could easily be their father.

On the way back to Bethlehem, while the soldiers were contacting their commander by phone to check my credentials, I started a conversation to break the oppressive atmosphere. Taller than they were, I looked straight into their eyes, a posture which somehow challenged the authority relations and gave me artificial self-confidence. (Eye contact also assumes or evokes a human honesty which is otherwise largely absent at checkpoints). Me: "So, you are here all alone, the whole day, doing very uncommon things like checking people, how do you feel doing so?" Some soldiers shifted their eyes away, another turned his head away, still another answered: "I just don't think when I am here, I just talk a bit with the other soldiers." Me: "Is that not difficult, not thinking all the time?" He did not know what to answer. I remembered that once a police man answered a member of United Civilians for Peace that the only place where he was thinking was at home.

"Indeed, they are very young," an older reservist told me at another checkpoint occasion. He said that he had volunteered to be at the checkpoint, not because he liked it there but because it was better to have an older man present, "better for the Jews and better for the Palestinians." He was like a father to the soldiers, he said, he wanted to smoothen the contact between them and those who crossed the checkpoint. While he was talking, the other soldiers looked shy and embarrassed. Their English was not sufficient for a real conversation, and I could see that they preferred to fall back into the uncomplicated pattern of giving one-line questions and getting one-word answers, the pattern to which they are used when dealing with 'Arabs'. But the reservist, courteously,
apparently wanted to show them in an exemplary manner how to conduct a correct conversation with a foreigner, and waved me through after the distant commander once again gave his approval by phone. I felt strangely uplifted and embarrassed at the same time.

Together with some visiting Dutch journalists I meet Albert Aghazarian, the well-known PR-man of Birzeit University. We sit down in lazy chairs in his ancient home in the Armenian quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem. For him, checkpoints have two faces. "On the one hand, they are mechanisms of control, factories of humiliation and hate. On the other, the people waiting there feel an egalitarian atmosphere. The professor and the student, the VIP and the worker, the local and the international, the capitalist and the anti-globalization activist - they all queue there. At the checkpoint, Palestine stands at the cutting edge of humanity. At the checkpoint, people - any people - are challenged to take a stand. Are you for or against, are you on this side or that side? Moreover, the checkpoint can divide people but can bring them also together. Two leading members of the International Solidarity Movement, a Palestinian and a Jew, started a relation after finding each other at a checkpoint. You know, the Portuguese winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature lately commented on a visit to Ramallah that 'we are all Palestinians'. He expressed that feeling of egalitarianism."

Aghzarian is still recovering from the teargas which he inhaled during the times he joined the internationals crossing the checkpoint to Birzeit. He even had to give up his inseparable smoking pipe. "As I am an Armenian, and therefore stubborn, I did not want to take another route [the settlers' bypass road which a Jerusalemite can take] to the university, even though it meant that I had to queue and suffer. I did not want to show myself a coward when those internationals are taking risks to support us."

As always he offers jokes. "Hell and Heaven argue their case in front of the High Court of Justice. It is always Hell who wins. Do you know why? All the lawyers are in Hell!" The Israeli High Court is known to routinely embrace the security arguments submitted by the army.

During a meeting with Israelis Aghazarian told them the following.

"Once there were three Moslem Palestinian sheikhs [religious leaders] who were fed up with the situation in which they lived. To escape Palestine, unable to travel through a bridge or airport, they decided to take a short-cut: Why shouldn't they become Jewish rabbis? Surprisingly, they were accepted by the rabbinate. So for three years they studied and studied and completed their exams with outstanding results. Then, as a final test, they were asked to swim for a hundred meters. That was the hardest task they faced. They jumped into the pool, and swam and swam. Two of them reached the finish and felt elated that they now were Jews. They saw their colleague who was struggling not to sink, and they looked into each others' eyes - would they rescue him? - until one said, "No, no, there is no need, he is just an Arab!"

Aghazarian told the joke to an Israeli who had to laugh loudly and immediately went to a compatriot to tell the joke further - with one difference. He exchanged the roles of 'sheikh' and "rabbi', 'Palestinian' and 'Jew'. That laughed better.

During that same meeting, which happened to be about leadership and diplomacy, among other things, an Israeli told Aghazarian that it was all fine and well to build youth leadership skills and diplomacy skills but that he first told Jewish youth to learn one essential skill: swimming. (A reference to the fear that once Arabs will drive the Jews into the sea). Aghazarian asked him, "So where do you want them to learn swimming, in the Mediterranean, in the swimming pool in Ariel [a settlement], or in the Dead Sea? His Israeli interlocutor answered: "In the Dead Sea," emphasizing 'dead'. Aghazarian: "But you don't need to learn swimming in the Dead Sea, there you float!"

All the time Tamer is moving, indeed swimming, with his hands and legs. No lack of energy. A neighbour told that this was so because Mary had eaten a lot of dates during her pregnancy. If that is true, it would suit Tamer's name, which means 'holder of dates'.

"If Tamer would not keep me upright, I would not know what to do," says Mary with her head between her hands. "My head explodes." Lately she has been depressed because of 'everything' but especially because our holiday to Cyprus is in doubt due to problems at the bridge to Jordan. Even an alternative holiday at a swimming pool of a Jericho hotel is not possible, according to the travel agent, since Palestinians from outside Jericho are not allowed to enter and stay in the town. The TV images are a further source of depression: a kid in Jenin who was shot while eating chocolate, a kid from Dheisha camp who had been so battered that he couldn't speak anymore, children in Gaza mercilessly bombed. Mary also feels with the students killed at the Hebrew University. "Why do they earn this?"

Jara tries to kill the curfew time together with a new, older friend, Serena, a somewhat shy girl who accepts being led by Jara. In the garden, Jara plays that she is a musical conductor while Serena is the audience. Jara starts nicely with a popular love song from Dream TV, but then brings her voice to a pitch, shouts the phrase which I cannot hear anymore, "mamnu'a tajaawoul" [forbidden to go out], and even orders Serena to turn and put her arms high on the wall while Jara sings a nationalist march. She is naughty these days, we are amazed and angry that she does not want to go to the summer camp when the curfew is lifted. Everybody wants to get out during opening hours except her! We suspect it is because she rather likes to give than to take orders. If she is around home, she is the splendid center of the neighbourhood group of children who play on the empty university street. She even changes clothes four times a day, apparently to show off in front of the neighbours. "Take care, she will be spoiled, and you will not be able to handle her later on," Norma says. We decide that when the curfew is lifted the next days she should stay under a friendly but firm house arrest. If she does not want to go out when there are opening hours, she should not go out when there is curfew either. Imm Hannah and Janet protest. However, in a sudden move Jara once again escapes us, slips through the door and reaches the street to play with her friends. To top it all, visitors, unaware, give her presents, one after another.

When I leave home, Jara shouts "Daaaag papa" [bye papa] and I shout back "Daaaag Jara", the further away we are from each other, the harder we shout, until both our voices are drowned in the distance.

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