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Again I looked, wondering, at these soldiers. Who
were aiming at our heads. At such close range. Frontally. And tried to think
what they were thinking. And had no answer. Only that something terrible has
happened to the collective consciousness whereby aiming at a Palestinian’s
head is not violence.
Aya Kaniuk,
17.3.2010
They threw stones at the sun and the clouds and the soldiers and against the
evil and for the good and a thick blanket of teargas was everywhere.
Go away, the sky trembled, go to your homes, go away, go, go, go.
I was among them.
I saw around me the young bodies withdrawing from the teargas and the rubber
bullets and again running towards the soldiers and throwing stones, and
their joyous youthfulness and the fairness of their cause, and the Israeli
army jeeps and soldiers with their helmets and rifles and sights, aiming and
shooting or hurling teargas canisters, galloping to and fro in their jeeps
ruffling the feathers of their dominance, and stopping again and shooting
again, and in my heart I join and say to them go. Go, go, go away, go to
your homes, this is not your place, go, go, go.
Want to throw one? A sweet little kid offered me with an empathic,
considerate look.
He had this little bucket with some little stones inside.
And I said, no thank you.
Don’t you want to? He opened his eyes wide, his look saying, it’s okay,
you’re welcome, you’re invited.
I said to him: my heart is here, with you, but only my heart.
Okay, he said and smiled. But if you want to, just say the word.
Thank you, I said. Thank you.
And my heart swelled
.
This was at about twelve thirty, when I got to Qalandiya Checkpoint. From
afar, from behind the wall, one could already see a thick, black, cloud of
smoke and hear the cracks of gunfire.
The checkpoint was close to vehicles and the transit on its way to Ramallah
was not allowed to cross. We got off. The driver paid back the passengers
who had paid their fare to Ramallah.
Right after crossing the checkpoint I met little Ibrahim Abu Alayish, and
Fatso, and the young man who doesn’t know when he was born because of the
Occupation bureaucracy and he is twenty three or eight and wants so badly to
know and doesn’t know how to find out. And Ibrahim told me he had been
arrested. Which I already knew. And he knew that I knew.
Like a cub, so young and intent to survive, he knows that his arrest impacts
me, and I think that in his way asked to be contained. So I stroked his
fuzzy head and showed him how important he is to me and hoped he would
understand that it is always so, not just when he is arrested.
The event was ongoing. The checkpoint was nearly empty. Some of the venders
who were still there looked on since there weren’t any prospective clients
anyway. The car park, too, always full, was nearly empty. Apparently anyone
who could manage, got his car away from there.
Some jeeps stood immediately behind the small roundabout north of the
checkpoint. Next to them stood the soldiers. From afar one could detect a
clump of moving spots near the main entrance to Qalandiya refugee camp.
I bypassed the soldiers who didn’t look at me, and continued walking north.
On the two-street road to Ramallah, one lane was blocked, the other open to
traffic. While I walked some cars hurried by on the open side.
Several dozen meters after the first group of jeeps was another group
standing on the road just next to the spot where Omar Matar had been
murdered. This happened exactly in March, I recalled, March 2003. Children
had thrown stones and soldiers chased them and they escaped and a soldier
shot a live bullet at Omar’s neck while he was running away and he fell
unconscious, and a week later he was dead. He was fourteen years old.
Some soldiers stood outside the jeeps and threw teargas canisters at the
distant youngsters but clearly they were not hitting them at this range.
I continued northbound, walking close to the camp walls so that the soldiers
would not notice me.
At this time some more cars passed me by hurriedly, fearing gunfire.
As I was another several dozen meters away from the soldiers, they noticed
me and threw two gas canisters at me, that didn’t hit me. They fell pretty
close, and thick, acrid, white smoke flooded my senses for a moment, but the
wind blew and the gas quickly vanished, and I continued hurriedly towards
the youngsters.
On both sides of the street the shops were closed and all the house-doors
and windows were shut tight. And it seemed there was not a living soul
anywhere.
Meanwhile cars began to accumulate on the open traffic lane. Most of them
were transits and cabs coming from Ramallah.
At some point the soldiers began to hurl gas canisters at the cars stuck in
line. One could hear the clicks of the canisters hitting the roofs of the
cars enveloped by clouds of thick white gas-smoke.
At this point I was already worried, remembering what had happened to
Raduan’s nephew a few years ago in one of the Occupation Army’s incursions
into Ramallah.
The soldiers had gone from house to house, and out of boredom or frustration
or whatever other reason, threw gas canisters into the houses they came
upon.
Raduan’s nephew was then a few months old. The gas flooded the room he was
in and he was irreversibly injured. Since then, his brain has remained at
the development level of a few-months old baby. He cannot see, cannot speak,
his body is deformed and maimed, and he will not remain alive much longer.
At the time, when Raduan’s family tried to press charges against the army
for what it had done to the baby, because they hoped that this way they
would have money for special treatment that might save him, they found out
they have no right to lodge a complaint or application after three months
from the day of the injury.
Not that anything would give them back the baby’s brain.
I look at the soldiers and wonder what motivates them. The taxis in line are
not at all connected to their confrontation with the youngsters, after all.
They, too, realize that none of the people stuck in those cars threw a
single stone at them. They know most of these people are older, even
elderly.
And I think that as far as the soldiers are concerned, this really does not
make any difference. And it makes no difference because for them, the
children of Qalandiya who throw stones in their direction, and any
Palestinian as such, are one and the same.
Arabs.
Because for them a Palestinian is not ‘who’ but ‘what’. His one-time
existence is not real to them. He is not an individual with a name and a
particular identity but rather a representative of a race. An abstract
entity. In this sense indeed it makes no difference whatsoever whether the
soldier aims his gas canister at a child who just threw stones, or at an
eighty-year old man who quite incidentally got stuck in a service cab at
that spot, or any Palestinian as such. For they are all Palestinians, and in
this sense they are similar and equal and identical.
More and more the soldiers threw gas canisters at the cars and the
tight-shut houses. And there was a moment when people began to get out of
the cars and ran away in a panic. Obviously most of them did not know where
to run. Obviously they were frightened. I heard screaming and crying. And
more and more doors opened and people, mostly stumbling, ran away from the
cars.
A very old man, staggered out of a cab, his hand on his mouth, was swallowed
into some courtyard.
The soldiers, seeing the people running, threw more and more gas canisters
in their way.
A young woman coming out of the transit, stumbling and rising, in her arms a
tiny little baby girl, both of them crying hysterically, and the mother then
began to scream, and her scream etched the heart and the imagination and the
grayness that was everywhere.
At first she ran from side to side like a caged animal, to nowhere in
particular, direction-less. Then she was swallowed into one of the yards
nearby.
At some point the line of cars was opened and they began to hurry on.
I went on up the road, and reached the group of youngsters, most of them
from Qalandiya refugee camp, and was swallowed among them.
They were of all ages. Most of them very young – seven and eight to eighteen
and nineteen years old, at the most. And a handful older.
Some of them I knew, others I didn’t.
There was a moment when they all began to descend hurriedly towards the
soldiers, some throwing stones in their direction, others only marching
together, and immediately the soldiers resumed throwing gas canisters at
them and most of them ran back.
Again they re-gather and descend the road, throwing stones towards the
soldiers, and again the soldiers throw gas, and the youngsters ran back up
the road.
This is a new gas, one boy told me, and I thought I too had noticed it was
different than what I knew. More acrid and worse than usual.
And there was a moment when the soldiers stopped hurling gas canisters and
started shooting small gas cartridges that whistled past our heads. I looked
at them. How they aim their rifles at us and fire.
Gas was everywhere. One boy offered me water and I drank. Another handed me
an onion, and I took it.
Most of them are very young, I thought. Babies. And I was sad, because I
worried.
And the ritual persisted. The youngsters charge forward towards the soldiers
and throw stones towards them, that mostly don’t hit anything, mostly aimed
at the sky, and the soldiers rain their gas cartridges back, and some
youngsters fall on the ground, convulsing, and then get up again, gather
small stones from those already scattered everywhere, and throw them and run
away, and the soldiers shoot and shoot and shoot.
Some hours went by this way, I think.
Suddenly I see little M., N.’s son. He is eight at the most, I’m thinking.
God. His hands are holding some little stones which he tries unsuccessfully
to keep around his belly so they wouldn’t drop. As he sees me, he runs
towards me, his face alight, and I saw him trying to figure out how to shake
my hand without all his stones falling, and my heart cringed with fear for
him. And I said, M., go home! Go to Mommy, to N. She’ll be awfully worried.
And he pursed his little lips in anger, and his face, and looked away from
me, turning his shoulder to me in protest, and left me into the boiling
angry joyful youngness of protest yelling against the soldiers and the
Occupation and the prevention and the poverty and the humiliation, yelling
NO.
And he too with them.
Be careful, I’m told over and over again.
Why didn’t you marry, I was asked in the midst of all of this by someone I
really don’t know. Why? You’re pretty, he added, smiling shyly. And handing
me a tissue.
Thank you, I said.
And just then lots of gas cartridges were shot at us. They fell beside us.
And hit the low concrete wall we were leaning against.
I too fell on the ground. The body seemed to want to break out its skin for
rescue. Until it was over.
Again I looked, wondering, at these soldiers. Who were aiming at our heads.
At such close range. Frontally. And tried to think what they were thinking.
And had no answer. Only that something terrible has happened to the
collective consciousness whereby aiming at a Palestinian’s head is not
violence. And I thought that all of this is only a symptom of something for
which I have no name.
Then I saw R. and my blood froze. And stopped. For R. had had several inner
organs torn and injured and his life had been in grave danger. A few years
ago soldiers shot a live bullet in his back at short-range, and the bullet
entered and dug in and destroyed and peeled and harmed and R. hardly
survived.
Very frail, very weak.
R., I said. What could I say to him. Obviously he is too weak even to lift a
stone, never mind throwing it. And clearly anything jeopardizes him. The gas
endangers him. And I saw how much he wanted to belong. To be a part of
everyone.
And he was handing out onions.
Just then his nice cousin sat down next to me, whom I still remember from
the time that R. had been in the hospital. There was a pause in the
shooting. And R. sat on my one side and his cousin on the other. And we
chatted. And the cousin said to me, tell him to go home, and pointed at his
belly, at R.’s dugout belly. And I told him, R., go home. And R. smiled at
me, his gaze glazed. We looked at him sadly, I and his cousin.
And then the soldiers began to shoot again.
An older man crossing the street on foot said angrily: If the soldiers would
go away it would end. That’s what they want, they want stones and
boom-boom-boom, that’s what they want. They don’t want peace. And I said,
that’s true. Because it is true. Because it’s always like this. The soldiers
look for a reason to provoke the children to throw stones. So either they
are lucky because there’s a demonstration or an uprising. And if they’re not
lucky that way, they make sure it happens. They ride around provocatively
inside the camp in order for stones to be thrown at them, which they are.
And then they shoot. Gas, rubber, live.
Today the gas is rough. More and more youngsters drop to the ground in
convulsions. Many run far away to get some air.
Someone lit up car tires and black clouds of smoke color the white-gray of
the gas.
Not one car still drives along the open side of the road. The area’s empty.
Only thousands of little stones and gas canisters lie scattered everywhere.
A gas cartridge whistles next to my head, singing my hair, and a slight odor
of burnt hair floods me.
Be careful, one boy who sees it tells me. They don’t know who you are.
They’ll shoot you. And he meant that they don’t know you’re not Palestinian.
They don’t realize you’re not free game.
And I thought he was right. And I also thought what superfluous maturity of
mind he has at his young age, knowing the nature of man.
It was already a bit past four o’clock. Abu Omar rapidly climbs the road
towards the camp. Pushing the handcart from which he sells cakes at A-Ram.
We waved. Later he called me again and again to make sure I was alright.
At this point soldiers are taking over a house in the camp, not far from the
grocery store. The youngsters run there, throwing stones. Then a scream was
heard, dead! Dead! And suddenly, silence. As though someone above had frozen
the world. And some moments later two paramedics passed by me carrying a
stretcher. On the stretcher lay a boy who looked about thirteen years old.
Later I was told he was fourteen and from Ramallah, not from Qalandiya, his
name unknown. His body was still. In his neck a hole gaped, bleeding.
I don’t know whether he was alive or dead.
A little boy holding a large juice bottle saw it all, and began pouring the
juice out on the ground in the shape of a Star of David. After he finished,
he stepped on it. His eyes grim. Stepping on it again and again. The body of
the boy more or less his age on the stretcher bubbling in his motions.
Then I saw A.’s son, perhaps nine years old. Or ten, rather, of slight
build. Running along with everyone else. Excited. Tightening some rag over
his face. His brother was shot in the leg with a live bullet in one of the
soldiers’ incursions into Qalandiya just as he was standing with his father
and selling ice-cream. And I wanted to yell at him, but he was already
engulfed by the others. And although I should have called his father and
told him his little son was here I didn’t.
And then I saw F. whose ten and a half year-old brother was shot in the head
by a soldier who had chased him.
And H. whose brother was murdered in a demonstration when he was fifteen
years old.
And the brother of B. who has been under administrative detention for a year
and a half by now and no one knows why or in what condition he is or what he
is accused of.
And J. who once used to sell paper slips with Koran verses at the
Checkpoint, because his father was disabled and he was the eldest son.
I haven’t seen him for some years. He has grown into a good-looking
adolescent. We happily shook hands in the midst of all of this, and promised
ourselves to talk.
In the meantime the soldiers retreat somewhat and the boys climbed the hill
next to the wall. The hill on which several of the camp’s children have been
murdered in the past few years: 14-year old Omar Matar and 13-year old Ahmad
Abu Latifa and 15 and a half-year old Fares Gimzawi and all the others.
And suddenly there were dozens of them there. Running on top of the hill.
Throwing their little stones that don’t reach anywhere, shouting in childish
triumph.
And then the gas and stun grenades started raining down from behind the
wall. At first the boys were startled and began to run away. But after a
moment, in cheerful yells, they returned and began to collect the landing
grenades and throwing them back over the wall at the soldiers.
A jeep tried to climb the hill, and the youngsters ran towards it roaring,
showering stones, and it retreated, to their cheers, dancing their
‘victory’. Some signaling V with their fingers, others waving rags. Again a
jeep tries to climb and a stone hits it. We hear it clinking against its
roof.
The hit jeep revolves in anger, spitting soil, goes back down to the road
and runs full force into a container standing on the road, and clashes with
it again, and the youngsters dance on the hill.
Then some of the soldiers begin to climb the hill on foot, their rifles
pointed at the ready.
The boys escape back down the hill. Two of the soldiers knelt behind some
soil mounds and aimed with their rifle sights. The blood froze in my veins.
New whistles tore the air. Was it rubber or live ammunition, I wondered.
Probably rubber.
Some of the soldiers climb the roof of a house bordering on the road.
Teargas clouds flood the alley below the house taken over by the soldiers.
This is just next door to Sami and Fatma Asad. I chose not to phone them,
for if they’re taking shelter, I would just be disrupting. Better not have
them answer me. I was just hoping that they, so experienced with gunfire
over their heads and into their house, know what to do and how to protect
themselves. That they are fine.
Meanwhile the soldiers shot at electricity cables running over the road and
a spark went through the wires from one side to the other and back again,
and on both sides of the street lights go out.
More and more stones are thrown by the children and the soldiers fire gas
cartridges and rubber bullets.
Just don’t let anything happen, I plead silently.
Why can’t we live together, an especially sweet child asks me, who’s already
brought me tissue and onion and water and tissue again and onion yet again.
All of us together, he said. Why no? Why don’t they want that?
There’s something nightmarish in the sight of soldiers hiding on roofs and
aiming through their rifle sights. And facing them, this joyous collective
excited childishness, blind and deaf to danger. With that age’s blessed and
dangerous illusion of eternal life.
If only darkness would fall already, I thought.
Only nightfall will put an end to this.
If my wife were not pregnant with my daughter I would be there with them, B.
tells me, his voice sadly longing.
And I thought how much I appreciate his sense of responsibility. His
restraint. For I so very much understand his longing to be swept into this
young, raging, powerful togetherness.
He, who was shot in his thigh with a live bullet at the age of fifteen while
he was on his way to the store to buy something for his family. Who was
arrested in Jerusalem on his way to the hospital, whose kidneys soldiers had
ruined while beating him up in jail, and doctors at the Beer Sheva hospital
– seeing a boy not yet sixteen years old with serious injury to his kidneys,
arriving unconscious from jail, and shackled to his hospital bed – did not
report nor complain nor protest nor ask how all this could be possible. And
who, in spite of his serious condition, released him a month later back to
jail, from where he had arrived wounded and seriously injured, and kept
silent.
Suddenly I felt I could not breathe again. That all my pipes had locked
shut. I ran to the side and knelt down. And was surrounded. I signaled them
with my hand to wait. That I’ll be alright in a moment. And it passed. And I
received some water. And took it.
And one of them said, they don’t like you, do they? And I said, no they
don’t. And I don’t like them either, I added. And smiled at him. Because he
looked so concerned and mature inside his young body, most likely about
one-third my age.
And I got up and shook myself. And another little one came up to me and
whispered, that as I fell my blouse was pushed up a bit, he was concerned
for my modesty and I thanked him for telling me.
And some more time went by.
It’s true that the day before, “Rage Day” was announced, so soldiers stood
at the alert and ready and the youngsters went out into the street. But this
is perhaps only because not every day is right for rebellion. Because they
have to look for work. Because mothers plead with their sons not to throw
stones. Plead with them to stay home. And because there simply isn’t enough
time to rebel, not everyday, in sight of the walls and fences and edicts and
bans and ghettos increasingly closing in on them.
Not all the time.
So sometimes something come up, something symbolic, suffices to remember
that which cannot be remembered every single day, also because the price of
uprising is much too high. Too heavy. Something that reminds of that which
is always true, that this just cannot be. And that they do not accept it.
That it is not fair.
And the occasional ceremoniousness such as Ramadan or “Rage Day” or
something else is then used to arouse that which should and must rightly be
said, always.
Therefore I think that on this Wednesday the youngsters took to the street
only partly because of Al Aqsa or the Jewish construction in Jerusalem.
Also, but not especially and only because of them.
They took to the street, I think, to demonstrate and throw their little
stones in order to say with all their young and soulful might – NO.
No, and go away.
And again, no.
And their stones were aimed especially at Qalandiya Checkpoint.
Which is the essence of it all.
No to the checkpoint.
No to the ugly, dominating checkpoint that sits on their land and prevents
their lives and crushes and tramples and shatters their lives from morning
to night.
The checkpoint that has taken the lives of so many children and boys.
And that is why this point of rebellion this Wednesday was also a spot of
joy.
Their burning, happy youth trembled in joy inside their muscles just now
taking shape at this age, in their shriek: No.
And it was a day of rejoicing.
Because out of the ashes of oppression and habit and acquiescence and
contraction, the NO rose clearly, strong and erect.
With no compromise or acceptance.
No, they shriek, every one on his own and all together.
No.
And I with them there, feel the right of this NO, its justice - in my body.
In my heart I, too, shriek with them all, no.
Go away. Go. Go home.
Go.
But in my grownup mind I realize that tomorrow or perhaps even tonight, the
arrests will follow.
That they will enter the camp at night, bang on the doors with their
rifle-butts, or break them in.
And if they don’t come tonight, then some coming night. The babies will wet
their pants, mothers will shriek and plead not to take their children, and
they will take them, usually the youngest, to have them confess of
everything they’ll be told to confess having done. Of stones thrown or not.
Of other deeds. And they’ll sit for long months in jail where they’ll be
questioned about others, did they do this or that, and usually they’ll say
whatever their interrogators will want them to say, also about people they
don’t even know, because usually it’s impossible not to. Because there is no
choice.
And they’ll come out of jail soon or not, hurt and angry and even more lost.
And the message is clear. It is forbidden to refuse. Forbidden to say no.
Forbidden to live. Forbidden and forbidden and forbidden. And a new
generation will grow up, and throw stones at the occupier.
How could it not?
One could hardly see anything as night fell, and because of the gas.
Body and lung strangely charred.
The face of a young woman emerges from the closed balcony over my head. Come
on up, she tells me in a clipped voice.
Please, come, she points to the road gray with gas and the sniping soldiers.
She wants to rescue me.
Thanks, I say. I’ll come another time. Thank you. I think to myself, after
all she doesn’t know me, and I don’t know what to do with the warmth and
gratitude that engulf me.
I thank her once more and she vanishes back into the shuttered house.
The sound of glass shattering. Soldiers have shot at a window. And another
window.
Suddenly a paramedic leaps out of the dark at the soldiers’ gun-barrels, his
hands in the air. Don’t shoot, he shouts. There’s someone hurt. Don’t shoot.
Then several paramedics arrive and they all run up the alley together.
Towards the house whose roof the soldiers have taken over, I think, or the
one next door.
Several moments later the paramedics come down the alley with a stretcher
bearing an apparently old man, wearing a gown, his legs trembling
incessantly. Next to him a woman hurries along, apparently his spouse. She
is old, too. Carrying crutches, probably his.
He’s fifty years old, they tell me. Head wound.
The ambulance, lights flashing, turned around and hurried off to Ramallah.
It is nearly night now. The sound of the muezzin blends with the gray that
has turned almost black.
Beautiful voice, I thought, sounds like a woman’s, although that doesn’t
make sense.
Then it was fully dark. A quarter past six. The muezzin fell silent.
The soldiers came down from the roof and returned to the checkpoint.
And the youngsters turned around and went back home. And so did I.
Translated by Tal Haran. |