The General's Son: Journey of an Israeli in Palestine (28 page)

3
Maya Rosenfeld, “The Centrality of the Prisoners’ Movement” in
Threat: Palestinian Political Prisoners in Israel
, ed. Abeer Baker and Anat Matar (London: Pluto Press, 2011), 11.

It was Friday, December 10, 2010—my 49th birthday—and I had been staying with Khaled’s family in Beit Ummar for a few days. I was there because I wanted to experience the occupation from the inside, and Khaled and his family were gracious enough to host me for the week. Ali said he wanted me to come with him to Nabi Saleh, another Palestinian village where weekly protests were taking place following Friday prayer. I had been to protests in Bil’in as well as other places, and so I was glad to go. Ali and I drove from Beit Ummar to Nabi Saleh, which is northwest of Ramallah.

Nearly half of Nabi Saleh’s valuable agricultural land had been seized for an Israeli settlement called Halamish. Near the village there is a natural spring named
Ein Al Kus
(Bow Spring). In 2009, settlers from Halamish had taken control of the spring and its surroundings and prevented Palestinian access to it. Since then, the people of Nabi Saleh and the nearby village of Dir Nizam had been protesting the theft of the spring, the theft of their lands, and the occupation in general, every Friday afternoon.

The shortest route from Beit Ummar, which is near Hebron in the southern part of the West Bank, to Nabi Saleh, which is close to Ramallah in the central part of the West Bank, goes through Jerusalem. But most West Bank Palestinians are not allowed to enter the city or even drive through it, so if you are a Palestinian or driving with a Palestinian, it takes forever to commute between these two places. We had to take a detour road, a huge eastward loop through the desert. It is a steep winding road that goes through Wadi Nar in the Judean Desert and then winds back up north toward Ramallah once you bypass Jerusalem. It took us almost two hours to take a trip that would otherwise have taken no more than thirty or forty minutes. In June 2010, AP reporter Ben Hubbard wrote this about the trip: “Wadi Nar means ‘the Valley of Fire,’ a place where brakes fail, clutches burn up, engines stall and people die. The ride up and down the canyon walls is among the worst routes Palestinian motorists must use to circumnavigate the towns, army posts and well-maintained highways built for Israelis.”
¹

But it was well worth the drive. Nabi Saleh lies in a spot surrounded by rolling hills and olive groves, the epitome of everything that is beautiful about the Palestinian landscape. As you approach the village, you go past the pre-military Jewish preparatory school and then the settlement of Halamish, both of which are eyesores, constructed with no regard for the landscape.

Ali is chronically late, even by Palestinian standards, so although he drove like a madman, by the time we reached Nabi Saleh the protest had begun and the Israeli army had blocked the main road to the village. We were bummed. Ali is very serious and passionate about the development of a non-violent resistance throughout the West Bank, but often he is his worst enemy and he was very upset with himself for being late. “Ali, in Hebrew we say, ‘
Kol Akava Letova
’,” I said.

“We have the same saying in Arabic,” he replied, quoting: “
Kul Ta’akhir fiha khir
,”—every delay happens for a good reason. Then Ali remembered that there was a back entrance to the village, which was another 15-minute drive.

When we reached the other side of the village, there was an army roadblock there as well. Three soldiers gestured for us to stop. I could tell they were reservists because they were older and pretty unkempt.

“Closed military zone,” they said. “You have to turn back.”
Indeed!

Ali and I stepped out of the car to talk to them. They were clearly reservists, and their commanding officer, a captain in the reserves, who was a short, pleasant-looking chap with a beard, told us we couldn’t enter.

Ali tried a few lines on him. “What’s the matter?” he asked. “We just want to visit friends, and we always visit here, and we were never stopped before.”

The officer smiled and said, “You wouldn’t want to go there anyway, it’s a war zone.”

“War?” I asked. “You call this a war? A war means two armies engaged in battle. Is there another army present? Do they have tanks and warplanes? Are they well armed? Surely you aren’t referring to the boys throwing rocks as an army.” I didn’t wait for him to reply, before adding: “Besides, if you weren’t here, there would be no rocks. They would march with their flags and then go home.”

Other soldiers began crowding around, all of them reservists and far less patient than their commanding officer. “This is a closed military zone, and you are in violation of the commanding officer ordering you to leave,” one said. “Are you refusing to follow the order?”

“I thought he was in charge,” I said, pointing to the young officer, who was too young and friendly for his own good. “Besides,” I continued, “neither you nor your officer has the authority to declare this area closed. This is Palestinian land so why don’t you all go home and let us and the people of Nabi Saleh exercise our right to protest in peace?”

“But why are you even here, what are you protesting?” the officer asked in a very friendly tone.

“We are here to protest the occupation and theft of these people’s land,” I said. “Why are you here?”

“This place is no different from Tel Aviv or any other place in Israel. Jews are allowed to live here if they want, and we are charged with keeping them safe,” the officer said.

This exchange went on for some time until finally the conversation looked like it was reaching a boiling point. Ali began talking to the other soldiers too, and he mentioned that Israeli soldiers had killed his brother at a checkpoint similar to this one.

“Well, if we killed him then he must have deserved to die. Israeli soldiers do not kill without good reason,” one of the soldiers replied.

I was chomping at the bit to bring up Jenin or Gaza or a thousand other examples where Israeli soldiers had killed countless innocent people for no good reason. But this was not the time or the place. Our objective was to get into Nabi Saleh and I didn’t trust myself to keep my temper under control. I suggested to Ali that we leave. I didn’t want any problems with these soldiers because we still had another option for getting to the village. As we were turned away to get into the car, I stopped and looked at the soldiers, now a group of seven or eight. I pointed at Ali and said, “You have no idea who this man is, but believe me when I tell you that one day you will all go on your knees before this man and beg for his forgiveness.”

We got into the car and turned around.

We drove back about 300 yards, so we were out of the soldiers’ sight, parked the car among the olive trees, and walked through the olive grove under the soldiers’ noses to the village. We walked in silence for about ten minutes, until we saw Bassem Tamimi waiting for us. Bassem is about 5’8”, with slightly graying light brown hair, a mustache, and light blue eyes. He is a good-looking man and he was wearing jeans and a black leather jacket. He was very friendly, and I was struck by how calm he seemed. Ali introduced us and we all walked back up to the road and toward the village.

As we entered the village itself we saw a group of Magav
²
soldiers firing tear gas grenades from massive launchers. They paid us no heed as we walked right by them, made a right turn, and walked up a hill to Bassem’s house.

Ali told me that he and Bassem knew one another from prison, and Bassem was a highly respected man in the village and in Palestine in general. Calm and collected, he had the look of a guy who wouldn’t be easily unnerved. We sat on his porch and had tea while his two young children played outside.

The house sits on a hill so we had a good view of the small village whose 500 inhabitants had decided it was time speak their mind. On the dirt road right by the house were four Israeli army reservists, one of whom was an officer; they had
just erected a small makeshift barrier from large rocks they had gathered. A few minutes after they were done an army Jeep approached, wanting to drive through, so they had to dismantle the barrier to let the Jeep pass. As they bent over to move the heavy rocks, their guns slung forward and hit their heads. They were a miserable sight to see, not at all the daring and fearless soldiers one might expect from an army that claims to be one the world’s finest. It took great deal of restraint on my part to keep still and not tell the soldiers how stupid they looked. But, since I was a guest, I didn’t want to cause any trouble.

Bassem soon invited us into the house to eat. His mother cooked and he served us eggs, fresh baked bread with freshly picked herbs, and an assortment of salads. As we sat down to eat, his cell phone rang. Ali smiled as he listened to Bassem talk. I asked Ali what was so funny. He said the regional Magav commander was on the line. “He is asking Bassem in Arabic to tell the
shebab
(the youth who were protesting) to stop because it was Friday, and he wanted to go home for the weekend.”

An Israeli military commander calling a Palestinian resistance leader, begging him to stop protesting so he could go home to Friday dinner? What kind of House of Crazy was this?

The commander called several more times, but every time Bassem said calmly, “When the soldiers leave the village, the protest will stop. Not the other way around.”

After we were done eating we walked down toward the main road. There were quite a lot of people there, watching the protest, including young children who were stuffing their little pockets with rocks. The older kids were throwing rocks and the soldiers were shooting. They fired mostly tear gas and from time to time you could hear that they turned to rubber-coated steel bullets and live ammunition. At one point, one of the young Palestinians picked up a tear gas grenade that had been shot at him and threw it back at the reservists while it was still spewing gas. The Israeli soldiers were terrified. They began running wildly in all directions, tripping over the rocks, their guns dangling from their shoulders and helmets bopping on their heads. I thought, thank God for them that they don’t have to face a real army.

I could clearly hear shots being fired from somewhere above us. I looked around and I noticed that the commanding officer, a lieutenant colonel, was standing a few hundred feet away. I shouted to him in Hebrew “There are children everywhere! Stop shooting!” He looked at me for a long minute, then looked away and started walking back toward his Jeep.

Just then a woman wearing a black
hijab
, pants, and a black shirt ran past me. She had an intent, almost mesmerized look, and she was holding a very large rock in her hand. She ran toward the lieutenant colonel and hurled it at him as he was walking away.

As the rock sailed toward the back of his head, my heart stopped. If the rock hit the officer, the repercussions would have been horrendous. The soldiers would
have had a field day shooting everyone in sight. Luckily, it missed him by a few inches. I was relieved and furious at the same time.

“At least get the children out of here!” I shouted.

With all the commotion, the officer was oblivious and had no clue that he had been in danger. He went to his Jeep, sat in it for a while, and every so often would come out shooting in the air and then return to the Jeep. I kept calling him and the others to stop shooting. Then the Jeeps would speed by, screeching up and down the road, and the rocks would fall on them like a hailstorm.

I looked at Ali as all this was going on. “Don’t you feel like throwing rocks at the soldiers?” I asked him. Ali, like many other Palestinians I’ve met, strongly disapproved of the rock throwing. “It only serves the occupation,” he said. But unlike several towns where rock throwing was frowned upon, the
shebab
there had not yet bought into the non-violent aspect of the protests. They reacted to the army’s presence in their village by throwing rocks and, frankly, I couldn’t blame them.

It was getting late and we still had a long drive to get back to Beit Ummar. It didn’t look like this would end any time soon, so we ventured back, rocks and tear gas canisters flying above us in every direction, until we reached the car, still parked in the olive grove. I was never so relieved in my life as when we entered that car and drove off.

I couldn’t get the day’s images out of my head: Jeeps screeching through the tiny village and rocks coming down on them like a hailstorm. Right or wrong, brave or foolish, I had to admit to myself that on a simply visceral level, seeing the Jeeps get blasted with stones felt good. I felt no sympathy for the soldiers, none whatsoever.

As we drove away I really felt I could use a beer. I asked Ali if we could stop somewhere for a beer because there is no alcohol in Beit Ummar, and drinking is frowned upon in many places throughout the West Bank. So we stopped at a gas station on the way and sat for a bit while I had a beer. Back in Beit Ummar that evening we went to Yusef’s apartment. Yusef was Khaled and Ali’s older brother who was killed by soldiers at the checkpoint in Beit Ummar. His widow and her children, along with Seham, Ali’s older sister, were all there. We had dinner, then we had tea, watched music videos on television, and relaxed for the rest of the evening. I was worn out by the long trip and the day’s events. But there was more to come.