However long it takes…
It’s rare that books about Palestine focus on the Palestinian people rather than the territory or the issue, but here is one that does this skillfully while providing the reader with the relevant politico-historical framework. The author lives in the West Bank. This means that the people whose stories he tells are ones he has met many times over and often lived with. His gaze is warm and human, respectful and responsive. His text conveys in all their complexity both a tentacular occupation, and the myriad resistances through which Palestinians mobilize themselves to survive and outlast it.
From the vantage point of his home in Aida camp, Rich Wiles experiences the occupation at first-hand. The frequent forays of the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) into the camp leave dead and wounded, homes destroyed, youths and boys arrested. A military jeep comes upon 14-year old Mahmoud alone in an alley with his dog, scoops him up, beats him, and throws him into a military cell. From here he is transferred to Acion Detention Center, then to Ofer, then to Telmond prison. Charged with throwing stones and carrying a knife, he is fined $5,000, and sentenced to more than three months in prison. Many similar cases have been documented, but Rich Wiles fills out the details and consequences of this typical Occupation event: the other child prisoners; the inadequate food; self-scarring in protest; a gas attack by guards; the visit of a 10-year old brother (but they can’t hug each other through the reinforced glass). There’s a welcome party with fireworks when Mahmoud finally gets home, but his dog has died, and he “doesn’t want to go out any more”.
Rich visits other West Bank camps – Al-Ayn and Balata near
Nablus, Jenin – and records the experiences of other
survivors of Occupation attacks. As the IOF carry out
house-to-house searches in Al-Ayn “Armour-plated lorries and
bulldozers, personnel-carriers and jeeps filled every street”. He
succeeds in penetrating Al-Ayn in the later days of the siege, and
meets Sena and Mahmoud. They spent the attack with their children
in their bathroom, only to have their home dynamited, without any
reason given. Rich meets a man who points to a mound of rubble and
tells him, “forty of us used to share this house, five families in
total”. Planted on the mound is a red flag, symbol of resistance
and the death of martyrs. Such sieges, deaths, arrests and home
demolitions are the everyday life of West Bank camps.
Military force is the main but not the only weapon of the
Occupation. Another is the checkpoints and permits that constrain
mobility. When octogenarian Abu Waleed al-Azzeh is in hospital in
Jerusalem, only eight kilometers from Aida camp, none of his
extended family can obtain permits to visit him. Since children
under 16 do not require permits, it is decided that Abu-Waleed’s
oldest grandson, Miras (13-years), will make the trip. Rich
accompanies him to guarantee safe passage through the checkpoints.
People’s struggles to maintain relationships in spite of the
Occupation is a major theme of ‘Behind the Wall’. It takes Aisha 16
hours to get from Bethlehem to the prison in Naqab where her son is
a prisoner, and another five hours to return. They communicate
through glass. Aisha tells Rich of delight at seeing her son again
– “He is even more handsome!” To her this is more important than
the endless delays and the body search. Her words show the
politicization that occupation brings: “They put us through all
this… to try to make us not want to go through it all again…We do
all this to support the prisoners and cheer them up”.
The Occupation is brutal but also absurd, an aspect Rich
illustrates through the story of Mahadi and Susi. Cousins, from the
same village, engaged to be married, Mahadi lives inside Aida camp,
while Susu lives less than three hundred metres away from the edge
of the camp. The building of the Wall has made it impossible for
them to meet. The Occupation has reclassified the land after
building the Wall, so that Susu now lives in Israel and needs
permission as a West Banker to be there. Her application is
refused, making her a prisoner inside her own house. As an
inhabitant of Aida camp, Mahadi is equally unable to reach Susu: He
is turned back at the checkpoint. He searches for a tunnel
under the Wall. They talk by phone and wave from roof tops. They
talk to each through the metal gate in the Wall. Eventually the
couple works out a way to marry: Rich comments, “Some elements of
humanity simply cannot be shackled”. In the divided village of
Battir on the old ‘Green Line’, Hadr lives with his two young
daughters on the ‘Palestinian’ side. Four years ago his wife
crossed to Jordan to look after her sick father. Israel has not
allowed her to return, and the Jordanians have not allowed Hadr to
join his wife.
It’s through such carefully told individual stories that Wiles
portrays lives intended to be unlivable, made so by deaths,
imprisonments, home demolitions, immobility, unemployment, the
rising costs of basic foodstuffs, and absence of hope of a better
future. All these contribute to pressure towards ‘quiet transfer’.
The Apartheid Wall has added enormously to this unique form of
colonization, cutting villagers off from their lands and urban
markets, isolating once thriving regional centres such as Bethlehem
and Tulkaram, and further de-developing an already desperate
Palestinian economy. Judged illegal by the International Court of
Justice in 2004, the Wall when finished will expropriate 9.5% of
the West Bank. A symbol of Israeli dominance and international
complicity, the Wall has called out many kinds of Palestinians
resistance: graffiti, art work, weekly protests, tunneling and
finding gaps, keeping farms and businesses going. Such persistence
against the odds points to a crucial element in Palestinian
resistance: not being deterred by failure. Not one of the people
Rich records mentions emigration.
Though the Wall looms nine meters tall at the edge of Aida camp,
allowing the IOF to look and shoot at will from its watch towers
into the camp, the shabab go down almost daily to challenge the IOF
with stones. A youth from Aida camp, Yasser ‘the Wall’, climbs a
Wall watchtower and hangs a Fateh flag there. Then he manages to
make a small hole in the Wall by laying fires along its base.
Prison holds no fears for Yasser: “What have I got to lose? Let
them take me to their prison. It can be no worse than this life
anyway!”
The Wall has made life harder for everyone on its route. Abu Ali
used to move between his home and his chicken restaurant inside
Al-Ram by showing his ID at the check point. Now they want a
written permission as well as a number. Unable to get permission
Abu Ali slips back through razor wire to keep his shop open, though
there are few customers in this newly created No-Man’s-Land. He
daren’t go home again for fear of getting stuck there. While Rich
is Al-Ram he sees two old women trying and failing to reach
Jerusalem through the sewage tunnels under the Wall. He sees
workers who prize their way into Jerusalem through cracks and razor
wire. A teenage boy gives him a jaunty smile as he climbs the Wall.
Rich comments “While Israel can and does control many aspects of
Palestinian life it seems the one thing it cannot always occupy is
people’s minds”.
Many forms of resistance emerge from the stories of the people Rich
encounters. The life story of Ibrahim, whose Pavement Café in
Hebron is surrounded by settlers and IOF, reads like political
history told in colloquial Palestinian. The struggle to get
educated that students in Nablus express during the Operation Hot
Winter of 2007 has been part of the Palestinian struggle since
before 1948. Memory work -- visits to home villages -- has
been going on informally since 1967, and now is mediated through
NGOs and cyberspace. Rich accompanies children from Aida camp to
what remains of Ras Abu ‘Ammar and Beit Jibreen, describing how
children bring back earth, stones, prickly pears, and excited
stories to their families. Unable to enter the settlement built
over his village, Mohammad says, “The right to return to my village
will come one day however long it takes”. Finding family names
scratched on the wall of his grandfather’s home, Miras adds his
own.
Palestinians’ capacity to celebrate happy events -- the release of
a prisoner, a wedding – is surely one of their strengths. Another
is an ability to turn suffering into black humour. Yet another is
intuiting the Occupation’s aim and finding and appropriate counter
measures. When Aisha says that the Occupation seeks to make people
give up by making life unlivable, she concludes that sustaining
family and community ties come what may is the best form of
resistance.
Though the reader of ‘Behind the Wall’ encounters a wide range of
Palestinians, women and men, young and old, one cannot help
remarking Rich’s special affinity for children. This comes out not
only in attention to malnourished infants in a ‘Bethlehem’
hospital, or to children wounded or arrested during IOF raids. It’s
more a capacity to describe them so that they stay in the mind,
whether it’s two and a half year old Gangoon who tells the IOF
soldier checking the bus to “Give us your IDs!”; or three year old
Jamileh, walking radiant around Balata camp in her Eid dress with
her ‘brother’ Rich; or Yasser ‘the Wall’ who, parentless, “defended
himself, his camp and his rights”; or little Tasbeeh, whose home in
Balata is stormed by the IOF a few hours after her birth,
endangering her eardrum; or Miras, shot in the stomach while
playing with his cousins on the balcony, who stays strong in
hospital to reassure his father. Later, Miras becomes one of a
group learning photography with Rich; it’s good to know that his
photos of the camp are different from the others because he “chose
to look for beauty”. This is a book that all supporters of the
Palestinian struggle will want to give to family and friends.
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Rich Wiles, Behind the Wall: Life, Love and Struggle in Palestine. Washington: Potomac Books Inc. HB: $26.95