1 Halah*
*not her real name
Halah is a fighter. The first detail I hear about
her is that she’s on a hunger strike, living in a tent next to her car which
was burnt out by Israeli settlers the week before. It is January in the West
Bank and around 4 ̊C/39 ̊F. There has been almost constant rain and strong,
freezing winds; there was even a severe hailstorm. She is one tough lady. At 56
years old, Halah is extremely overweight and walks with a cane. She has had two
strokes in her right leg. One was a result of being beaten during an arrest and
the second struck during the Gaza War:
‘We were watching the news and I was so
affected by it. My leg is still bad even after I’ve been admitted to hospital
and had operations. It was very critical. The stroke didn’t come to my brain
but instead came to my leg. It was so blue.’
It is as if her mind couldn’t take the pain of so
much suffering and so her body stood in its stead. How much suffering must
you experience for your body to react like that?
My first sight of Halah is as she is climbing at
least fifteen rocky steps to the dirt track she is forced to take to her house.
I will never forget the sight of her; hijabed head bent double to make sure her
feet hit each step as solidly as possible. I want to help her but am not able
to – the steps not being wide enough for two of us. I’m also not sure whether
she would be offended or not – whether it would be an insult to imply that she
can’t do it on her own. She doesn’t see me until she’s at the top of the steps
where she says a very tired, breathless and warm ‘salam wa alaikum’ (‘peace be
upon you’). Her hijab is pulled tight over the sides of her face making it even
rounder, accentuating her plump cheeks, rosy with the climb. I smile and reply
‘wa alaikum al’salam’ (‘and upon you be peace’) and kiss her on both cheeks as
is the custom. She beams broadly at the kisses and looks through her small,
darkened, rectangular glasses with smiling eyes into my own. ‘Kayfa halik’ (how
are you?) she asks. ‘kullu tammam, hamdullilah’ (‘all is well, thanks be to
God)’ I say as she starts walking slowly towards her house. ‘Hamdullilah’ she
says softly as she begins to concentrate on walking. ‘Hamdullilah’ she says, as
if to herself.
I follow Halah down the path, not wanting to
overtake but also not feeling she is able to talk and walk at the same time –
her breathing is now very laboured and audible, and she is leaning heavily on
her cane for support – so I trail behind. Her uncertainty on her feet and her
swollen ankles remind me of my grandmother though Halah is at least twenty
years younger.
I wonder what I would do if my grandmother was
forced to climb up and down those uneven steps whenever she needed to go to
work or go shopping. I don’t think I would want her to leave the house but I
couldn’t, and wouldn’t, want to force her not to. I wonder how much I would
fight with the authorities to try and get permission for her to use the road
and park by the house. I wonder how frustrated I would be with the years of
trying and failing. Constant attempts, permission not granted. Constant
attempts, permission granted and thwarted. She tells me later how difficult
that walk is for her:
'The way is very difficult for me. I know I’m a
heavy lady. I don’t have any illusions about that! There’s a steep hill going
down to those stairs; about six metres. The steps that you came up are very
weak, especially when it’s rainy and muddy. I could easily slip down those
stairs. Because of my health issues it means that I can’t really leave the
house. Ok, I have my nephews and brother living here but they don’t help with
my expenses. No one helps me with my expenses.'
Only that day, the Israeli military had put cement
blocks in front of a path which was Halah’s last chance of getting her car to
her house. She had appealed to the Palestinian Authority (PA) who had granted
permission for her to use, and make more sound, a wide dirt path from the main
road to her house. She is prohibited from using the tarmac road which
leads to her house from the other side although the Israelis who live in the
settlements along that road (some of which are on her land) are permitted. Despite
the PA’s approval, the Israeli military closed the entrance of her last hope.
Anyway, as she reminds me, the PA has no authority in this area – Area C.
But that is my beginning. There
are so many other places we could start.... We could start with Halah’s father,
Atif, now deceased, who built a home for his family in the 1940s. Who built it
big enough to house the family he expected to have... the grandchildren who had
not been born yet but for whom he was already planning a life. Little did he
know the kind of life they could expect.
We could start with the arrival of ‘new Jews’ in
the area who attacked those Palestinian Jews who refused to join their cause.
Atif saved twenty such Palestinian Jews from the Jewish mob outside by
sheltering them in his house. He and his wife Manal took their guns, climbed
onto the roof and fired into the air. The mob ran away. Maybe Atif thought that
was the end of it. Maybe he thought they were gone for good. When they returned
with an army to defend themselves and started attacking his family, did he wish
he killed them, then? Or did he still believe that not killing them was the
right thing to do? – that violence begets violence; that his and his family’s
lives are in God’s hands; He has a plan. As his daughter Halah seemed to assent
to:
'[I]t’s not a life but if this is our fate, if this
is what God’s chosen for us then I just hope that there is a reward, because
this is not a life.'
By the time we reach Halah’s house, she is
exhausted. As she lowers herself into a chair, she breathes deeply and heavily
and closes her eyes, trying to recover. Recover. Re-cover. To cover herself
again with an appearance of energy although she has none, with some semblance
of socially acceptable behaviour. This in itself is a struggle for her: ‘I’m
constantly frustrated, I can’t even be polite to people any more, I’m under so
much pressure, I’m always wound up.’
She is exhausted, depressed and angry, and doesn’t
have the energy to feign otherwise. The constant attacks on her family and
property have, she feels, left her ‘mindless.’ I’m not sure how to interpret
this but it is the over-riding feeling that she repeatedly relates to me. Does
she mean that she feels numb? I cannot believe that this is her meaning – when
speaking about her experiences with settlers, she speaks in an extremely
animated and angry tone. She cares. She feels. Her voice strains and cracks
with anger.
Mind-less. Without a mind. Maybe she means
without her mind. Without having control over her thoughts or
feelings. I go back to what she said earlier:
'Other people as part of life think: ‘what kind of
dress shall I buy? What kind of shoes shall I buy?’ Believe it or not, we don’t
even think of that, all we think of is ‘when is the road going to open for me
to get to work?’, ‘If I leave the house, will I be allowed back in?’ ‘When can
I leave the house, when can I get back?’ ‘What time do I have to be back?’
That’s all I ever think about, I don’t think about buying anything new or going
anywhere, that’s all I ever think about. It’s not even a life’
She seems to be suffering from too many emotions
and thoughts. I imagine the constant worry and stress of not knowing whether
you are able to get to work, to make a wage that day or week or month. Then
even if you can, I imagine being at work not knowing if you can get home or
not. Will the soldiers let me pass this time or will they keep me waiting for
three hours? Will they arrest me and keep me at the police station until
midnight? Will settlers attack me with eggs and water or with stones; will I
come back to my house to find my windows broken, my trees burnt or a member of
my family injured (all of these have happened to Halah on numerous occasions).
The constant worry and stress could indeed lead someone to say they feel
‘mindless’.
We sit on her veranda, surrounded by lemon and
orange trees which have recovered since their branches were cut off by settlers
some years ago. Being forced to park her car so far from her house not only
means that Halah has to walk the long, treacherous journey to her house...often
with bags of shopping...and can’t bring heavy gas canisters up....and can’t get
her rubbish collected...and can’t get to an ambulance... and means she has to
leave her car parked very far from her house where she can’t protect it. Six of
her family’s cars have been burned ...completely burnt out, the glass melted,
the seats ashes...she suspects that the settlers use an accelerator. The sixth
car was burned only days before I got there; its shell was still sitting about
50 yards from the bottom of the rocky stairs. The sixth was too much for Halah.
She lost herself:
'When I heard about my last car being burnt, I
couldn’t contain myself, I couldn’t control myself. I still feel until now that
there are moments when I just lose it when I can’t control myself, I can’t
control what I’m saying. There are moments when I do question if I’m actually
crazy.'
This pressure from all sides, Halah finds
‘suffocating’. She tells me that Israel ‘manipulates all aspects of life
– marriage, food, my daughter’s marriage, the children’s marriage, social,
political, economical – every single detail in our lives has been worked
on by Israel.’ Even, I am astonished and disgusted to discover, her own
marriage.
Unlike most Palestinian women, Halah doesn’t have a
husband to rely on for either income or emotional support. This is extremely
unusual for a Palestinian woman and comes with a large amount of social stigma.
I ask her what happened:
'The man that I was married to – my ex-husband -
only married me because he had an arrangement with the Israelis to try and get
me out of my house. I was only married to him for 48 days because I found out,
left him and came back. I left him when I was pregnant with my daughter; she
doesn’t know anything about him. There are other things but I can’t say them in
front of the children.' (her nephews and nieces were in the room at
this point).
To have shared your bed, body and hopes with only
one man. To have that man be the father of your only child. And for him
to be aiding those who throw large rocks at the ambulance carrying your mother,
causing her to die at home without treatment. For him to be on the side of
those who broke your nephew’s leg when he was fourteen by throwing stones at
him, of those who burn your cars, cut down your trees, shoot through your
windows, steal your land, ban you from driving to your house, ban you
from
leaving your house,
[2] from
tending your land, from going to university.
[3]
But who are ‘those’? Who are these people whose
hatred is so visceral that they brutally abuse their neighbours? Are they
happy? Are they scared? Do they think that at any moment, Halah and her family
will shoot them? Explode them? Do they think that their and Halah’s
precariousness is a zero sum game? If Halah’s family’s lives become less
precarious, theirs will become more?
Will they be happy if they get Halah’s house? If
they get the whole West Bank? Will their hatred dissipate or will it find a new
target? Are there some individuals among them who don’t hate? Who don’t want to
throw and burn and beat but who feel they must or they themselves will be
turned upon? Will they ever voice their dissent? Will they ever show Halah’s
family that there are Israeli settlers who just want to be
neighbours?
Who were these people who came to a foreign land to
claim it as their own? Did they believe they were coming to save the Jews from
the Arab barbarians after the massacre of 1929
[4]?
Michael Feige describes how the massacre (known to the settlers as ‘Tarpat’)
was the driving force behind the first settler movement to come to Hebron. Much
of the settler community sees itself as a continuation of the old Jewish
community, which was massacred and largely driven out. According to
Feige, Zeev Hever, who plays a central role in the propagation of the Jewish
settler community in Hebron, describes what he deems to be the three most
essential duties of the Jews in Hebron:
'[E]rasing the shame of the Hurban (destruction,
another term laden with exilic connotations) of Tarpat, reversing the failure
of the former community to return to Hebron and re-establishing the continuity
of life in Hebron. All these are different ways of making the same point, that
the new community replaces the old one. It inherits its history and has its
score to settle.'
[5]
Halah and her family are paying the price for acts
committed by certain Palestinians more than eighty years ago. The settlers
seem to have dehumanised the entire Palestinian population, blaming them all
for the acts of a few. To respond to such tragic violence with yet more
hateful violence only perpetuates the cycle of revenge and turns some of those
dehumanised enemies into the very thing the new settlers fear – hostile
neighbours who will kill their Jewish neighbours the first chance they get.
Instead, perhaps what the settlers need is to mourn their loss.
Mourning allows us to deal with the pain of loss in
a way that does not seek revenge but looks for understanding.
[6] Understanding of myself, of you, and of how
we are connected. Connected through our common human vulnerability; through our
impacts on the precariousness of each others lives.
Israeli settlers in Hebron are well aware of the
precariousness of their lives; emphasized by the army that is there to guard
them and the parts of Hebron they feel they cannot go to without dozens of
soldiers to protect them. Reminded of the danger of others and the
precariousness of their forebears’ lives by the narrative of the Tarpat. But
precariousness does not have to be a zero sum game. A decrease in your
vulnerability does not have to mean an increase in mine. Your gain does not
have to be my loss. Do I really become less vulnerable by making you more so?
Or do I in fact become more vulnerable to the possibility of your revenge?
We are all implicated in the vulnerability and
precariousness of others’ lives in many ways, including how we decide to tell
our narratives, as well as how we read or hear others’ experiences.
When we hear a person recounting an experience, the extent to which I relate to
‘them’ and their story depends not only on the way that the story is told but
also upon my own subjective instincts. We have, all of us, been conditioned
into notions of ‘us’ and ‘them’ and into ideas of what characteristics make up
these categorisations. But this is a conditioning and does not
mean that we necessarily have more in common with those we deem one of ‘us’ as
opposed to one of ‘them’. I may have a more similar sense of humour to a Maori
than my next-door neighbour; I may have more similar fears to an Argentinian
child than to my brother. Of course, I have more emotional ties to those
closest to me but this does not mean that I do not have any bond to those
farthest away. Although ‘their’ lives may seem disconnected from ‘ours’, we are
in fact inextricably linked.
If we can write, speak, read and hear narratives of
suffering in the knowledge that they are framed to begin at a certain point,
that they necessarily exclude certain aspects and, in the case of
pro-Israel/pro-Palestinian narratives, often have the express intention of
dehumanising the Other, then we can seek what is not told. We can
recognise when someone is being dehumanised and the radical dangers of
believing someone to be less-than-human. Jews have experienced the extreme
results of a dehumanising discourse in recent history. Palestinians are
experiencing it now.
[1] The
real amount is almost impossible to know as settlement products are often mixed
with products from Israeli proper so that the labelling does not show the
consumer where the product was actually made/grown. It is estimated that
exports to the EU in 2004 either partly or wholly from Israeli settlements were
worth around US$2 billion. Jan Willem van Gelder Hassel Kroes, “Economic links
with Israeli Settlements in Occupied Palestinian Territories,” (A research
paper prepared for the Sir Joseph Hotung Programme for Law, Human Rights and
Peace Building in the Middle East, School of Oriental and African Studies,
University of London, February 10, 2009), accessed April 15, 2012,
http://www.bricup.org.uk/documents/UKcompaniesAndIsraeliSettlements.pdf .
[2] Ahmed, Halah’s
nephew told me how the family were put under 24 hour curfew for a month during
the 2
nd intifada, he said: ‘it was like we were in jail except
the jail was your house. We couldn’t even open a window.’ I
nterviewed
January 25, 2012
, West Bank,.
[3] Halah’s
brother, Hani was arrested to put pressure on the family to sell. Although he
was released a year later, a condition of his bail was that he could not go
back to University to study accounting and so now sells coffee on the street
which brings in very little income. Interview with Halah, January 25, 2012 n
the West Bank.
[4] In
1929, 67 Jews were massacred in Hebron by a Palestinian mob. Though hundreds
more were kept safe by their Arab neighbours.
[6] Butler,
Precarious Life, Chapter
1.
