DIARY OF A PEOPLE UNDER SEIGE
Diary of an ISM activist living in Rafah
Sent by Victoria Buch, Jerusalem, Israel
August 21, 2003
And outside, they are shouting again, men's voices fighting to
stay afloat like it was an ocean they were drowing in. Down the street
in Al Awda Square, Hamas has been demonstrating since 8 pm between
Christmas lights in bright colors and loudspeakers. Further down, the
shooting from the tower dominiates the night, louder than angry men,
louder than demonstrators. Earlier tonight, an ambulance's urgent wail,
I holding my breath praying. Death is so close now you can smell it.
Already it has come like a rainstorm beginning in Hebron, like the time
I watched rain come towards me from across a lake and ran toward the
forest and my feet were not faster than the rain. In the West Bank,
tanks close in, six dead in a day. In Gaza, five missiles from an F16
assassinate Ismael Abu Shanab, a non-militant spokesperson for Hamas;
kill his two bodyguards, and injure 20 bystanders, 5 seriously. F16s
paint the sky everyday, blue and white like clouds. But so far in
Rafah, a military tower is shooting in the air, bullets have remained
abstract in their threat, have not collided today with flesh, but still
I see death everywhere, in the faces of my friends and of strangers in
the streets. Shouting upstairs as the images paint TV.
8-29-03
In my haste to leave the internet cafe, I forgot to mention in
my last letter that just as we were leaving the hospital, one
seventeen-year-old was dying in the ICU from the injuries he had
received by the missile in Jabaliya Camp the day before, and crowds of
people were flowing into the waiting room like rivers, falling all over
each other and you could hear the sounds of hearts breaking.
And last night back in Rafah slept so well I didn't hear the two five
minute bouts of gunfire near us or the two tank shells that landed near
us, but woke up anyway with my whole face clenched and my head pounding
which is how I wake up everyday for no reason I can discern, woke up to
hommos and foul and shakshuka, bread warmed directly on the burner,
don't mess around here, Al-Jazeera playing war scenes in India and Iraq
and Palestine; Al-Jazeera covering the blackout in London, CNN covering
talking american heads going on and on in that disinterested stance
thateven seeps through the overdub.
Abu Ahmed's voice, shrill and disgruntled (existing for itself only)
voice, demanding we find our way outside to where the air is softer,
under the fig tree; to where Sally's eleven-year-old legs all wrapped up
in green bellbottoms are climbing the wall to find the freshest figs,
deep purple like red grapes, insides full of erotic pink fibers
disolving like sugar. Sally bickering tirelessly with her father over
figs. Can I tell you about this family? Can I tell you that I managed
to sleep through high caliber gunfire and tank shells but wake up
promptly at 7am every morning when the members of the family start
hollering at each other about breakfast, and that they only cool down
after they've eaten and after they've had tea and settled down to watch
TV and clim fig trees and sit around all day together chatting and
poking fun at each other. Abu Ahmed hollers all day I think just to
holler and not because he's deaf in one ear.
9-1-03
On Saturday we went to Khan Younis to visit the shaheed tent of
Hamdi Kallakh, who had been assassinated decapitated two days earlier by
an Apache missile at the age of 35. We were led to the house where
women were crowded together on cushions, filling two small rooms. We
walked in, murmering condolences in stilted Arabic, not knowing what to
say. We asked about his mother, but she was unconscious from grief and
from fasting, she hadn't eaten since her son was killed. So we walked
on; The 20-something widow he had left behind was sitting in the far
corner and lifted her niqab to greet us, revealing a soft face with
large cheekbones. Everyone seemed a bit confused about what we were
doing there. We sat down in a corner where people made room for us,
between aging women, eyes wide and bottomless, coffeebrown skin in
delicate folds like the pages of old books. They wore looks of
disbelief and soft white cotton scarves wrapped loosely around their
faces, folding into soft hills over their full, fat bellies, and below
that, heavy black jilbabs down to their bare callussed old women feet.
We were served traditional coffee and dried dates, the bitterness of a
person't passing followed by the sweetness of Allah's patience.
A younger woman with a round face and thin lips began to translate.
She wanted to know what we had to say about the helicopters that had
killed her cousin and why Bush was sending tanks to their borders and
their cities. Bush and Shgaron is one word here. More than a few times
I've heard people say America to mean Israel without thinking. The old
women pitching in their frustrations with the rest. Us agreeing with
them, us angry out loud with them. At some point they heard our anger
and it brought us toether into the room.
The young widow sat silently through all of this, lips smiling faintly,
removed from the whole weight of the room and the agitated women,
nursing her 4-month-old child, the youngest of seven. Someone brought
in shaheed posters for us to examine. About the M16 he was holding,
they said his wife had pleaded with him to leave it so the army wouldn't
kill him and leave her and their children behind to pick up the pieces;
but now that he's been murdered by that army she's proud and says she'll
give that gun to his oldest son.
But outside it's the first day of school and you wouldn't notice the
grief. The streets explode with children in bright new uniforms,
pinstripes and fresh blue polo shirts and shiny white mendeels are
lining the streets in row formation. The entire youth population of
Rafah in mass exodus in the eleven-AM sun.
9-2-03
And as students rush through the steets from their second day of
school, we drive past them to the pale white of the shaheed tent of Ayya
Mahmood, shot deat three mornings ago at the age of eight. What can be
said about that. White plastic chairs hold men in long lines under the
shade of the tent. Above, a mural hangs from the wall, a tree bleeds as
it cradles the Haram al-Sharif (Dome of the Rock) in its branches.
We follow Ayya's uncle up a pathway of stairs and through the narrow
maze of refugee camp streets, through rusting doors. We sit with the
mother and some men from the family who have gathered. Her retelling of
the story is calm, unemotional until she breaks into shaking, silent
sobs at the end.
"She was eight years old and she would have started her school year the
next day. She was so smart, so sweet, y'achti, look at her"
(the photos passed around, Ayya looking bright and determined in a red
sweater her hair high in pigtails)
"It was Yom il-Jumaa (Friday) and she had been fasting all morning with
me. I gave her some money and told her to go buy something to eat, she
was only eight and there was no reason for her to fast. She went on
bicycle. She bought wafers, chips, and a popcycle and rode back. A
tank was shooting from the Neve Dekalim settlement which borders their
neighborhood. It shot her through the heart, she fell from her bicycle,
we found her covered in blood, all the snacks she had just bought to
break her fast, covered in blood, her hands still holding onto them."
Her uncle pitches in. "I didn't recognize her when I saw her in the
hospital. I said, 'This isn't Ayya. Ayya is b'khair (in good health).'
She was covered in blood and I couldn't tell it was her. Her mother was
there and she told me it's Ayya. I couldn't believe it."
More pictures are passed around of Ayya four months ago against a
garden backdrop taken in a local studio. Ayya's new backpack. Ayya's
new school uniform, unworn and fresh, pinstripes too blue, sleeves too
empty of little girl arms.
"She wanted a guava that morning but we didn't have any guava. We said
we'd buy her some the next morning, but she was killed."
Six other children were injured in this shooting including one girl who
lost her legs. No adults were in the area at the time, it was just
tanks against kids.
Ayya's sister Safa sits down next to me. "I want you to tell this to
the world."
She tells me how smart Ayya was, and good, how she prayed five times a
day and fasted on Ramadan, and sometimes Safa would take her to the
mosque. She was good in English and in every subject (her last report
card is brought to where we are sitting, an average of 91%, high enough
to receive state subsidies to go to engineering school, but Ayya wanted
to be a doctor). Safa helping her study all the time, Safa telling her
bedtime stories, Safa teaching her to read Qur'an. When there was
shooting at night coming from the settlement Ayya would run to Safa's
bed and Safa would protect her from her fear. "I was," says Safa, "her
closest sister."
I think her mother and her cousin, sitting together on my other side,
are trying to make sure she doesn't lose connection to religion,
pointedly declaring "La ilaha il allah," there is no god but God; Safa
stares back at them blankly. "Mohammed rasul Allah," Mohammed is God's
messenger. Safa ignores turns her head to face another direction. She
looks at me. "Do you believe in God? You say you believe in God? Where
was God three days ago?"
Different family members take turns sobbing and comforting each other,
don't cry, don't cry, believe in Allah. It's the third day of the wake
and we eat maglouba, rice spiced with cardamom and roasted garlic and a
spice they called asfar, yellow, in Arabic, and meat on top, traditional
dish at weddings and funerals. Safa doesn't want to eat but she does.
We leave in many prolonged farewells, planning to meet again soon. I
follow her uncle, down the narrow pathway to join up with the men from
our group, imagining the life of eight year old girls and fresh guavas.
9-4-03
For the longest time, I avoided the half of Abu Ahmed's house
that faces the border, two bedrooms and a bathroom, during the night,
remembering the first night I'd ever slept here, when Abu Ahmed
explained to me that I couldn't sleep in the bedroom by the border -
despite the massive softness of the Western-style bed there (such a
luxury next to the simplicity of the thin floor mattresses typical of
this culture) - because of the tank that parked there at night, often
shooting near or into the house. Months later, on a night when several
of us were sleeping here, he put us in that same room to sleep. I was
confused and asked him if it wasn't dangerous as he had said before or
if anything had changed. Between a prolonged bout of laughter and
ranting punctuated with exclamations of "Inty fahemti ghalat" (you
understood wrong), he explained that it was fine for me to sleep there,
"as long as when you hear gunfire, you don't get scared and sit up in
bed. If you sit up you might get shot." He demonstrated several times
how I should react to gunfire in the night, how not to sit up, and then
to add weight to his explanation, motioned to the bulletholes in the
wall barely above head level.
It was dark tonight when we got to Abu Ahmed's house, which made me
kind of nervous about the tank I knew was parked next to the house. Abu
Ahmed was leaning out of the doorframe staring into the night. We sat
for long minutes on long benches made of old wooden slabs and
cinderblocks (covered with colorful decades-old woven carpets) and white
plastic Israeli chars wholse feet sunk into the soft sand, drinking tea
(Abu Ahmed is a tea fiend, he says every time he serves us tea that he
would dring the whole potfull himself if it wasn't for us.)
Abu Fat'hi is over this evening. Between a full face of hair, full
cheeks, large muild, and general demeanor of joviality, he reminds me of
my old social studies teacher Mr. Granagan, or a Palestinian verson of
Santa Claus. He invites us to see his family, and this night we accept
to amble down the road to the Fat'hi area - I'm not talking about one
house but three, built one on top of another, to accomodate Abu and Om
Fat'hi, their two sons, and their 35 grandchildren. On the wall of
every flat there is a picture of their third son, who was shot dead on
his way to school at the age of sixteen. That was in the year of 1994,
in the midst of the hopeful beginning of the Oslo era.
We're in Fat'hi's flat. Fat'hi, who is just like his father except his
demeanor lacks the wight of age and body build; his wife and all the
women and girls in the famiy gather around us, the children demanding
pictures. We intend to stay five minutes and stay for two hours,
enthralled. People full of end-of-the-day banter, chewing on the latest
news.
In the middle of this rumbling scene, one of the men of the family
walked in. He was coming from Tes es Sultan, and with news. The army
had just announced over loudspeaker its intention to demolish two large
new apartment buildings on the border that faces the Rafiah Yam
settlement from the new refugee camp still being built by the UN to
accomodate those who had lost homes earlier in the Intifada. Already
five tanks had incurred into the area and occupied the new well (rebuilt
after the army demolished it this February), preceded by gunfire in the
early evening that had already landed one man in the hospital after he
was shot in the leg by a high-caliber bullet.
Remembering too clearly the sleepless terror of living through past
incursions makes it harder to sleep easily here tonight where a night
broken by tank fire seems peaceful compared to what we know is happening
2 km away, grappling with my own powerlessness to do any thing and my
anxiety that one of the areas where we sleep will be next.
We leave despite please of all the children to stay. Especially Rowan,
four-year-old beauty, too wise for her age, touching my arm gently,
"naami hayna al-yom," sleep here tonight. We walk out into the night,
searching the landscape for military patrole vehicles. Inching rather
uncertainly along the fifty meters of path between Abu Fat'hi and Abu
Ahmed's homes. And sure enough, a jeep fires into the night and drives
across and away towards Brazil camp and sens us running back towards Abu
Fat'hi's. Abu Fat'hi himself now walks nonchalantly down the path to
Abu Ahmed's, yelling back at us to come now while there's no military on
this side of the border. I hold my breath until I reach Abu Ahmed's
door, five and a half months into life here and still I am not used to
this.
Suzan is the only one still awake when we get back, mulling over her
last night with her family; tomorrow she's getting married at 27 and
that is its own rambling story of weeks spent in the souk, sudden
infatuation, and the anticipatory shyness of marriage through the
formalized channell of traditional Islamic marriage rituals in a culture
of gender division. Every, and I mean every part of her body is freshly
waxed in preparation for tomorrow night. She is daydreaming, her eyes
rest somewhere between the frankness of the bedroom air and the future
she is escaping too. Her head droops slowly into the pillow, and I
follow suit. I fall asleep to the sound of the machine guns of tanks as
they rumble back and forth on border control, clearing the way with
bursts of gunfire. It doesn't stop. My mind wanders to Tes es Sultan.
Brought to you by Peacemaker Circle International.
10:29:10 AM 
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