mid-day

06/08/07

It’s midday and the best place to be is in the shade of the open-walled tent, wind blowing, heat discarded outside. Mahmoud and Abed are playing chess, Mahmoud dancing a victory dance over Abed. Defeated, Abed tips the chess board and stomps off with cries for tea. He is 21.

Mahmoud, his older brother, worked in Israel for about 6 years, apparently stuffing force-feeding tubes down the throats of geese, part of the pate trade in Israel. “Hada mish quayis,” he explains, saying the work was terrible, and he hated to put the tubes down the birds’ throats. He realized it wasn’t worth it, being away from his children for long periods—so that his oldest son, a 5 year old, calls Abed “abu,” father, and Mahmoud “Mahmoud.” So Mahmoud came back to herd sheep and goats, be near his family, and philosophize on the global chase for money and on what one truly needs to exist happily. He explained this to me in charitably simple Arabic.

He is making a kite for the youths—he picked up 3 like-sized sticks, crossed them into a pinwheel, and is fastening them with plastic binding. The youths are tearing open plastic bags—pink, black, green—to use as the kite material.

Much of this “village” is made of temporary structures: tents with walls which roll up, allowing wind and air in or keeping out cold wind and rain in winter months.

Kites made, the three younger and two drifting neighbouring adolescents fly them in perfect winds.

Kite-making and flying over, the radio is turned on and the tent space erupts into a clamour of dance moves. Hammoudi, the two-year old, is the star for a while, dancing pant-less, arms up, hands clapping, feet stomping, determination on his grinning face. He is precious and precocious, daily revealing a quick intelligence.

The neighbour teens come in and join the dancing, arms linked or slung over shoulders, and feet a flurry of rapid hops and steps as they do Dabka moves.

The room is alive with dancing: shoulders shimmer, feet stomp and slide, and life-long love for dancing very evident.

These smiling, dancing, lovely people are the world’s “terrorists,” the kind of people whose existence has almost been “wiped off the map” in many acts of “defending oneself,” in real terms in multiple acts of city lock-downs, army invasions, house demolitions, closed-borders-imposed malnutrition, poverty, starvation, and banned emergency visits to the hospital.

video clip

Here to offer them our international presence, hoping that will ward of aggressive settlers and would-be tent-demolitions, they instead offer so very much with their ready inclusion of us in family events and their evident desire to share time together. My last day with them for these next couple of weeks involved meeting a daughter and new in-laws as they arrived for a post-wedding celebration at the paternal home.

Food and tea were cut short by settler activity on the Palestinian land we’ve been monitoring. Smiles, laughter, and genuine kindness were unwillingly swapped for the open hatred of the settlers we filmed in the process of finalizing their months-long land-steal: in the morning they had begun erecting the wire mesh of the fence to enclose the stolen land. This task was further completed at evening, the opposite side going up. As we filmed this sad event, the main settler who has been active in stealing and working on this Palestinian land paused his fence efforts to shout “Nazi, Hitler, go home” at us while threatening to punch us in the face. He later broke whatever restraint he was trying to maintain for the cameras and shoved the other Human Rights Worker, trying to push him and myself off the settler-appropriated land.

As in previous incidences with this settler working stolen land, the army was slow to arrive and the police simply didn’t. When the police have bothered to show up, they display an open bias against law and the Palestinian land-owners. Together with the army, the police play the game of re-assigning duty and authority to one another: the army cannot arrest the settlers, but the police claim the army are the ones who must first decide whether the land in question is Palestinian or settler land. The army claims otherwise, citing the police as the decision-makers. Round and round in this dizzy, ridiculous game we chase their tails, as the settler continues before our eyes to appropriate the land and water resources to grow grapes which forecast a 60,000 shekel revenue in wine production, according to his Israeli-worker side-kick. Meanwhile, the Palestinian land-owners, who are very much present and keen to work their land for agricultural (livelihood) use are left landless and facing the daunting, delayed legal system that is Israeli “democracy” in reality.