Letters from Palestine (25 page)

The meaning of “Shaden” in Arabic is “a
young gazelle that is now strong enough to walk independently next
to her mother.” Despite the treacherous bullets, I can see her
running freely and happily across the green fields of Palestine,
asking us to join her in a cosmic celebration against hate and
bigotry and telling us that this land shall be soon the home of
peace and justice for all.

_PHOTO

Issa Souf, thirty-eight, lives in the small
West Bank village of Hares, near Nablus, with his wife and three
children. Ward, seven, is the eldest and was a month-and-a-half old
when Issa was wounded, as he will describe below. His younger
children are named Mohammad and Haya.

Before his injury, Issa was a physical
fitness instructor and studied journalism and public relations. He
also loved to play oriental music. Afterward, he has supervised
summer camps for children under the banner of “Love for Life,”
where the children are instructed in arts, contemplation
techniques, and nonviolence—in spite of the hardships of life under
Israeli occupation and the seemingly futile political pursuit of
“peace.”

Issa also writes articles for various
websites and continues to maintain relations with activists of the
international solidarity movement and with Israelis who believe in
Palestinian rights to their land.

* * *

At the end of our time in the West Bank, Anna
and I were taken by an Israeli peace activist, Dorothy Naor, into
some small out-of-the way villages in order to meet some of the
families she had become close to. But there was another reason I
was particularly interested to make this journey with Dorothy: It
was to meet a man named Issa Souf.

I had first read about him in Anna Baltzer’s
book, but others had told me about him as well and urged me to meet
him. Fortuitously, Dorothy was well acquainted with Issa and his
family, so a visit was easily arranged.

So it was that early in the afternoon of
November 25, 2008, Dorothy drove us over rutted roads to Issa’s
village of Hares and finally to Issa’s modest home. It was quiet
and peaceful there. The sun shone down on us. Dorothy went inside
while Anna and I sat in some chairs near Issa’s porch. Dorothy
remained inside for some minutes. It turned out that Issa had been
asleep when we arrived, and it took him some time to get dressed.
Finally, he appeared, smiling, on the doorstep, in a wheelchair
(how often we had seen men in wheelchairs during our visit to
Palestine).

Issa was young—or at least appeared young to
me (he was thirty-seven at the time, it turned out)—young and
handsome. He radiated a kind of benignity. He spoke softly while
his two children nestled themselves around him. He didn’t speak of
what had caused his injury, only of its long-term consequences for
his health. Even after extensive treatment, he was still having
great difficulty—his lungs were in danger of collapse—and the
Israelis were making it virtually impossible for him to travel to
get the kind of treatment he needed. These concerns were very much
on his mind the day that we visited.

He did not complain; he only described
something of the ordeal he had been living for the past eight years
with regard to his health, which he now feared was in danger of a
serious decline. He was very worried about his family.

Issa had been described to me almost as a
kind of paragon, a veritable apostle, of nonviolence, but in view
of all he had suffered, I wondered if he still felt that way. When
I asked him about it, he spoke with feeling. “More than ever,” he
said.

There was something about this man, not just
his philosophy, but his very being, that impressed me tremendously.
I think you’ll understand something of what I felt while in his
presence when you read his story. Or maybe even when you look at
the photo Anna took of him that day as we talked outside his house
under the warmth of the afternoon sun on a quiet day in
Palestine.

* * *

I opened my eyes to this world in a small,
very old Palestinian village, Hares, whose ruins and religious
sites as well as its millennia-old olive trees testify to how
ancient it is. That was on the fourth of April, 1971. Childhood was
innocent, not knowing what fate had in store for us. I was an
excellent student in primary school, then went on to high school in
another larger village, which we had to reach on foot, three to
four kilometers away, every day.

In the 1980s, the Israeli colonial
settlement activity reached our village, and scenes of resistance
between the owners of the lands and the army and settlers grew in
intensity. We saw as children how our parents were treated with
force and humiliation in front of our eyes. We grew up on the
respect of elders and that they can do anything and protect us. We
were then given to fear and cold and loss of sanctuary. Something
broke inside us, and we wondered about those strangers to our
language, our culture, and our values, and who look so
different.

In 1986, a large Israeli Army force invaded
our village in a frightening way. Their aim was my elder brother,
Nawwaf, who was sleeping on the roof that night and was seized. The
chief officer told my father not to worry, half an hour and we will
return him to you. It was the first such case in the village, and
days passed, and Nawwaf did not come back.

New rituals entered our lives, such as going
to the Red Cross offices and jails and attending Israeli courts. A
year and a half later, Nawwaf was sentenced to seventeen years of
prison, and he delivered a speech in court, telling the judge, “I
don’t think that your occupation state will last that long, and
this sentence will just be ink on paper!”

When my father came back from the courtroom,
we gathered around him to ask what happened. He said that the half
hour mentioned by the officer on the night of the arrest had become
seventeen years. Dumbfounded, I came out with extreme anger and a
feeling of impotence against this overwhelming army which steals
our land and brothers and does not respect the elders. I turned to
my nephew Rabia, the three-year-old son of my imprisoned brother,
and decided that he is my son now, and that I will see to it that
he gets everything he needs until his father gets out of prison. I
found in this decision some release for my anger when I heard the
sentence.

The first Intifada against the occupation
broke out in late 1987, and its effects did not reach our village
except by following the calls for strikes and acts of defiance to
the occupation. That period was a turning point in the culture and
values of our generation. It reinforced the rebellious tendency in
our personalities with courage, instead of fear, a tendency to take
initiatives, instead of mere reactions.

My mother’s words always followed me: Isn’t
it enough that your brother is in prison? Do you want to follow
him? Indeed, I was arrested, but for short periods, and had to pay
back-breaking fines more than once.

Political developments were shaping our
perceptions in the wake of the Intifada: the Madrid Conference in
1991, the Oslo Accords in 1993, and mutual recognition between the
PLO and Israel, then the establishment of the Palestinian Authority
and the return of Yasser Arafat from exile. We really imagined that
we were on the threshold of independence, and, instead of stones,
some young people offered olive branches to Israeli soldiers. We
did not realize that these agreements were full of holes that would
drain our hopes.

The Second Intifada flared up in late 2000,
following the abortion of the so-called peace process and the
continuing Israeli policies of land expropriation, demolition of
houses, uprooting of trees, more closures and restrictions on
movement, the erection of more and more checkpoints, and other
measures. This time round, it was more violent, with more blood,
fighter planes, tanks, explosions, and assassinations. In other
words, the full might of the Israeli army against a civilian
population.

I always hated conflict and wars and
believed that life is a gift that should not be squandered. It
should be preserved at least, in order to reach the rest of the
world with a different message. If the Palestinians could kill a
million Israelis—not that they could—would that end the conflict
forever? And if the Israelis killed a million Palestinians, and
they could, would that end the conflict?

Not long after my brother Nawwaf was
released from prison, we had a gathering with friends and discussed
a different way of struggle for our national cause. We decided to
choose peaceful, or mass, struggle, and we started to network with
Israeli human rights groups such as Ta’ayush (Coexistence), Rabbis
and Physicians for Human Rights, and so on. We invited the media
and contacted the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), notably
the Israeli activist Neta Golan who contributed a lot to these
activities.

Nonviolent mass struggle is much harder than
armed struggle. Its results are very slow because it needs a big
effort of planning and organization and choosing the right tools to
convince others of the value of this type of struggle. Talk of
nonviolence was often faced with dismay at a time when blood was
being spilled in confrontations with the Israeli Army and settlers
as they attacked farmers during the olive harvest to prevent them
from reaching their lands. The presence of international and
Israeli solidarity activists and the media helped reduce the
violence.

My personal ordeal started on 15 May
2001.

I got a call from one of my brothers that
Israeli soldiers were roaming around our house, which is near a
road that settlers use. Many families with kids and women live in
the area, and we were always fearful when the soldiers used tear
gas near houses.

We locked our windows and doors, and I
played around a bit with my month-and-a-half-old child, Ward, and
went out to warn the neighbors. The streets were empty as people
huddled in their homes. I was barely fifty meters from my home when
I heard automatic gun fire. I stumbled for two or three steps
before falling to the ground. I tried to stand up again, but in
vain. I gathered all my energy to make another attempt, but failed
again. I realized I was hit.

Two Israeli soldiers came and stood above
me, and one of them kicked me with his boots, shouting in Hebrew,
“Get up! Get up!” The other soldier prevented my family and
brothers, who tried to reach me, from rescuing me. The soldiers
would shoot overhead or fire stun grenades, yelling at them.

In the meantime, my situation was getting
worse with every passing second because the bullet entered my right
shoulder and hit the lung before exploding in the vertebral column,
and the shrapnel pieces were lodged in the spinal cord. On its way,
it caused tearing of the lung, which led to internal bleeding.

My voice was dying down, and my respiration
weakened, and my face started turning yellow. The soldiers kept
ordering me to stand up. I murmured that I don’t have much left to
stand on. The last words I heard myself uttering before passing out
were, “Please be human and let the others help me because I am on
my way to death.”

I woke up in a hospital, and the first words
I made out were of a doctor telling my brother that if I survived,
I would spend the rest of my life in a wheelchair.

According to my brother, the trip to the
hospital was extremely hard because of the many checkpoints all
along the way. Every soldier at the checkpoints would open an
investigation with the ambulance driver about why I was hit and how
serious it was, as if to waste time on purpose, knowing that every
moment counted and could mean life or death.

The Nablus Rafidia Hospital was not equipped
for such cases, but they gave me the initial treatment that kept me
alive. I remained there for five days and then was transferred to
Jordan where I underwent operations to extract all the large pieces
of the exploded bullet, while the small ones can still be seen in
the X-rays.

My situation became stable, and I was
transferred to the Farah physiotherapy center, which specialized in
spinal cord injuries. I underwent a long program, learning to
urinate again, as I had lost control over those functions, and to
try to rely on myself in basic acts. I still needed helpers to move
me from chair to bed and to the bathroom, and so on.

In the meantime, we were lucky to find a
specialized center in England through British friends in
coordination with Ta’ayush and Physicians for Human Rights. I was
helped to go through all the procedures to travel with my brother
Nawwaf for a month and a half. I went through another extensive
program of rehabilitation, and I came back home more able to rely
on myself in many things. I was hoping to be the last victim of
this long and useless conflict, but unfortunately, many others fell
after me, on both sides. What is more important is that nobody
knows till when.

On the third anniversary of my being
wounded, on May 15, 2004, I wrote an open letter to the two
soldiers who had shot me:

I remember you. I remember your confused
face when you stood above my head and wouldn’t let people come to
my aid. I remember how my voice grew weaker when I said to you, “Be
humane and let my parents help me.” I keep all those pictures in my
head: How I lay on the ground, trying to get up but unable. How I
fought my shortness of breath, which was caused by the blood that
was collecting in my lungs, and the voice that was weakened because
my diaphragm was hurt. I won’t hide from you that, despite this, I
had pity for you. I felt that I was strong because I had powers I
didn’t know about before.

That was exactly three years ago. I rushed
out of the house in order to distance the village children from the
danger of the tear gas. They were used to playing their simple
games on the dusty streets of the village while the pregnant women
watched over them and chatted. I didn’t believe that your weapons
contained live bullets or dum-dum bullets, which are prohibited
under international law. I was able to protect the children and get
them away from your fire, and I don’t regret that.