Letters from Palestine (42 page)

I took my mattress and went to the corridor
this time, the last place I could try. I lay down, and listened to
the radio reporting the latest. And I continued to hear blasts all
over.

Forty-five minutes after the third strike,
they came back, to finish the job against the ministerial compound.
With the fourth strike, more glass shattered, what was left of it.
I rushed to the window closest to the attacks, already shattered,
and again tried to see through dark smoke. But I couldn’t see
anything, but could hear ambulances below, more screaming.

The electricity was off, the landlines down.
No phone lines, no internet, no cell phone connection. I had no way
of speaking to anyone. It was very isolating, terrifying.

It seemed ridiculous to go back to bed after
all of this, to try to sleep. But there is really nowhere I felt
safe, so I went back to the mattress in the corridor. It started
raining, and I could see rain coming in the sea-view window, and my
bedroom window. I got up, tried to cover things . . . my laptop, my
stereo . . . I was just trying to save my things. And there was
glass all over the floor, I was stepping on it.

This morning, my nieces came over, and when
they saw my bedroom with the broken windows and thick shards of
glass where my head and body would have been, they were horrified
and started crying.

We still have glass everywhere. We tried to
clean . . . it’s everywhere. [Dr. Eid picks glass off the couch,
the floor, apologizing to me.]

I heard later that they used more than forty
shells, which when you add up all the strikes is entirely
possible.

After the attacks, the drones were all over,
flying low, buzzing like huge mosquitoes. The sound they make, it’s
loud, grating, and you know it means they’re considering what to do
next. They were up there the rest of the night, flying circles,
coming lower, going back up, the pitch of their whine raising,
going away, coming back . . . They want to make their presence
felt. They are really saying to us, ‘We can do whatever we want,
with impunity.’

There’s only so much one can bear, you know.
You can’t think clearly, you know, I don’t know what to do.

People are afraid they might strike the
Ministry of Justice and next to it the Ministry of Education, just
up the street, about 400-500 meters.

Update: 8:00 a.m., 31 December. The Council
of Ministers, hosting the Prime Minister’s Office, was targeted
Tuesday night at around 8:50 p.m., along with the Ministry of
Interior in Tel al Hawa (just five hundred meters from Dr. Eid’s
home), which was targeted for the third time. Both were completely
destroyed.

* * *

Eva Bartlett is a Canadian human rights
advocate and freelancer who spent eight months in 2007 living in
West Bank communities and four months in Cairo and at the Rafah
crossing. At the time she wrote this article, she was based in
Gaza, after the third successful voyage of the Free Gaza Movement
to break the siege on Gaza. She is a regular contributor to
PalestineChronicle.com.

_PHOTO

Mazin Qumsiyeh is a professor at Bethlehem
University and has previously served on the faculty of the
University of Tennessee, Duke, and Yale. His main interest is media
activism and public education. He has served on the board,
steering, and executive committees of a number of groups, including
the Peace Action Education Fund, the U.S. Campaign to End the
Occupation, the Palestinian-American Congress, Association for One
Democratic State in Israel/Palestine, and BoycottIsraeliGoods.org.
He is now president of the Palestinian Center for Rapprochement
Between People. He has advised many other groups, including the
Sommerville Divestment Project, the Olympia-Rafah Sister City
Project, the Palestine Freedom Project, Sabeel North America, and
the National Council of Churches of Christ, USA.

Mazin has published several books of which
the most acclaimed was
Sharing the Land of Canaan: Human Rights
and the Israeli/Palestinian Struggle
. He also has an activism
book published electronically on his website (http://qumsiyeh.org).
He has published over two hundred letters to the editor and one
hundred op-ed pieces and has been interviewed extensively on TV and
radio. Appearances in national media have included the
Washington Post
,
New York Times
,
Boston Globe
,
CNBC, C-Span, and ABC, among others. He also regularly lectures on
issues of human rights and international law.

Bethlehem, Occupied Palestine

December 29, 2008

It was not possible to sleep here for two
nights now. The events and the images of death and carnage of
children, of policemen, of people that look like my mother and my
son and my sister and my friends were simply too much. Gaza has run
out of stretchers and many are now carried to hospitals (which are
running out of supplies) and morgues on commercial street signs, in
blankets or simply by their limp limbs. Three mosques were
destroyed.

I recalled the Israeli attacks on the Church
of Nativity which was minor compared to this. I was watching Israel
shell the university in Gaza City, including its faculty of science
and a residence dorm for female students, and was thinking of my
university and my lab and office at Bethlehem University.

I was then shocked by more horrific scenes
and news. In one house five young sisters were killed. In another
six family members, including four children, killed while eating
breakfast. In a scene that haunted me, where four children were
killed along with their mother, I saw rescue workers try
frantically to pull the remaining surviving girl whose legs were
crushed under a huge boulder from the roof. As some of them were
calming her down and working hard, just next to them other workers
pulled the dead body of her sister (looked like a three- or
four-year-old). They quickly covered her, but I think her sister
noticed. Sometimes the dead are envied for their suffering has
ended. Her suffering is just beginning. I thought of all the
thousands of relatives of all the victims and how they feel . . . I
thought of friends I lost and talks with people in Gaza . . . I
thought of my mother who at seventy-six has seen so much suffering
and still she cried at the new images of new atrocities . . .

My heart aches and struggles with my
scientist brain. The latter wants to focus on facts and figures.
The attack in its second day was in the words of Israeli leaders
“the beginning” and is intended “to send Gaza back decades.” So far
over three hundred have been killed and over one thousand injured
(two hundred of those critically), 35 percent women, children and
elderly. I examine numbers of homes, police stations, civil society
buildings destroyed. I read the Al Mezan Center for human rights,
which rationally states that most Gaza victims are civilians. But
even my rational mind refuses to deal with these things. How could
it handle just that one image of the young girl’s anguished pained
look under the rubble of her house? And so tears stream down again
to try to wash away the image, to no avail . . . How could my mind
examine rationally the statements of “leaders” saying this carnage
is not the fault of the bombers and war criminals, but of
Hamas!

Protests have been organized around the
world and more are being planned. The demonstrations helped vent
some frustration and we hope will herald a reawakening of the heart
of humanity that has been sputtering. But we hope it will go much
farther in changing the rotten system of elites in power ignoring
people’s rights for political expediency and for profit.

In the Bethlehem demonstration, we pounded
on the permanently closed gate of the apartheid wall with deafening
sound, and the soldiers in the tower started to throw stun grenades
and tear gas. Injuries were sustained for activists . . . Our lungs
still ache but our hearts ache more for the criminality of the
apartheid regime, and the collaboration of the world’s governments.
The Israeli occupation army killed two protesters with live
ammunition in other parts of the West Bank.

Can someone ask the Western media or the
Western governments who keep spouting the nonsense about “Hamas”
and “rockets” (projectiles that are militarily of little use and
have no explosives, and killed only one person this year), why
targeting civilian police stations, mosques, homes with children,
ports, fishing vessels, streets, and more in one of the most
densely populated areas on earth, murdering hundreds of civilians,
would be an acceptable action (I don’t say response because Israel
was killing people and massacring them for sixty years before)? And
what would they expect a starving 1.5 million people to do?
Especially when one million of those are refugees or displaced
people denied their rights to return to their homes and lands for
sixty years while settlers live across the borders on their lands
in areas like “Sderot” and “Netviot?” Would they not expect some
resistance from some of those? Isn’t that codified in International
law for the right of occupied people to resist, including
violently? (Note that I personally support civil forms of
resistance.) Even if one buys the U.S./Israeli government
propaganda, would it be acceptable to bomb cities in Europe and the
U.S. for any perceived or actual crime of a portion of their
society or even their leaders (Bush and Blair in Iraq)?

But again I think it is best for me not to
try and reason things through in such times of calamity and little
sleep. Jesus made a statement directly relevant for us today: “You
are the earth’s salt. But if the salt should become tasteless, what
can make it salt again? It is completely useless and can only be
thrown out of doors and stamped under foot. You are the world’s
light—it is impossible to hide a town built on the top of a hill.
Men do not light a lamp and put it under a bucket. They put it on a
lamp-stand and it gives light for everybody in the house.”

It is thus the time when people who claim
they want peace and justice to stop talking about it and actually
work for it. Put your lamp higher. It is time for real change . . .
It is time for a world Intifada (uprising against injustice). It is
time to do something concrete.

* * *

Author’s Note: This was written and
distributed via email two days after the Israeli army attack on
Gaza began on December 27. In the three weeks of the attack, over
1400 Palestinians were killed, mostly civilians, including 420
children. Israel used white phosphorous and DIME weapons in
civilian areas. International human rights groups have called for
investigation and prosecution of Israeli war crimes. The siege of
the occupied territories continues.

_PHOTO

I’m Safa Joudeh, twenty-seven, from Gaza and
living here at the moment. I graduated from Birzeit University in
2003 with a BA in English literature. I went to the U.S. in 2004 on
a scholarship and studied public policy at George Mason University
in Virginia. I transferred to Stony Brook Long Island in order to
do an internship at a media organization located at the U.N.
headquarters in New York, but, unfortunately, I had to leave the
U.S. before graduating.

I’ve been in Gaza a little over a year now.
I work on and off as a freelance journalist. I’ve had articles
published on electronic intifada, Time Magazine and Aljazeera
English, and before the massacre in Gaza was trying to publish some
poetry I’ve been writing, mostly about the Palestinian experience,
as an insider of course.

* * *

Safa, she is one of those I can’t write about
without a stab of pain in my heart. Safa has not died, but she has
disappeared, at least from my life, and I can only pray that she is
well.

Safa at least will be able to tell you her
story, but here I will just tell you mine and how I can to know
her.

I first got in touch with her shortly before
Israel launched its savage attacks on Gaza, where Safa was then
living with her parents. She had been referred to me as an
excellent writer (Safa is a journalist, blogger, and poet) and a
likely candidate for our book. After hearing about the book, she
readily assented, and a warm correspondence quickly developed
between us. Then, in little more than a week, everything changed
because of the massacre taking place in Gaza. Safa no longer had
time to write me so often (of course, the lack of electricity often
prevented her from writing at all), though she still managed to
find the time to send me little notes, and, despite everything that
she was dealing with, wanted to talk more about what she was
planning to write for the book. I told her to forget about all that
for now, for heaven’s sake and her own.

But mostly what Safa was doing at this time
was writing firsthand blog dispatches about what she and her family
were experiencing and what she had been able to observe as the air
attacks continued, followed by the invasion of Israeli troops
during their twenty-two-day assault. (You will be reading some of
these reports shortly.) And, somehow, she also was able to find
time to write articles for some online journals that were full of
fire and steely resolve—strong, gutsy pieces of writing that
exemplified the spirit of resistance of the Gazan people as they
withstood the slaughter that they were being subjected to.

Once the Israelis halted their attacks and
withdrew their forces, something seemed to shift for Safa
internally. Of course, she was then preoccupied with urgent
concerns in trying to resume and rebuild her life, and very
preoccupied as well with some serious family problems, but her
notes to me, even if less frequent than before, were nevertheless
full of warmth and expressions of personal appreciation of me for
what she felt had been my steadfast concern for her and her family
as well as my articles and other work dealing with Gaza. And she
even went back to trying to provide me with the material I needed
from her for the book—her bio and a photograph.