18 - 24 April 2002
Issue No.582
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 18 - 24 April 2002 Issue No.582 |
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Apocalypse now
Sean Connor Riordan, a graduate student in the department of Arabic Studies at the American University in Cairo, was in Bethlehem when the Israeli army began its barbarous invasion of the holy city. He recounts his experience
On Good Friday I paused by an opening in the Church of the Nativity's flagstone-floored hall, where a few wooden slats had been put aside to reveal an aged mosaic of human figures gesturing in rapture and pain. Today's floor seems to have been constructed above such ancient mosaics, largely hiding the mosaic representation of Christian messianism -- the expectation that, among other things, the end of the world will be staged in an epic battle between good and evil. It is in these terms that I can most vividly imagine and remember the Israeli invasion of Bethlehem on the week after Easter.
Travelling with a friend from the American University in Cairo, on behalf of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), I arrived in the West Bank town of Bethlehem on the day before my exploration of the Church of the Nativity. The ISM is one of several non-violent movements that brings international civilians together, under Palestinian leadership, to protest and dramatise Israel's illegal occupation of Palestinian territory as well as engage in solidarity activities with the Palestinians.
Our scheduled actions had been planned with a period of relative peace in mind, but, with the Netanya suicide-bombing earlier that week, our Palestinian hosts were predicting an invasion. As the Good Friday invasion of Ramallah unfolded, similar military action seemed imminent in Bethlehem.
The Israel Defence Forces' (IDF) invasion started on Easter Sunday. By Monday, hundreds of Palestinian resistance fighters and civilians seeking shelter had fled into the Church of the Nativity. Some of the wounded probably bled on the floor, prostrate in poses shadowing those of the mosaic figures below. The church marking Christ's birthplace was soon placed under siege by one of the world's most technologically advanced armies. By the following day, its starving, bleeding fugitive occupants began to feel the sanctuary shake with the impact of sporadic shelling and gunfire. Few scenes could be more apocalyptic.
This dramatic portrayal of the situation at the Church of the Nativity is consistent with my memories of the beginning of the IDF invasion. Initially, I experienced the invasion through the windows and phone lines of Bethlehem's Independent Media Centre. Several volunteers from the ISM and myself had begun working and living in the media centre office just prior to the invasion in order to disseminate grassroots information about what was happening around us.
There were many ways in which the world seemed inverted over the course of those days. We received a David and Goliath telephone report about youth from the Deheisha refugee camp disabling an Israeli tank. Unseasonably harsh hail and thunder-storms swept through the surrounding valleys and towns, pounding the ground mercilessly. Sporadic but intense shelling and gunfire fell upon Palestinian land and homes, marking the presence of a seemingly unstoppable war machine bent on a final solution to the "Palestinian problem." All the while, the situation at the Church of the Nativity emerged as a grave humanitarian crisis and an almost apocalyptic media event.
Cosmic disorder was equally apparent when two of my colleagues and I broke the military curfew three days into the invasion, and ventured out to get food which was running low at the media centre. That afternoon the streets of Bethlehem could have functioned as the movie set for a post-nuclear holocaust film. The stormy skies had cleared briefly, turning a lightly opaque yellow. Cars sat upended and crumpled against ashen buildings, telephone booths were uprooted and flattened on the sidewalk and tank treads had eaten deep into the asphalt. Corporate television journalists stumbled around in small groups, encumbered by equipment, flak jackets, helmets. A baker's hand periodically emerged from behind a tinted door to hand bread to patrons brave enough to venture out during the curfew. Paranoid at potentially being a target, I walked through Bethlehem that afternoon holding a white T-shirt in my right hand, arm extended in the universal sign of surrender. Armoured personnel carriers (APCs) occasionally disturbed the empty silence as they rumbled by en route to the adjacent town of Beit Jala, ignoring our breach of the military curfew.
Though I had many intimate experiences with the physical violence of the occupation -- most notably, a tank letting off a round of automatic fire in my direction as I attempted to leave Bethlehem -- I was never physically injured. Several of my colleagues from the ISM were not so fortunate.
Before the full military invasion of Bethlehem, IDF tanks took up positions in the adjacent town of Beit Jala. While some internationals, myself included, stayed in the refugee camps around Bethlehem, living as "human shields" in the hope of deterring the IDF from shelling the camps, most of the internationals marched peacefully into Beit Jala to check on besieged local families. A group, composed of ISM and Italian activists, walked slowly, arm-in-arm towards an Israeli APC. With little warning, a soldier in the APC repeatedly fired into the ground and walls around the group. Seven people were injured from the ricocheting bullets and one young woman remains hospitalised for wounds sustained in the Israeli assault.
Back at Aida refugee camp, where I was staying as a "human shield," this news hit me just as the shock of a recent encounter with a small band of the camp's children was beginning to fade. Spotting me looking at posters of some of the Bethlehem area camp's recent "martyrs," a half-dozen boys congregated around me and began to narrate how each of those pictured died. A majority were young men and boys who were killed while defending the camp -- their home -- during the IDF's last invasion in mid-March. One poster, of a smiling young woman with her baby, drew lamentations from the children. They told me she had been hit by four sniper's bullets in the neck, while baking bread in her kitchen.
In concluding their short lesson, the children began to describe their hopes that someday they would become martyrs themselves. Leaving no room for misinterpretation on my part, they spontaneously and playfully performed their own future deaths. Some pretended to unload rounds from imaginary machine guns while others pretended to detonate imaginary explosives strapped to their bodies. Shaken by the gravity of their aspirations I realised that the most perverse effect of the Israeli occupation is the production of children who actively crave death.
A conversation I had later that day with Ibrahim, a local father, clarified why the children have such aspirations. As is the case with all Palestinians inhabiting refugee camps in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Ibrahim's family was uprooted from its home in 1948 and has not been allowed by Israel to return.
That Easter afternoon he began describing to me his own attempts at combating the martyr-syndrome of local youth through promoting creative outlets such as drama and painting -- the latter's popularity as an activity is attested to by the dozens of colorful, pastoral murals that Aida's children have painted on the camp's bullet-riddled walls. Then he frowned and began describing a recent experience with his own three- year-old daughter. Several weeks ago he discovered her sitting in a window one day, aiming her pointer-finger at the nearby IDF installation that guards the Israeli settlement of Gilo and pretending, in her words, to "kill the Israelis." The drive for martyrdom that pushes on children and the violent desires of Ibrahim's daughter are, as her father explained to me, relatively recent manifestations of Israel's own violent response to the Palestinian struggle for freedom. Recounting his daughter's account of two family friends being gunned down in the street by an Apache helicopter several weeks ago -- part of the IDF's unofficial but widely-implemented policy of shooting anything that moves in refugee camps -- he shrugged in exasperation: "What else would one expect after such a childhood?"
The shocking violence that my colleagues experienced on that same day in Beit Jala will always remain in my mind. However, the violent colonisation of childhood dreams that the IDF's brutal repression of the Palestinian struggle for liberation engenders strikes me as the most tragic and enduring lesson that I learned in Bethlehem.
My experience of the invasion will remain with me in surreal apocalyptic memories, linked to the Church of the Nativity's mosaic figures. However, the violence of the occupation in general, while also tied to these memories, is most critical in the aspirations of martyrdom expressed by the children of the 'Aida refugee camp. Salvaging the dreams of these children requires the immediate creation of a Palestinian state in which three-year-old girls like Ibrahim's daughter will no longer be witness to the IDF's mechanised terror. Only then can the Palestinian people's very real apocalypse be averted.
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