We oscillate here between outrage and willed calm, “maneuvering between numbness and hypersensitivity,” as a friend put it. You can’t get let every death, every demolition permeate you, you cannot let the anger over each obscenity carry you off like a riptide. In that, we have very good examples: almost everyone around us, including the Samouni children who sing, offer tea and coffee, eagerly soak up Adie’s English classes.
But that will to calmness becomes alienating when you try to quietly absorb the graffiti scrawled on the wall of the home of the Samouni family saying, “1 down, 999,999 to go,” or the tombstone drawn on the wall with the inscription: “Arabs, 1948-2009,” without cursing or letting any emotion seep out, at least in front of the families (There was more: one note saying “die you all,” and several bits in Hebrew.
I also tried not to mouth the Hebrew letters and the words that the Israeli soldiers wrote; for some reason at that moment ‘proving’ to them that there are Jews who don’t hate them seemed tawdry). Israel has not committed genocide, but you see its seeds germinating in the minds of the Givati brigadiers who wrote those words on the walls of the Samouni home two years ago. The gunner who rubbed out a hospital the pilot
Who burned a refugee camp… the paratrooper
Who shot the third-time refugee the poet. Who lauded the nation on its finest hour and the nation. Who scented blood and blessed the MiG.
You see that they had a message for people other than the Arab-speaking Palestinians who would move back into that home after the war too; a message for the English-speaking journalists and investigators who would dutifully record those words after the Israeli army retreated back behind the perimeter of the ghetto. “We wish to remove these people from our world.” That was the message they left, the normal reaction if your mindset views Gaza as an “abscess, a troublesome pus,” as Matan Vilnai called it a few years ago. You lance it.
Maybe part of the reason we freeze a little, benumb ourselves, is because we cannot wrap our empathy around the emotive and human void that those sketchings symbolize, or at their human residue: Ahmed Samouni’s first-born baby sharing his birth-date with the death of Ahmed’s parents, the shrapnel slowly working its way out through his skin, the scars on his little siblings’ faces, his brother’s mangled breathing passages.
I don’t know why the Samouni family left those messages up on the raw concrete walls of their home. I’m not even sure they live in that section of the house anymore. An American psychologist was telling me yesterday that one of the points of murals and art-therapy is to share a trauma: to symbolically create witnesses where they had been none before, so that the raw pain and hurt of murder and destruction is softened or slightly dissipated through broader exposure.
Maybe they keep the writing up so they don’t have to keep it as private knowledge that there were young men in their home despoiling it, who orphaned them, who hate them in such an unalloyed terrifying way. They keep it up so that they can tell people about it. I don’t generally ask them or anyone to talk too much about the war, but the psychologist I was with wanted to hear the stories of the Samounis for her video documentary project. We spoke to Ahmed for maybe 40 minutes.
So another thing I learned was that many of the older men in the Samouni family spoke excellent Hebrew—Ahmed’s father had worked for 30 years in Israel. They had tried to use the Hebrew that in the past they had used to speak with their employers, co-workers, taxi-drivers, the Israelis whose economy they had shared for so long. During the massacre one of the men had gone outside, shown his hawiya, the Palestinian identity card, proved to the Israeli army that they were not terrorists, spoke in Hebrew to them, explained the number of women and children sheltering in the homes with them, and then was shot down by the IDF.
The person I was with asked Ahmed if he had a message for the outside world—she was aware that he had probably been asked that question before. Ahmed asked us, “Why do they do this to us? We are civilians, we had women and children with us—why do they destroy everything?” We glibly answer “Zionism” but a frequent reaction here to the Israeli destruction of their lives is befuddlement—I guess because they don’t see how the people abusing them have abjured their humanity for the tribal morality of the pogrom.
They merely describe it: “they want to destroy everything about us,” as the owner of the Rafah zoo described its destruction during the 2nd Intifada. I don’t see him as less confused than Ahmed Samouni, just sharp enough to see the clear outlines of what was being done to him and to all of them.
