NOVANEWS
By David ShulmanFebruary 11, 2011 Sheikh JarrahIt took the Planning Committee of the Jerusalem City Council less thanfifteen minutes to approve plans for the next wave of evictions in SheikhJarrah. We knew it was coming. Six large Palestinian families—some fiftysouls– are to be expelled from their homes, the houses will be demolished,and thirteen apartment units will then be built for Israeli settlers. We knowthe families, we know the neighborhood, and we know the meaning andintention of this move, a further step in the ethnic cleansing the governmentis intent on carrying through in Sheikh Jarrah. They probably feel that thismoment, with all eyes focused on Egypt, is a good time to act. Some 90,000housing units for Jews have been built in Jerusalem on private Palestinian land,taken over for this purpose. More are coming.A small group of activists stood in protest outside the City Council office duringthe meeting on Monday. The police arrested four of them and, as is their wont,asked the court to prohibit them from participating in demonstrations for 180 days.In the eyes of the Jerusalem police, non-violent civil protest is a disease to beextirpated. The judge threw out the request and scolded the police for the illegalarrests.Here is a small vignette that tells you all you really need to know about the state ofcivil liberties in Israel today. We are slipping rapidly into a form of “light” Fascism,entirely palatable to the bulk of the Jewish population; democratic institutions suchas the courts are still functioning and sometimes act to protect basic rights, but theyhave little or no power in the face of the anti-democratic laws the Knesset is enacting orof the administrative decisions, of a racist and fanatically nationalist character, thatgovernment bodies, such as the Jerusalem municipality, routinely put into effect.“Light” Fascism has a way of turning into its heavier counterpart. We are losing groundday by day.So here we are at the 65th Friday demonstration in Sheikh Jarrah, and Mahmud Sau,whose home is slated for demolition, is addressing the two or three hundred Israeliprotesters who have come today, braving the cold rain. “We have been here for oversixty years,” he says. “We are refugees from 1948, and now they will make us refugees asecond time. When we moved here, my mother used to bring water, in pots she carriedon her head, from a well near where the gas station is today [on Nablus Road]. We builtthese homes. All we want is to live in peace with everyone. When they destroy my house,they will at the same time cut off access from the street to our neighbors’ homes; how arethey supposed to live there? Where will we go?” He thanks us for coming to stand with him.A Palestinian grandmother or great-grandmother, small and bent, ten thousand wrinkleson her face, stands at the gate of her home, scrutinizing the crowd. She must be wonderingif we’re capable of doing anything substantial to help. So am I.At least we’ve managed to keep up the weekly protests for over a year. In a way, it’s nosmall achievement. But the demonstrations have lately become a little tepid to my taste.We stand, the drummers beat, we shout our slogans, we embrace our friends, we go home.It’s a far cry from the dramatic days of massive arrests in December 2009. Last week, indriving rain, we gathered under a newly painted sign someone had thoughtfully put upon a pole at our usual site: “Tahrir Square.” Wishful thinking. But today a little morelively action has been planned. After we circle through Um al-Harun, where the newdemolitions are to take place, we push through, past the first barricades, to Umar ibnAffan Street and its stolen house. A makeshift booth of poles and cloth, in the colors ofthe Palestinian flag, is rapidly set up on the pavement. (When we tried this last fall, at thetime of the Festival of Booths, Succot, the police immediately tore our Palestinian-Israelipeace booth to shreds.) We’re chanting, as always, and suddenly the booth is raised on highand we’re marching behind it to the rows of metal barricades where the street divides; behindthem, blocking access to the Ghawi and al-Kurd houses, which the settlers have taken, standthe blue police and the military police in khaki green. They look to me a little nervous; we’veput them off balance, and no doubt they can sense the energy coursing through the crowd ofdemonstrators. The cries intensify: “One Two Three Four, Occupation No More. Five SixSeven Eight, Stop the Settlers, Stop the Hate. From Sheikh Jarrah to Bil’in, Freedom FreedomPalestine.” And so on, in Hebrew and Arabic and English. The drums are beating, and thebooth is actually crossing over the barrier, carrying some of the demonstrators through withit, when the police manage to grab hold of it from below and smash it.They move to reinforce the barricades and the line of soldiers manning them, butmeanwhile, in the mêlée, several activists have squeezed through to the lower street and thelost homes—a small victory. Restless, unsatisfied, I want to be there with them. Ezra suddenlyappears—he has this unsettling habit—and, as if divining my wish, says, “Follow me.” We setoff—Ezra, Eitan, and I—to find a crack in the police defenses. “Why are the Jews so given toworrying?” Ezra asks, both confident and a little scornful. “Not all of them,” I say, “onlyAshkenazim like me.” We pass two women soldiers, who make no move to stop us, then asmall group of border police. Before they can react, we duck down a flight of steps and leapover a rough rock-and-stucco wall into a small grove of fruit trees and then rapidly weave ourway over the muddy ground to Umar ibn Affan. I keep thinking the soldiers must be rightbehind us and will arrest us in another moment—not that I would mind—but they’re eithertoo lazy or too stunned to do this, though a small detachment of soldiers from the barricadesis now rushing toward us down the street.We stand before the Ghawi home, draped with soaked Israeli flags and other paraphernalia ofthe settlers, some of whom are staring down at us from the roof. The commanding office ofthe police is here, conferring—as is the norm—with the settler invaders, who are, I am sure,giving him his orders, urging him to attack the small body of protesters in the street. I figurethis may happen soon. Meanwhile, we’re making quite a lot of noise. Of course there’s theperhaps childish but still delicious feeling of defiance, a slight whiff of human freedom, torelish for these few moments. As if to strengthen it, Silan, one of the Sheikh Jarrah veterans,arrives to join us, sailing, insouciant, through the barrier at the lower end of the street on abicycle. How she found it, and found the way, I’ll never know. I don’t think I’ll forget it.Maybe it’s not so childish after all, this brief taste of freedom. Later in the evening, trying torecollect the sequence in some order, to make some sense, I say to myself: It’s not yet TahrirSquare, but it may yet come to that. East Jerusalem is one place it could happen. Thehundreds of thousands of Palestinians who live there may tire of the endless cruelty andinjustice. And if not there, then somewhere else in the territories. It won’t take much toignite the spark. Afterwards people will wonder how they suffered passively for so manyyears, and they may remember, as we will, these fleeting moments of saying no, at least that,of speaking the truth, of defying the lie and the enforcers of the lie. That’s the thing aboutfreedom: it’s intrinsically indivisible; the tiniest taste of it already contains the wholeintoxicating fullness, and once you’ve known it you can never really go back to the apathyand the doubt and the collusion with evil that comprise our daily routine, though thetemptation to do so is, I suppose, always there. I’m thinking about that very subtle, almostunnoticeable, but critical inner movement from passive to active, from confusion to dignity,from child to woman or man. It’s shocking how much and yet how little effort is needed—fornearly all of us– to cross that line. Many, perhaps most people may never even approach it, totheir infinite loss. Entropy and passivity may be the deepest human desires– to lie still and letthe world wash over us or, even better, to keep it from touching us at all. These are not,however, our deepest needs.So now the cries have assumed a new, richer tone, and even the sun has come out after therain and the colors of sky and trees and clouds and eyes have deepened immensely, and inplace of the longer chunks of text we’re now into a resonant staccato: “Apartheid? Fight Back!Apartheid? Fight Back!” Over and over and on and on, fists raised, the drums behind us, intothe stolen courtyard of the al-Kurd family—”Settlers, we’re coming to chase you out!”—thenslowly up the street to the massed police and the barriers and the main group ofdemonstrators on the other side. I see among the latter, pressed up close to the metal bars,my son Edan, and we smile. Another sunburst.They’ve had their own adventures—a few arrests; a settler vehicle that drove into the crowdand knocked over a seventy-seven-year-old demonstrator. We’ve produced, it seems, a minorquandary for the police; if they open the barriers to let us through, the whole crowd will burstinto the lower street and reach the forbidden houses, and they certainly don’t want that tohappen. What to do? Even this matters a little: you have to push them and prod them, tooutflank them, to seize the initiative, even if only for the moment, to make the statement forits own sake and for the sake of our children, never giving up, fighting back, over and over,however quixotically, until someday Quixote wins, as win he must. But you have to do itwithout wondering if Quixote will someday win. That is the one great condition of his victory.You have to cross, and cross again, that line. |