From the diary of Palestinian journalist, Mouna Hamzeh-Muhaisen, in Dheisheh refugee camp, near Bethlehem, 2000.
Wednesday, October 4
The numbness that I feel for the past six days continues. When I arise at 4 o’clock in the morning – I haven’t been sleeping much these past days – I try not to rush to the computer or to the radio and just go to the roof to take my coffee. I feel I am going crazy.
However, without even thinking about it, I make the coffee, switch on the local radio Bethlehem 2000, and begin to read the 352 E-mails which have arrived. I feel so numb.
Nobody in Dheisheh is able to go to work except those who have a job in Bethlehem itself. Life has stopped. Each Palestinian living in zone A is cut off – by tanks! – from the other regions. We can’t go from Bethlehem to Hebron (in the south), nor to Jerusalem (in the north). All that we can do these days is to follow the news attentively. Our eyes are glued to the television sets all day. Nothing more.
I go out to watch the television at my neighbor’s house. Nobody here wants the confrontations to stop. Everybody wants the confrontations to continue, and to hell with it. There is so much despair and the people are subjected to such pressures that they think the moment has come: either them or us. And if they bombard us and reduce us to rubble, let come what may. “Only one bomb and that will be the end of Dheisheh,” says Muyasar, my 34-year-old neighbor, mother of six. “But we will die instantaneously,” I reply. “Better to die than to continue to live like this,” she replies.
Every woman to whom I speak says the same thing. The climate is so different this time. The people are fed up. Fed up with Israeli aggression, fed up with the corruption of the Palestinian Authority, fed up with the peace accords which have transformed this place into an apartheid state, into a Bantustan, into a West Bank divided into 200 isolated tiny islands. Fed up with the silence of the world which pays us no attention, only because we are Arabs.
During this time, in Israel life continues normally. The Israelis get up each morning and go to work, while their children go to school. They attend theaters and go to work, while their children go to school. They are not affected by what goes on here. It is as if their husbands, their fathers, their children who kill us, wound us, cripple us, are some sort of mercenaries coming from far away.
Wednesday, October 5
The electricity has been cut off in the Bethlehem region between 7 and 11 in the evening. We quickly understood why: the Israeli army bombarded one of the generators, which was set on fire. The Palestinians asked for guarantees for the firefighters who arrived to put out the fire. The Israeli side refused, naturally.
The blackout marked the low point of all of our depression since we learned that Arafat would meet Barak in Paris. Many of us bet that he wouldn’t go. Nobody wanted to him to go.
And now , this morning brings us a huge cloud of sadness. The revolutionary songs, the howling sirens outside, and the news of the confrontations of yesterday and during the night – 7 more deaths – does not anger us. On the contrary, it is the sounds and the news which push us forward, which makes our blood boil, prompting in us that anger which is indispensable for us to survive another day.
Cry, Oh my eyes, cry. The tears will wash away my suffering. How many do we have to confront Oum Hamzeh today? Oh, Oum Hamzeh, your son has rejoined the long procession of martyrs. And we are all supposed to say: it’s good, he’s a martyr, he’s going directly to heaven. Be strong for your blind husband, be strong for your other son, rejoice that your son is the first martyr of Dhisheh for the Al-Aqsa Intifada.
Oh, the suffering in the heart of a mother. Oh, the horrible suffering. The Israeli bullets have charred his chest in his arms. Again and again and again. We can see his back. Four snipers’ bullets have riddled his body as he was standing on the street with his friend, Akram.
I am so afraid for you, Akram, if you would also die. I beg you, don’t die. Who will tell your mother? Who will console her and ease her suffering? A son killed and hospitalized in Jerusalem, where she can’t even go. A daughter in Gaza, you might as well be on the moon. That’s the peace process that they want to shove down our throats. That’s Oslo, the peace accord, the process of negotiations. Peace, my eye, and I’d like to use a more explicit word. It is a war process, an accord with live ammunition, and Oslo to eradicate the Palestinians, a treaty for the Apaches.
Saturday, October 7
As we were sitting, speaking about the events of the past week, the television interrupted its programs to announce that the Hezbollah fighters had just captured 3 Israeli soldiers. We all exploded with joy. The events have suddenly taken another turn. Are we headed toward a regional war? Everything will depend on the response of Syria and Lebanon if they are bombed by Israel. Nobody here believes that Arab states will respond to an Israeli aggression. Anger against the Arab countries is immense, as it is against the United States and the United Nations.
I have a terrible headache. I tried to go back to sleep but I am awakened by the noise of a terrible few salon. I sit up in bed and I listen. It seems very close, at the tunnel of Beit-Jala, near the village of Al-Khader, a few yards from Dheisheh. The firing goes on for 40 minutes. I can hear the booing and the applause coming from the camp. I smile in the dark. I was a child in Amman during the war of June 1967 and during black September, the massacre of Palestinians by Jordanian security forces. I lived in Palestine practically the entire time of the Intifada. But for the first time in my life the sound of bullets didn’t frighten me. And for the first time I understood why the Palestinians who have lived under the occupation their entire lives have continued to battle the Israelis, standing up to their guns with stones.
Sunday, October 8
If Barak really wants to know if the Intifada will continue or if it can be crushed, he ought to speak to the Palestinian women here rather than threaten artifact. Has Barak asked himself why this time women are absent from the lines of confrontation? With few exceptions – notably, during the funerals of martyrs – they stay home. One could not say because there is an exchange of fire and they are not sure if it is safe to leave their homes.
But the women are the unknown soldiers, those who hold the Fort, with which each household represents. It is they who calm their children, their eyes riveted to the television. I don’t know a single woman in Dheisheh who does not closely follow the smallest development of the situation. Even my mother-in-law, who is 77 years old, sits in the room, her ears stuck to the radio. And everybody tells how they are unable to carry out their daily tasks, that they have lost weight these last ten days, that they have suffered from headaches, that they can’t sleep well at night, that they fear for their husbands and children.
What do they have to say to Mr. Barack? That the NT fata must continue, that the people’s deaths must not be in vain, that the news of a ceasefire depresses us. We can’t have an Intifada from time to time and then fall into a deep sleep only to wake up several years later and start all over again. This time the fight must be pursued to the end, to victory.
Monday, October 9
I remember the first time I settled here, coming from the United states, at the beginning of the first Intifada. I was so unused to seeing the Israeli soldiers break into the house that I leaked to the phone to dial 911. But there is no one here to protect us. There is no law to protect us from Israeli brutality.
And now it is the settlers who have taken over from the Israeli soldiers, who fire upon and terrorize the Palestinian civilians. The Palestinian security forces can do nothing. That is the Oslo peace process! The events of the last two days indicate how well Israel has calculated in dividing the West Bank into the zones a comma B&C. I can’t go to Hebron without passing the settlements, I can’t go to hell without passing the settlements. Each Palestinian town and village surrounded by settlements. Who would dare to take his car under such circumstances?
Tuesday, October 10
36 people have been wounded in Palestinian territory. Nevertheless, all that is necessary to stop the confrontations is for Israel to completely withdraw its troops from the territories and to realize that without the creation of an authentic Palestinian state in all the occupied territories in 1967, the freedom struggle will never end. Show me where in history of people have stopped dreaming and fighting for its independence and freedom.
The peace of the brave, Mr. Prime Minister, is a piece that puts an end to the bloodbath, not that which requires still more bloodshed. The peace of the brave presupposes the recognition of the legitimate rights of a people, rather than their suppression.
If the Israeli state and the Palestinian state were to live side by side, Mr. Prime Minister, then everything in the world would change for the better period if you recognize that apartheid cannot last, then everything would change for the better.
Tuesday, October 17
While I was sitting down, 20,000 people at Bethlehem participated in new funerals. The martyr is Muaya Osama Jawarish, of the Aida refugee camp. An Israeli soldier killed him with a bullet to the head, while he was returning from school, his satchel on his back. Before the prosecution had buried his body in the earth, all the television stations transmitted from Sharm El-Sheikh the final communique of the summit.
Clinton tells us, indirectly of course, that the decision had been taken to end our Intifada. Instead of telling us that Israel was going to stop massacring the Palestinian people, he explained to us that “the two sides would act immediately to calm the situation.” he spoke of a ceasefire. But a ceasefire is signed between two armies, no? Where is our army?
Another day passes and no one wants the Intifada to stop. The liberation struggle has gone on for decades. And during these years young girls have become mothers, the mothers have become grandmothers. They have buried their husbands, their fathers and their sons, and still we aren’t free. We live as ever under occupation and we still don’t have an independent state.
Welcome to another day in Palestine, a new day of occupation. And one must try to find one’s place in the sun. It is, nevertheless, there, if one looks hard. One can see the green pastures and the blue of the sea, and the rainbow on the horizon. Raise your chin a little and you’ll be able to find that place.
