It's three days after the last clashes. Up at the university, rumor has it that the students are planning something. I'm working at home today. When the students finally agree on something, word will come to me from the Public Relations Office.
Actually the news when it does come is that the students have disagreed again. Shabiba are going to the Atara Bridge just outside Birzeit village and the left-wing faction are going to Ma'alufiyya again.
I decide to go to Atara, and arrive with Michael O'Neill to find a geographically spread out but still relatively tense situation with fifty students and about the same number of Israeli and Palestinian forces.
We watch a shab with a sling shot running towards the Israelis, stone whirling through the air, yelling a war cry over his shoulder to his still stationary friends, "Yella, ya Shabab!"
Two bonehead American journalists standing next to us simultaneously turn to their translator and, in a very serious tone, ask, "What did he say?" as if it wasn't already fucking obvious. Their translator shakes his head, saying "It was nothing", shaking deep within as he tries - very hard - not to burst out with laughter at them. Michael loudly, slowly, and unnecessarily translates "Come on, guys!" for the two, savouring every moment of the opportunity. I'm surprised how rude he can be when he needs to. Michael's usually such a nice boy.
"Careful," says Yasser to me, with his camera in hand, "they're shooting at journalists." Photographer Jamal Al-Aroury (pictured right - click for enlargement © Yasser Darweesh) was injured in his hand by those benign-sounding 'rubber' bullets, bleeding a fair amount.
The Israelis have caught two students (below, © Yasser Darweesh), have injured one of them enough to necessitate having him taken him away by a waiting Palestinian ambulance , and have the other imprisoned in their jeep. Now they have something to negotiate with so they can go home.
The Palestinian police go up to talk with the Israelis, who agree to release him if the students withdraw from the area. The whole process from here on in gets a little silly. The students move back a bit. The Israeli soldiers shake their heads and say further. The Palestinian police make some more arm movements. The students inch back a bit further. The Israeli soldiers shake their heads again. The Palestinian police make even more arm movements. And so on.
The students move back a little more. The Israeli soldiers shake their heads. The students won't budge. They feel they've moved enough. Some plain clothes guy from the Authority with a walkie-talkie says, "Shabab. Go back so they will release him. Then you can come back again." Amusing but stupid advice.
Yasser and I start saying to the students, "C'mon, enough, go back so they will release him." It's a no-go situation here anyway, nothing will happen as the Israeli position is way too good.
The students have to go. And they do. First back enough for the Israelis to release the guy, who comes out with his hands tied with plastic wire cord. Then, with shouts, the students leave, promising to go to Ma'alufiyya.
On the way into Ma’alufiyya, we encounter a Palestinian police cordon. They refuse us entry to the area, mamnoah ("forbidden") despite us having press cards and no existing law to forbid us entry. Yasser and I give them a hard time.
Jeysh Lahad ("Lahad's Army"), someone comments, a reference to Antoine Lahad's South Lebanese Army, Israel's surrogate collaborationist force of Lebanese in South Lebanon. While we are busy ranting to each other out loud, "I'm mamnoah, you're mamnoah, everything and everyone's mamnoah in this country," one policeman comes and tells us there is a way to the same place on the mountain.
We go up the side road and ask the first group of policeman we see where the mountain road is. "This way. Please. You are welcome."
We move along the same route I took on Wednesday, except this side of the mountain is filled with maybe a thousand people, sitting and watching their friends through stones below (pictured right). It's another sunny day.
The atmosphere is reminiscient of a sports event, each development accompanied with the same kind of cheering, as well as warning shouts when those in the grandstand seats above can see a soldier sneaking up on someone from an angle he can't see.
We head down the mountain to the "journalists' camp" (pictured left), a sorry sight if ever there was one. The whole position of the group is like the front box at a sports event. Out of the line of fire, everyone getting the same picture.
The two bonehead American journalists (click image of on right for enlargement) are still asking their translator what the demonstrators are saying, this time to the soldiers. This time it's in Hebrew and - in case the accompanying gestures were not clear enough - consists of mostly unrepeatable assertions regarding the alleged human and/or non-human parentage of the soldiers.
I would have loved to be doing that translation for them, which would have worked well as a literal translation, delivered in sonnet form:
O soldier, your father is a donkey!
O soldier, your mother is a woman of ill-repute!
O soldier, O pimp, may the vagina that bore you be cursed!
O soldier, truly, you are the son of a whore!"
O soldier, you were bourne by dogs!
O soldier, put what is in your hand in your ass!
O soldier, O pimp, may the vagina that bore you be cursed!
O soldier, truly, you are the son of a whore!"
Tactical use of the geographical features is different today. The Israelis are not on the road. They are up the other side of the mountain, holed up in a house (pictured right, click for 75K enlargement).
The demonstrators, once again a mixture of Birzeit students and others, are holed up or sheltering behind another house at the same level on the same mountain. More stone throwing, teargas and 'rubber' bullets.
One strangely fat Israeli soldier (pictured left) who has been positioned above the journalists' camp for some while, loads a teargas grenade to fire at the nearby students who are throwing stones. The journalists, only a fifth of whom have gas masks, moan and brace for the burning.
The soldier pulls the trigger. The short barrel spits out a projectile that goes ten feet and dies, no gas.
The entire camp of journalists start laughing out loud. It's not every day you get a genuine laugh out of these situations. Everyone is overdoing the laughter a bit, just to make sure he hears it.
The soldier, 20 meters above us, looks embarrassed. He reloads. We sigh again. He fires. The same thing happens. We who have been rescued from the torment for at least a few minutes, ungratefully laugh some more. I swear the soldier is beetroot red.
Back towards Ramallah, the road is strewn with wreckage from the clashes three days before (pictured right). Some of the debris is spent ammunition - whether stones, empty teargas cartridges, or rubber/plastic-coated metal bullets.
Some of the debris is what remains from the barricades - old bedframes and other metal debris to stop jeeps coming up the road, the burnt out shells of long-abandoned roadside cars dragged into the street for shelter and of course, the scorches and blackened steel rings from burnt tires.
A big "The Clashes Were Here" sign, if you like.
Back towards town, a much larger crowd is visible. The ten or twenty stone throwers which are near us are beginning to retreat towards them. There is a danger that if they don't they will be cut off by soldiers who come down the mountain in between them and the larger group nearer Ramallah. Much of what is going on right now is happening up on the hilltop above.