Why not listen to sounds from the day while you read? On this clip you will find (i) Buses stopped at the Palestinian Police checkpoint: General milling around sounds. (ii) Chanting: Bil rohh, bil dam, nefdeeka ya shahid! ("By spirit, by blood, we will sacrifice O martyr!"), (iii) Palestinian policeman radioing news of the demonstration back to base, with chants in the background. (iv) At the demo: After the live ammunition from the settler, Israeli jeeps arrive, get pelted with stones and bottles, and return fire with 'rubber' bullets and tear gas (still jumpy, my shocked expletives have been beeped out) and cameramen shouting at each other. (v) Palestinian police telling the students to irja'a! ("go back!"). (vi) Students, ignoring the police, continue to stone the Israelis, while shouting mish zelami! ("Not a man") and making various jungle noises every time the soldiers shoot. Hissing of tear gas cannisters can be heard at the beginning. (vii) Gas mask breathing sounds, students swearing in Hebrew. (viii) Final attempt by Palestinian police breaks up the demonstration. You'll need the free Real Audio player and you can shift-click in Netscape to download the 376K file from here to play from your hard disk if you experience any network congestion. Click on the note to begin.
Round the corner, the Israelis have wasted no time in getting straight to the job. Rubber-coated steel cylinders, plastic-coated steel marbles and teargas. I notice something that was a first for me, officers repeatedly telling their soldiers not to fire more than was necessary to keep the demonstrators at bay. Clearly, strong orders have come down from somewhere in the IDF to not inflame things after yesterday's disgraceful shooting at the workers' van. When Palestinians start clashes to protest land being confiscated or a new settlement being constructed, most Israelis don't seem to mind if a few of them get popped. After all, "they started it" and it was "self-defence". In the international 'courts of fault', the media-normalised association of the words 'violent' and 'Arab' serve as a subconscious prosecuting attorney.
No one ever questions this. The argument of 'self-defence' is naturally very powerful within Israeli society despite 99 percent of shooting deaths having absolutely nothing to do with self-defence and everything to do with socialised, racist hatred of the Palestinian Arab, in a West Bank void of legal restraint if you're Jewish that is.
Special thanks for this must be offered to the Western media. One of its diseased representatives working here once lamented to our former Human Rights Action Project coordinator that, "there is nothing to report these days," meaning that issues such as Israeli land confiscation for settlements, torture, imprisonment without trial, town-suffocating closures, and the quiet expulsion of Jerusalem's Palestinians just weren't as reportable as soldiers and young Palestinians going at it in the streets. What doesn't get your attention is usually dropped from prime time. Learn the lesson, PR disciples: if you're going to die, make sure it looks good for cable TV. If you're going to kill someone, make sure it's a banal death destined for page 7.
When something like yesterday's events happens, the brutal face of the military occupation starts to get revealed against the high-contrast backdrop of boring, everyday Palestinian life - a van of workers coming home, joking about their day, ribbing each other, and passing round some zatar bread. The obscuring of what is a fact of life if you're Palestinian is a service for which the Israelis pay their PR consultants millions of dollars.
When I lived in London, tube train adverts of scantily-clad Israeli babes stretched out on Eilat beach always seemed more comfortable to gaze on than the reality grenades that Amnesty and Greenpeace used to hang there. Did you even notice the extent of reality-twisting in the second last Israeli Ministry of Tourism advertising campaign? One photo of the Muslim Dome of the Rock against the skyline of Palestinian East Jerusalem bore the campaign slogan "It can only be Israel."
One Palestinian from the Diaspora who studied at Birzeit University last semester rang up the telephone hotline listed in the most recent campaign just before she came out here.
"Hi," she said. "Your slogan is 'Israel. No one belongs here more than you.', isn't that right?"
"That's correct," came the reply, "How can I help you?"
"Well, I'm a Palestinian refugee who now lives in Britain," she explained. "I want to visit the country. Does your slogan apply to me?"
"Um. Actually, no," came the reply.
I am not making this up.
In the end your average CNN watcher isn't going to mourn the passing of a few more forners. After all they were only "rag heads", "towel heads", "camel jockeys", "porch monkeys", "sand niggers" or "terrorists". The pronunciation of "Arab" by some American news readers - "Ay-rab" - is something else to add to the list of crimes committed by Americans against the English language. Something that is absent from its Southern drawl incarnation, the word 'Arab when pronounced in Arabic evokes power and a clear sense of identity.
Remember that it was only news of American nuns getting raped and murdered and an American journalist getting shot that began the brief and mediocre American outcry about Uncle Sam's forays into Central America in the first place. Most people don't care and Israel knows this very well. The measure of public apathy is a significant consideration in governmental calculations of what they can get away with. Evil is as much about what we don't do as it is about what we do. A scary thought in the light of eternity. As Bruce Cockburn sang in Broken Wheel:
"The word mercy is going to have a new meaning
When we are judged by the children of our slaves."
Oops, drifted away as usual. Don't want to do that here. In suburban Ramallah where my present reality should be focused, the locals have barred their windows and locked up their daughters. A teargas cannister fired by the Israelis ends up in someone's garden. It gets thrown back by the students and ends up in someone else's garden. There are journalists crawling out of every shrub.
The protesters aren't masked bar one or two. This means they will end up on Israeli TV tonight. Having your mug shot beamed into the living room of every security man in the country seems a little unnecessarily risky. Maybe I'm missing the point. There are worse things in the Palestinian mind than being put in prison or becoming the latest casualty of an Israeli death squad.
This is a country where dying for 'the cause' is a central part of the people's national consciousness. How strange to someone from a country where my government spends its time trying to convince my people that the bad cause it is killing for is actually a good cause if we'd only look at it like they do, through colour TV lenses with the red of blood filtered out. Iraq's children and sanctions inexplicably spring to mind.
It still seems kind of stupid to me to invite it. If I was a Palestinian demonstrator I think I would wear a kiffiyyeh (the checkered Palestinian scarf), to avoid identification. It's a funny thought. In my culture these sort of choices are alien as, most of the time, the police are not your enemy.
In this society throwing stones at the 'border police' or regular soldiers of the occupation is considered the very least you can do. There was a time in pre-Israel Jewish society where bomb attacks on the British Mandate authorities was considered commendable nationalism by Jews. Why should it be any different for the Palestinians?
Even prominent Israelis admit this. It was Leah Rabin, Yitzhak Rabin's widow, that said, "We [the Jews] used terrorism to establish our state. Why should we expect the Palestinians to be any different?" Recently, Ehud Barak, leader of the Israeli Labour Party, said that, "if I imagine that if I were a Palestinian of the right age, I would, at some stage, have joined one of the terror organizations..."
Although it's the first time I've stood near the Israeli soldiers at a demonstration, it's getting tedious. No rocks are coming anywhere near them. On the demonstrators' side, Palestinians are being removed from the scene one by one in ambulances as the teargas and rubber-coated metal bullets take their intermittent toll.
On top of this, journalists keep walking into the frame of my video camera every few seconds. To give you an idea of how screwed up this is, the soldiers are only a meter away from my lens and haven't changed their position for 20 minutes. It's a feeding frenzy.
One well-dressed female photographer, American I think, keeps exclaiming impatiently at other journalists getting in her way. I did it to her earlier - inadvertently - but she was 30 feet away from them so what did she expect, everyone to hold back while she prances around in her hairstyle and gets the shots she wants? Of course when she gets the chance she does exactly the same.
I'm probably only resentful of her because she has a nice camera and I don't. I dream one day of owning a Nikon F5 with a wide angle and a powerful zoom lens. It has an on board computer like the space shuttle that can work out the skin tone of your subject and automatically adjust aperture and speed for a correct exposure, that enables it to keep in focus even if the subject is running towards you, and can take these photos at a rate of something like 8 frames a second.
In other words, perfect for situations like this where everything can happen so quickly that you can miss it completely. Unfortunately, it costs something like US$2,300 for the camera body alone, without any lenses, so I'm not holding my breath. But I'm allowed to dream.
Actually I think I really don't like this woman because I know that she's a narcissistic yuppie vulture making her money out of superficial contact with other people's misery. I bet you a Nikon F5 that if I went to the American Colony Hotel bar tonight, she'll be yakking away about how she's "seen better clashes."