The "March of a Million" was actually scheduled to take place in separate places across the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The Manara in Ramallah (above) was full, perhaps with 10-15,000 people. I wasn't really in the mood for the whole thing, for all the reasons detailed in the previous page, but made my appearance. Hanan Ashrawi and the governor of Ramallah, Mustapha 'Issa or Abu Firaas (lit. "Father of Tracker*") were on the stage errected late last night.
Arafat did appear earlier, but I missed him because he messed up the schedule a little. Aparently he juggled a few children, kissed them (I have no information on if they had been naughty or not), gave a victory sign a few times, and left. His speech, which I didn't miss, was recorded. Arafat is too sick to function in public these days. He trails off, goes to sleep in meetings, and is deemed much safer in post-edit public performances.
The first picture above is only here because I took the wrong film up to the university for scanning yesterday (18 May). Today's, below, actually two stitched together to make a panorama of the Manara, worked pretty well. If you're wondering why the photos look strange, it's because I pressed the wrong button in Photoshop and accidently found myself a concept for this Diary entry.
Don't you like watercolour paintings? As far as I understand it, the point of them is: what you take away gives you back more. Reducing reality to planes, textures, and a minimum of colours brings a powerful, motif-oriented art. All the photos for this entry have therefore been 'watercoloured'.
Note: For those that want to try this at home, it is not the Watercolour filter I used (which produces what evokes the painting equivalent of a thousand monkeys and typewriters before they strike gold) but rather the Smart Blur filter of Photoshop 4, with the following settings (Radius: 3, Tolerance: 25, Quality: High, Mode: Normal). It 'watercolours' better, as you will see, on photos of landscapes. Other stuff, to be honest, looks more like acrylic. Perhaps a painter could set me straight on this one. But try not to get any paint on the monitor. For those that prefer the real thing, clicking on any of the photos in these diary entries will give you the original picture at the same size.So, this weird filter effect actually helped me to get into the idea of time that the catastrophe evokes. Fifty years from now, I imagined Ramalawiyeen ("Ramallans") showing their children these paintings on their living room wall to describe the events of 50 years go, commemorating in turn the events their parents described them from 50 years before that. Seeing the photos - which will return as ever to the subject of the banality of violence in Palestine - in this format did something for me.
14 May 1998: The afternoon
Arrived down at Ma'aluffiyeh, site of the September 1996 clashes and the Spring 1997 Abu Ghnaim clashes, and got out of the taxi before Palestinian police directed it down a detour taking it away from the area of the clashes. Unlike last year, during the Abu Ghnaim clashes, there was no real attempt by them to stop either journalists or Palestinians going to protest. This took place - or rather didn't take place - for a number of reasons:
- They couldn't stop them in a million years, unless perhaps they want to start shooting their own people, and even that probably wouldn't stop them. Today is a once-in-a-lifetime day in the Palestinian consciousness.
- The demonstrators aren't going anywhere, an Israeli base exists less than a kilometer down the road. Israeli civillians will not be part of this confrontation. None live nearby.
- Israeli soldiers are not going to get injured, as the geography of this confrontation zone totally favours them. Rather it is Palestinians that will come off worse.
- The general feeling is that it would be good for Israel to have to deal with TV images of its soldiers shooting at Palestinians on this, the 50th anniversary of the founding of the State of Israel. The State, after all, was founded on such repression.
Being there...
As is my custom, I took the high road to see what was going on before heading down to the battleground. The usual story. In fact, I could stop here and you could read the "Birzeit student shot" entry from the Abu Ghnaim Diary to get almost exactly the same story. However, although the scenes may be the same as those exactly one year ago, I have changed.
I'm up on the hill with Ryan, a Palestine and Arabic Studies student at Birzeit. He's a good guy despite being a 'tourist' :-) (his ironic words) and we're spending our time trying to identify the various sounds. Dull explosion: rubber-coated metal bullets. Sharper explosion: plastic-coated metal bullets. Even sharper explosion but with less power: tear gas cannister being fired off. High penetrating crack: live ammunition.
Some younger shebab (lit. "youth", fig. "guys") standing nearby start speaking to us in Arabic. They're obviously a little stupid as the point of their enquiries is working out if we are Jews or not and once I tell them we are at Birzeit, they ask if we are "with the Israelis or with the Palestinians." I make it clear he's a little slow on the uptake if he doesn't know where Birzeit is at. We're all watching the scene below: Israeli soldiers up on the opposite hill and further down the road towards Jerusalem, students from Birzeit and other Palestinians in the valley road below.
A bad geographical situation if you're a Palestinian wanting to throw stones at soldiers who are either uphill or far away. On the other hand, the soldiers' weapons actually have range. While you're in an open space. This younger generation is sneered on by the generation of the Intifada, who had several years to get creative with homemade weapons. Why go out to get shot down if you aren't even in a position to make the soldiers slightly uncomfortable? If being a martyr was about stupidity, we'd have a lot of potential heros in Palestine today. It is time to go down to ground level.
Down in the valley
The fires are burning and the ambulances are busy. No one is prepared to really risk, the only thing that will break the relative stand-off. The Israelis are in no danger. And I mean no danger. In fact, I challenge anyone to come down and see these events and tell me that they have the right to open fire today. Live ammunition rings out. Tomorrow we will be assured by the front page of the Jerusalem Post that, "OC Judea and Samaria Brig.-Gen. Yitzhak Eitan stressed that no live ammunition was fired by security forces in the West Bank. In Gaza, troops fired live ammunition only when their lives were in danger, the IDF Spokesman stressed." I'm sick of the endless lies.
The day after that, we will read reports from fieldworkers from the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights in Gaza, that state, "During these confrontations, 71 Palestinians in Gaza were injured (46 by live ammunition, 25 by rubber coated metal bullets), among them five from the Palestinian security forces. Many of the injuries are critical and still 17 injured remain in hospitals, including three in the intensive care unit in al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza... Number of injuries in the upper body (from all ammunition types): 52."
Gaza's dead will include Zamil Sattam El-Waheidi, a 53-year old resident of Jabaliya refugee camp. Zamil was married, with 14 children. He 'endangered the lives of Israeli soldiers' while trying to help an injured civilian near the Erez broder between Gaza and Israel and was shot in the chest by for his troubles.
Jamal's anniversary
Almost exactly a year ago, Palestinian Journalist Jamal Al-Aroury was shot at with 'rubber' bullets by Israeli soldiers near Birzeit village. It's his time for 'rubber' bullets again. This time in the stomach. Fortunately, he's okay.
Shot at
As we are standing in this area 100 yards away from any confrontation, myself and Ryan, I suggest we shelter near two obviously medical personnel, holding a stretcher. Near us, stands a young woman in a hejab (colloquially known in Palengish as a "hejabi"), just watching, and a few more meters away, a couple of guys. An ambulance is also right next to us. No one is throwing stones. Suddenly, this unholy whizzing hiss enters our consciousness and a projectile hits the hejabi's shoe sole. She spins around unsettlingly before assuring us that she is okay.
It was a single rubber-coated metal bullet, an occasional tactic used by soldiers who want to use them to aim at an individual. I'm trying to work out who the bastard up on the hill was aiming at. I know he was trying to hit one of us as he is having to turn his gun 30 degrees away from the clashes to hit us.
The range of possibilities is narrow indeed: Two medical personnel, an obvious couple of foreigners, and a watching teenage woman. While I'm ducking behind the ambulance, I am thinking. I am thinking. It had to be for us or her. Judging by the fact it hit her shoe, it was probably aimed at our bodies. Fortunately neither of us got hit. It didn't matter, it achieved its real aim: it still messed with our heads.
*MEANING The Arabic name Firaas, means "tracker", someone with the strange and eerie desert ability to track a horse's or camel's trail. In this case and in the context of the name, Firaas is someone who is able to distinguish good human character from bad one, at least that's what the parents wished for their son when they named him. (Source MSANEWS Editors)
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