My senses let me down.
On Friday 31 December – the day Jawaher Abu Rahmah was murdered by the Israeli army – I thought I smelt manure in the village of Bil’in, but it was the skunk truck (The Boesh), used by the Israeli military to crush peaceful protest. Back in 1994 I thought I lived in one nation called Israel, with an Arab minority – no one had told me about the military occupation and I failed to see it. That year I witnessed one minor and one major event: on a Saturday morning near the Damascus Gate (Bab al-Amoud) in East Jerusalem, a jeep brakes abruptly as a young Arab man jumps out of the back; two soldiers give chase, hit him with a blunt weapon and drag him back into the vehicle, which then drives on. I watched it happen and I didn’t like it, but I didn’t know what it meant. On 25 February that year, newspaper vendors near and within the Old City thrust images of a massacre into my face; I learn that a Jewish settler and medical doctor Baruch Goldstein has entered the Ibrahim mosque in Hebron and opened fire on worshippers before being beaten to death. I looked at the gruesome photos and winced, feeling sorry for the Arabs, but I still didn’t understand. What I could not see with my own eyes did not occur to me at 18 years old: that I was witnessing a brutal occupation of an indigenous people called the Palestinians.
The term ‘ethnic cleansing’ was entirely alien to me, and ‘occupation’ was only familiar to me from history lessons on the Nazi occupation of France. The family I worked for in Tel Aviv certainly did not tell me. Instead, they only warned me each weekend to be careful in Jerusalem because “it is full of Arabs” and “they are like animals”. As the child of British liberal, middle class parents, I dismissed this as the vulgar racism and populist sentiment of the barely educated lower middle-class.
The year 2010/11: “Look over here, I want to show you, can you see the settlement of Har Gilo, can you see the Israeli-only road and tunnel; can you see the new construction of the wall just below?” M. always insists on pointing out all the signs of the occupation during our walks through Beit Jala, and sometimes I think it’s unnecessary, yet I have missed so many signs before. Last week during my bespoke tour of West Jerusalem, O. asked me if I had seen The Russian Compound leased by the Israeli state, also used as a detention and GSS interrogation centre holding many Palestinian political detainees. I had walked past, around it, perhaps sensed the rings of barbed wire in the periphery of my vision, but I had not been told its purpose, so no, I had not really seen it. T, a Jewish Israeli activist now in her 60s who was born in Tel Aviv, tells me she used to walk to school with a group of friends through a ruined Palestinian village and not ask who had lived there before. Present-day Tel Aviv has been cleansed of almost all obvious signs of Palestinian presence and dispossession except for the omnipresent young Israelis in military fatigues who serve the occupation but whose olive green uniform signals to most of the public, simply – and absurdly – benign, patriotic duty. Traveling to Bil’in from Tel Aviv, or leaving al-Quds to visit surrounding areas I see other signs – ordinary road signs in Hebrew, transliterated into English and Arabic. They are signposting war crimes: the illegal settlements beyond the 1949 armistice ‘Green’ line that proliferate, indeed flourish. What kind of criminal signposts his or her own crime? Where a hand-made sign or a placard would have little legitimacy in the eyes of a public distrustful of amateurishness and the absence of recognizable branding, mass produced government ministry signs with the purported mandate of informing the public give comfort to the Israeli and foreign driver and pedestrian.
Today, as I write this, the signs of occupation are too clear to me; I want to go to al-Quds for the afternoon but I would have to take a bus through a military checkpoint and I need a day without seeing an Israeli military uniform and without witnessing further outrages to human dignity: outrages and war crimes that are perpetrated so casually and defended so unthinkingly by a coalition of the willfully ignorant and defiantly racist. At the Tel Aviv protest against the murder of Jawaher on Saturday, I hold up a borrowed sign: ‘Jawaher Abu Rahmah, 36, killed by Israel’, a driver shouts back: ‘She shouldn’t have been demonstrating’.
We need to be educated before we can read the signs of Israeli occupation. I fantasize about how an illegal settlement might be signposted if the Israeli state were not the driving force behind the settlement of Palestinian land – a war crime under International humanitarian law. Perhaps it would be black spray on cardboard and it would read: ‘Come and live here – it belongs to us, not the Arabs. Tell your friends too. We have called it ‘Holy Mount of Ancient Something Beautiful’ “. Visually suspect as well as recognizably criminal.
