The story of this picture.
I was going to Nablus that day and got on the 16 bus in East Jerusalem to go to Ramallah.
East Jerusalem seems to be flourishing. The people who get on the bus all seem to be doing fine. Beit Hanina is bustling. A fat man walks out of a sweet shop and I see him savoring the last taste of something in his mouth. We pass a store selling terra cotta housewares, vases, water jugs and mixing bowls, and then a flower shop called Charming Flower Shop.
A man with dark gleaming hair is sitting on a chair under an awning, proudly surveying his possessions. These Palestinians are doing fine.
Now we begin to see the buttresses of racial separation. We stop at big intersections that serve settlers moving between Tel Aviv and their settlements in East Jerusalem or the West Bank. We pass the perfect modern tramway that goes off to Pisgat Zeev, a settlement. More service for settlers.
So the happy picture is shaded with the separation of black and white, of Jim Crow, of separate and unequal. And now it’s naked. We come to the wall, cruise along beside it as ordinary as day, its spools of barbed wire. I wonder how I could ever travel along in this corridor, knowing that the point is to segregate my kind. My kind is not to be trusted, but channeled and kept at arms length. I hold my camera to the window and shoot the wall, again and again.
The bus slows suddenly. It’s the Qalandiya traffic, outside the checkpoint. We see the huge forbidding guardtower. No one is moving in either direction. On the Palestinian side of the checkpoint there is only one lane in either direction. Everyone’s life on the bus is about to be disrupted and blighted for an hour.
There is honking and screaming. Men run up to the bus door shouting Hizma Hizma. They are offering to take you to a different checkpoint, twenty minutes away, back the way you have come. As ordinary as the voices selling dates and figs in the market. Some people get off the bus, to pay for that ride, or walk through.
Outside my window an old man walks by the bus carrying his wares—a carton with three big plastic jars of cumin. Crossing his path at an angle, obliviously, come two young men in civilian clothing. They are muscular. One holds a rifle. The other carries a black box. But it’s not a box– my mistake, a snubnosed rifle, state of the art.
These are Israelians –as Palestinians pronounce Israeli—making it sound like aliens. Above them flaps the flag of the state of Israel with the star of David. And I can’t help myself, but seeing that flag with the Jewish symbol flapping whitely over the architecture of apartheid, I just want to rip it down.
When I get home I find the picture above in the wall series. Didn’t know I’d gotten a graffiti, sent it to a friend.
“It says [vertically] Yossi M. [and horizontally, below it] May God avenge his blood. The three-letter group at the bottom is הי”ד (heh, yod, dalet) and it stands for the words “hashem yikom damo” (may God avenge his blood, or ה’ ייקום דמ ) and it means that someone was martyred. Jewish-martyred, possibly having connection to that location. The ‘God avenge his blood’ phrase has the undertone of threat, as if someone might step up and help God with the whole blood-avenging thing, just in case He doesn’t get around to it Himself.”
“The ‘God avenge his blood’ phrase has the undertone of threat, as if someone might step up and help God with the whole blood-avenging thing, just in case He doesn’t get around to it Himself”
Possibly. And possibly not.
“May God Avenge his blood” is an ancient term used in Jewish tradition for Jewish martyrs. It comes in place of terms like “alav hashalom”, Hebrew equivalent of “rest in peace”. The implication being that a Jew who has been killed because he is a Jew can not find peace until justice is meted out to the murderers.
Back in the day when Jews did not have power, it really was up to God to take care of this business. Nowadays, He has his agents in the form of Jewish militants.
Having said that, the term is widely used in the original sense (as distorted as that is in today’s context) without carrying the meaning of threat. The author of this graffito could have been echoing Belshazar’s feast (as Phil’s title interprets it) or he could have been posting a memorial notice to a friend. The use of an initial rather than spelling out the last name in a non-specific stretch of the barrier indicates to me a personal message of grief rather than a public threat.
I have a difficult time with the idea of “Jewish martyr” as opposed to the (apparently) vastly more correct “Israeli victim”. Generally, no-one is killing Israeli Jews because they are Jewish. It is not a religious thing. The very few Israeli (Israelian) Jews who are killed (if killed by Palestinians) are killed because the killer thinks of them as members of the people that stole the Palestinian land.
Killing a robber is not a religious thing, even if the robber has a religion, and even if the robber is identified (for victimhood) by religious symbols.
Anyone who does not understand by this time that Israel (that is, the Jewish Israelians, collectively) stole and continue to steal Palestine and its people’s land has a very perverse way of understanding things — even if he believes that the stealing was justified.
The fact that the last name is not spelled, indicates to me that the message is intended for a close-knit group of people, i.e. a military unit at Qalandya; as in, members of that unit know who “Yossi” was. They don’t need his last name.
Possibly, but I think, unlikely. Israeli military units rotate every few weeks. So, if the goal was to broadcast a message to the avengers, this will have been a short-lived communication.
Also, in my experience, martyrs who demand retribution are celebrated with their full name. It’s “Osama” or “Osama Bin Laden”, not “Osama BL”; “Meir Kahane”, not “Meir K.”
As for the scale – them’s large pieces of concrete. Even with big letters, there is still a lot of empty space around.
But for Israel as a whole,
מנא ,מנא, תקל, ופרסין