The Flame Will
Never Die
By Samah Jabr
_____________________________
http://www.wrmea.com/archives/janfeb03/0301012.html
January/February 2003, pages 12-13
Jerusalem Journal
On one of those days when Israel's "security"
required not only torturing people entering Jerusalem but
demanded harassing those leaving it as well, a poignant
scene took place in the main street of Beit Hanina. The
soldiers had stopped all cars and ordered all the
passengers out. Young men were made to stand against the
walls to be searched and interrogated, while the rest
were forced to continue their way on foot. One cab driver
objected to this, hoping to be allowed to drive his
passenger to her home: "She is very old and
sick," he pleaded. "She cannot walk all that
distance." But the Israeli soldiers merely shouted
at him, and would have hit him had not the elderly
passenger painfully dragged herself out of the taxi to
save the young driver. I saw that woman wracked with
arthritic pain as she struggled to get out of the taxi,
and felt my blood rise to a boil when I recognized my own
beloved grandmother.
I curbed my anger and hurried to
carry her belongings and assist her in walking the mile
ahead of us to reach the Al-Ram checkpoint. Once we
crossed that, we could take another cab to her home. I've
never seen grandma as vulnerable as she was on that day.
She looked very frail and hurt by the hostility she had
experienced.
Sweating and short of breath,
she remained silent as we walked very slowly to our
destination. I did not say a word, either, but I was
burning with rage at what had happened to grandmother-and
what is happening on a daily basis to our dear and
revered elderly people. I was so ashamed of my
helplessness, and of the fact that I could do nothing to
prevent her humiliation or alleviate her pain.
Finally she broke the silence
for a moment to say: "Their day will come. It
happened to the Pharaohs and to all other haughty
oppressors of this earth." As her eyes reddened with
tears, I hoped against hope that she would live long
enough to see that day come.
My culture places a great value
on caring for the elderly. Senior members of the
community are considered embodiments of our honor and our
blessings. After a lifetime of hard work, after
fulfilling all their responsibilities and sacrificing
much to provide for their offspring until they can fend
for themselves, people finally reach their golden years,
the autumn of their lives, when they derive warmth from
happy memories, and enjoy a well-earned rest from toil
and trouble. This is the way the elderly should be
cherished: with love, reverence and the respect of all of
those around them.
But this is far from being the
case for the elderly of Palestine. Despite great attempts
by vigorous adults to guard their families against the
prevalent suffering, the occupation's cruel reality
manages to afflict everyone. Our elderly are the most
victimized and exploited among the Palestinians,
especially those who live with the two unhealed wounds:
the Nakba, the catastrophic expulsion of Palestinians
from their homeland in 1948, and the Naksa, the fall of
the remainder of Palestine under occupation in 1967.
Oppression has been thrust on the entire Palestinian
nation; for the elderly, it greatly aggravates the ordeal
of aging, assaulting their dignity and violating their
basic rights. For too many of them, life seems a fate
worse than death.
By its nature, aging is a
difficult process, both for those who experience it and
for those around them. The elderly are fully conscious of
the proximity of their own mortality. Some feel that they
are
unworthy shadows or empty shells of who they once were.
They can become extremely sensitive and vulnerable to the
least of hardships, and consequently are prone to
frequent mood swings and cycles of depression.
But aging in Palestine is
characterized by far more regression than the natural
decline experienced by the elderly in areas of the world
far removed from oppression and occupation. Our seniors
suffer an unusual degree of ill-treatment and abuse.
Their minimal rights to life and liberty are violated,
their hearts are broken by the loss and misery of their
nation, and their safety and security are constantly
threatened by rampant violence, poverty and Israel's
deliberate destruction of Palestinian life. The aged are
the most needy, yet the most deprived, class of our
community. They are denied food and medicine during
recurrent Israeli curfews. They are prevented from going
to the hospital when ill. They are even deprived of the
solace of communal prayer at the mosque, or visiting
their grandchildren whenever they feel like it.
Recently a job interview took me
to al-Eizariyah. There, at Ras Kubsa junction, a wall has
been built to cut off the Abu-Deis and al-Eizariyah
neighborhoods from the mother city of Jerusalem. The
young and fit students of al-Quds University, located in
Abu-Deis, find ways around that wall: they jump over
fences, or crawl through barbed wire fences, or else go
the long way around over the hills. I had to scale a high
fence to reach my destination, and I testify that it
would be impossible for the elderly, the sick and the
weak to do the same thing.
A few years ago I worked with an
American student on compiling the oral history of the
Nakba. I interviewed elderly refugees who lived through
and remembered the experience. Those wrinkled and
toothless faces, freckled with age-spots, spoke as if
they had lived several lives and died several deaths.
Their pain is unending-but so is their faith and pride. I
saw the far-away look in their eyes and listened to their
deathly appeals. Their eyes were teary with longing when
they spoke of "better times," the days before
the Nakba, and showed us the large, rusty, old-fashioned
keys, all that they have left of their stolen homes.
Their hands trembled with relived terror as they spoke of
the expulsion and the war. While translating their words
into English for my colleague, I prayed that their hopes
would also be translated into reality during the little
time they had left to live.
Many of our elderly feel that
they have failed their children and grandchildren in
bringing us to life in an occupied land. For our part, we
young people also feel sad that our elderly have had to
live this tragic situation to the end of their days, and
we feel we have failed them in not restoring them to
freedom and justice during their lifetime. Despite all
the disappointments, however, neither they nor we have
abandoned the Palestinian cause or lost our commitment to
the liberation of our land and people-and that is all
that really matters.
David Ben-Gurion, the first
Israeli prime minister, said, "We should do whatever
it takes to prevent the Palestinians from coming back to
their homes. The old will die and the young will
forget." Ben-Gurion was wrong. Several generations
might die before liberty is achieved, but the flame will
never die and Palestinians will never forget. Despite all
difficulties, our elderly have built worthwhile and
meaningful lives over ruined dreams, and we will follow
in their path. Along with a
commitment to freedom and justice, our parents and
grandparents have bequeathed us the truth of what
happened. We have borne this commitment and this truth,
and we shall pass them on to the coming generations. Ours
shall not be a legacy of guilt or victimization, but
rather a mature sense of responsibility, well-organized
action, a sincere will and an effective strategy to end
this tyranny.
This is what we Palestinians can
do. We will maintain the steady fire that has never been
extinguished, that loyal flame that remains in the soul
of each Palestinian. Nevertheless, much remains to be
done to stem the tide of the occupiers' abuse of the
elderly, and of every Palestinian, in order for human
rights to be restored and our dream of true peace to be
realized. It might take a while, but, as Grandmother
says: "The day will come."
Samah Jabr is a medical resident in her native city of
Jerusalem.
January/February 2003, pages 12-13
Jerusalem Journal
© 2003 WRMEA
Sun, 20 Apr 2003
Gush Shalom
At Midnight, a Knock on the Door
BY Uri Avnery
19 April 2003
It was an almost
unbelievable news story: in order to trim the national
budget, the Ministry of Education had decided to dismiss
hundreds of teachers. A private company got the job of
delivering the bitter news to the dismissed teachers. Two
days before Passover - one of the highpoints of the
Jewish calendar, both for religious and secular Jews,
when families sit together around the table for the
joyous Seder ceremony - the messengers of the company
spread out to do their job. They knocked on the doors at
midnight and delivered the notices.
Even the Israeli public,
which does not get excited any more about anything, was
shocked for a moment. How could such a thing happen?
Couldn't they have waited until after the feast? What
brutality!
For me, it was much more
than a mistake of some government office. This is a
symbolic act, which reflects all that is wrong in today's
Israel.
First of all, the cruelty.
It wasn't deliberate, of course. The Minister of
Education did not tell the private contractor: hand them
the notice in as painful a way as possible. The
contractors, too, did not sit down and decide: let's do
it just before Passover and knock on their doors in the
middle of the night, like Stalin's secret police or our
undercover soldiers in Nablus.
No, nobody decided. Nobody
thought about it. And that is really the most shocking
part: the total insensitivity.
Even three or four years
ago, this would not have been possible. Somebody would
have intervened in time and shouted: "What are you
doing? Are you crazy?"
The Jews always defined
themselves as "the compassionate sons of the
compassionate". They believed that compassion is a
Jewish invention and quoted the old texts (such as the
Sabbath injunction in the Ten Commandments, ordering Jews
to relieve their slaves and draft animals every seventh
day.) Nietzsche, who abhorred pity, accused Judaism of
creating a morality of pity.
The new Hebrew society
that was created in this country was always proud of its
"mutual responsibility", the fact that nobody
went hungry in our society, that the incapacitated, sick,
old and unemployed were protected by the whole of
society. Once, when I was asked what being a Jew meant to
me in my childhood, I mentioned compassion, together with
seeking justice, hating violence, striving for peace and
loving education.
Not any more. After two
years of the al-Aksa intifada, the senses of Israeli
society have become almost completely blunted. The
terrible things that happen daily in the occupied
territories pass without mention. "Closures"
and curfews that last for months, hunger and thirst, sick
people dying for lack of treatment, the demolition of
homes and the uprooting of groves - these are "small
change", routine matters. Men, women and children
shot by snipers in their homes and on the streets? Who
cares. A young American woman crushed to death by a giant
bulldozer while trying to prevent the demolition of a
Palestinian home? So what. She deserved it, anyway. A
stone-throwing Palestinian boy shot dead by a tank? Three
lines in the paper. Maybe not even that.
The callousness has spread
from the occupied territories into Israel itself. Photos
in the paper show people rummaging in garbage bins? Well,
that's how it is. Government offices send hungry poor
people to get a free meal at private charities? Who
cares.
The new Minister of the
Treasury, Binyamin Netanyahu, a man who receives 50
thousand dollars for a single lecture in the United
States, has submitted an economic plan that hurts the
poorest of the poor. It reduces monthly old-age
allowances (to less than $300), child allowances,
unemployment payments, subsidies for homes for retarded
children and the elderly and the education and health
budgets.
Does the public revolt? Do
masses of students take to the streets? Do the media
explode in anger? Does the opposition in the Knesset (if
there is such an animal) shake heaven and earth? Not at
all. The Trade Union Federation (Histadrut), representing
the strongest and richest workers' committees, threatens
a general strike. What else? Here and there a politician
issues a statement, hoping to get into the headlines.
Here and there a handful of people of conscience protest.
Here and there a columnist writes an indignant article.
And that's that. So the poor will be a little poorer and
the rich a little richer. Big deal.
When Netanyahu himself is
asked about the plan, he takes to the well-established
Israeli line: There is no alternative. The Israeli
economy is sinking. It's all the fault of Arafat. The
intifada has destroyed our economy,
And that is a new thing
altogether with far-reaching implications.
This needs an explanation:
for more than five decades, Israeli society has enjoyed
the sweet illusion that there is no connection at all
between our policy towards the Arabs and our economic
situation. This is a cornerstone of our national
consciousness.
During my ten years in the
Knesset, I made at least a hundred speeches on this one
point. In economic debates I pointed to the security
policy and the occupation. In debates about security
policy, I raised questions about the economic price.
Each one of these speeches
aroused a furious and impatient reaction from all parts
of the House. In security debates they shouted at me:
"What has that to do with the economy? We are now
speaking about terrorism!" In economic debates they
shouted: "We are discussing the economy, so what are
you dragging your Palestinians into this for!" (Only
once in all those years, a Deputy Minister of the
Treasury took me aside in the corridor and said:
"You are the only one who made sense." (Not
being an economist, I was flattered.)
This ignoring of the price
of the war and the occupation has had curious results:
the poorest people, the unemployed and the inhabitants of
the run-down so-called "development towns" have
always voted Likud. In the last elections, they voted
solidly for Sharon. They had only two demands: to screw
the Arabs and to put an end to the economic crisis. They
saw no contradiction between the two.
But for some months now,
there has been a change in public consciousness. In order
to counter the accusation that the government's economic
policy has caused the depression, the Sharon people have
had to admit that the intifada is the main cause, even if
the worldwide crisis added to it. The intifada dealt a
terrible blow to tourism, one of the most important
sectors of our economy. Foreign investments, which are
essential to economic growth, have all but stopped. The
giant army necessary for the fight against the intifada,
together with the settlers, devour a huge proportion of
our GNP (many times more, per capita, than in the USA).
Some people believe that
if the depression deepens, the "weak strata"
(as the poor are called in Israel) will one day rise
against the Sharon government. That may be too
optimistic. But at least one can dream about the night
when, at midnight, the people knock on the door of the
government and hand it a notice of dismissal.
Uri Avnery
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