Vignettes of Nablus · and Ibal, sprawling over the landscape like sleeping giants. Today, I am making one of my final trips to Nablus. October is an exhilarating time to travel through

OCCUPIED TERRITORIES: REPORT

Vignettes of Nablus

Michael Lynk*

A road map would show that Nablus is only 60 kilometers north of Jerusalem, but it is really much farther than that. Across a political fault line, from the calm to the storm, the road from Jerusalem to Nablus leads to the crucible of the intifada in the West Bank.

The journey itself takes a long 50 minutes, as the car hugs the perilous two-lane road snaking up and down the ridge of hills and plateaus that form the spine of the West Bank. The hillsides are stone-terraced from top to bottom with olive trees, whose silvery-green leaves flutter and dance in the October breezes. A month from now, these hills, lonely now except for the occasional shepherd and his sheep, will be alive with people, as entire Palestinian villages flock to harvest the black olives hanging fat and heavy on the branches.

Closer to Nablus, the topography of the road view changes percepti- bly. Israeli civilian settlements command many of the hilltops, dominat- ing the surrounding countryside with their rows of stone-quarried, Swiss- chateau housing encased behind floodlit fencing. The olive trees on the hillsides beneath the settlements have been uprooted, leaving only the empty stone terraces as a reminder of the hills' former life. After passing through several Israeli army roadblocks, we coast down a last hill and into sight of the two barren mountains between which Nablus lies, Gerizim and Ibal, sprawling over the landscape like sleeping giants. Today, I am making one of my final trips to Nablus. October is an exhilarating time to travel through the West Bank. Not only do the ripening olive trees make the parched landscape greener, but the magnificent culumus clouds

*Michael Lynk, a labor lawyer in Ottawa, served in the West Bank as a refugee affairs officer with UNRWA during 1989.

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102 JOURNAL OF PALESTINE STUDIES

that now fill the eastern Mediterranean sky promise that the cooler rainy season is not far off.

For the past six months, I have been working as a human rights ob- server with the UN agency responsible for Palestinian refugees. Each working day, I visit several of the nineteen refugee camps on the West Bank. Invariably, the work also means inquiring at Israeli military headquarters about the arrested and dead, or spending long hours in Palestin- ian hospitals and health clinics investigating how a skull was fractured, how a young girl's leg came to be riddled with plastic shrapnel, or how a pair of seventy-year-old lungs was overcome with tear gas. On any given day, I and the other international observers might deliver tents to a family whose home has just been demolished, negotiate with the military to allow a convey of food into a camp or village after the eighth or ninth day of a round-the-clock curfew, or attempt to track down a Palestinian's I.D. card taken by an army patrol.

Occasionally, the presence of international observers makes a differ- ence when the Israeli army enters a camp or city on a raid. If the UN or the International Red Cross is around, perhaps a boy is merely arrested and not beaten or shot, a search of someone's house results in a rough lecture and not a thorough trashing, or an army raid on a school ends with a warning instead of a teargassing.

More often, in my experience, I have arrived too late to do anything but pick up the pieces. I can only sit and watch from the UN car, a human camera recording the visual evidence into a notebook with an un- steady hand. Among the virtues preached to us at law school were de- tachment from our client's case and non-committment to issues.' Partisan analysis and involvement, we were taught, were better left to sociologist and social worker. I didn't accept the advice then, and didn't apply it in my subsequent practise as a union-side labor lawyer. But, oddly enough, it made a lot of sense in the West Bank. If I couldn't keep a Chinese Wall beween what I was seeing and what I was feeling, I couldn't have faced the entrenched brutality that hung over virtually every encounter between Israeli and Palestinian on the West Bank.

Balata camp is home to about 16,000 Palestinian refugees. Although it has spilled over its original boundaries and now nestles up against the eastern edge of Nablus, no one would mistake where the city stops and the camp begins. Most buildings in Nablus, as in the West Bank, are

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made from sand-colored quarried stone projecting a solid, enduring presence. The camp housing, in contrast, has been built from concrete cinder blocks that have sprouted haphazardly into two- and three-story homes as families have extended and expanded over 40 years. The streets are un- paved, the houses hug each other, and, most noticably to a visitor from the West, the camp is without a trace of natural green anywhere.

But the camp's initial appearance belies the exuberance of life inside. On a normal afternoon, the streets are full of children; over half of the occupied territories' population is under the age of 18. Many of the youth in their older teens or early twenties-those without jobs in Nablus or inside Israel-mingle in groups on street corners. In two short years, the leadership of the camp, as everywhere else in the West Bank, has passed from the conservative clan elders to the shabab (literally, the "boys"). They, and their competing organizations-Fateh, the Commu- nists, the Popular Front, the Democratic Front, and the Muslim funda- mentalists-now dominate the political and civic life of the camp. They mediate family and social disputes, try to find jobs or welfare for the very poor or for those who have had a breadwinner killed or imprisoned, and prepare for the next visit from the army.

Besides being the largest refugee camp in the West Bank, Balata is one of the most militant. The uprising in the West Bank began here. Two days after the clash in Gaza that is acknowledged to have begun the intifada in December 1987, three Balata residents-two teenagers and a 53- year-old bystander-were shot dead by Israeli troops. In September 1989, the camp endured 18 days of army-imposed curfew, and in the first 22 months of the intifada, had been curfewed 186 days. (During a curfew, the camp residents are not permitted to leave their homes for any reason whatsoever. They cannot buy food, go to work, or even sit on their door- steps. The curfew is imposed around the clock, and Palestinians are rou- tinely arrested or even shot for curfew violations.)

I am sitting in the family room of Abu Khalid's home, on Balata's main street near the camp entrance. Over tiny cups of Arab coffee, his life narrative begins, and soon becomes intertwined with the social history of the camp: dispossession, survival, steadfastness, and finally reclama- tion through revolt.

Abu Khalid's family came to Balata from a village in the Galilee during the Israeli-Arab war in 1948. His parents had thought that they were leaving for only a few weeks. On the back of one of the family mules, they had brought some clothes, two weeks' worth of food, and the key to their home. Abu Khalid [not his real name] was born six months after their

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arrival in Balata. For the first nine years, the family-Abu Khalid, his mother and father, and three brothers and sisters-lived in United Na- tions tents. They, like most of the other Palestinian refugees, refused more permanent housing on the grounds that it would make it easier for the world to forget their claim. "We froze in those tents in the winters. My whole childhood seems in memory to have been one perpetual runny nose."1

"This house began as one room. Fourteen feet by fourteen feet for the six of us. All of the little houses were built in long neat rows along the street. School was in a tent or outdoors. We didn't have paper. Les- sons were written on tiny blackboards, and then erased. Learning that way is wonderful training for the memory.

"We grew up perpetually anxious. Anxiety, you know, sleeps in the souls of the dispossessed. We were anxious about the Israelis; the evils they were said to have done made them seem almost invincible, not really human at all. We sat and wondered when Nasir and the Arab world was going to stop broadcasting and start liberating. 'Only when their jaws get tired,' my father would say."

As a young man in the 1930s, Abu Khalid's father left his Galilee village to work in a factory in Haifa for several years. There, he became acquainted with unions and the nascent communist movement in Man- date Palestine. Although he never joined the Communist party, he was deeply influenced by its secularism and its militancy. Later, his father would become an activist in the various clandestine groups in Nablus that emerged in opposition first to King Hussein and, after 1967, to the Israeli occupation.

"My father was bitter, but never sentimental, about the 1948 war and his village in the Galilee. He would often say that his politics made him face life soberly. Others in the camp would talk endlessly about the beauty of their lost world. They would make love with their words to the olive trees. For him, poetry would never bring back anything. So, he would organize, ignore warnings from Hussein's police or the camp mukhtar, get arrested, and then, when he was out, start all over again.

"He worked as a car mechanic in Nablus. In 1966, Nablus revolted against King Hussein's regime. This is not very well known. Many were killed, and he and hundreds of others were arrested. My father was still in prison in 1967, when the war started and Israel conquered us. The Israelis simply sat down in the chairs of the Jordanian intelligence officers and continued. My father wasn't released until 1969. Meanwhile, our

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family lived like mice, on UN refugee rations and the money my older brothers made from odd jobs in Nablus, or Jerusalem, or in Israel."

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Twenty-Fourth Street sits on a spectacular roost on the side of Mt. Gerizim. Here, according to the Book of Deuteronomy, Moses was directed by God to deliver blessings to those who obeyed the law. Across the valley lies Mt. Ibal, the mountain of curses. "And it shall come to pass, when the Lord thy God hath brought thee in unto the land whither thou goest to possess, that thou shall put the blessing upon Mt. Gerizim and the curse upon Mt. Ibal" (Dt. 17:29). Below, the city stretches east and west between the two mountains. Above Twenty-Fourth Street, on the top of Mt. Gerizim, is the sacred shrine of the Samaritans.

Twenty-Fourth Street was also the site, in May and June of 1989, of frequent and often massive Israeli army raids and patrols. On a virtually daily basis, two or three jeeps, sometimes accompanied by a troop truck, would drive up the mountainside road from the military headquarters and spend an entire afternoon in the neighborhood. Homes would be thoroughly searched, with furniture or dried food supplies such as flour or cooking oil deliberately destroyed in the process. Sometimes, a father would be singled out for a beating in front of his family, or suggestive remarks would be made about a young girl's virginity or a mother's prow- ess in bed.

Early in June, while patrolling through a refugee camp about 10 kilometers from Nablus, I was radioed from Jerusalem that a Red Crescent ambulance was being prevented by the army from reaching a wounded Palestinian, and could we make our way to Twenty-Fourth Street as quickly as possible.

About an hour earlier, a burning tire at the entrance had attracted the attention of two jeeps. Youths began taunting the soldiers and there was an exchange of tear gas and stones. The soldiers then began targeting specific youths for arrest. Three soldiers chased eleven-year-old Ghaleb Samihna along Twenty-Fourth Street and up an outdoor stairway that climbed to the street above. Another soldier, at the top of the stairs, saw the boy running up towards him. He aimed and fired, hitting Ghaleb in the abdomen.

The pursuing soldiers caught up to the fallen boy, who was still conscious and screaming in pain. They carried him up another stairway to a nearby rooftop, locking the door behind them. Everyone in the neigh-

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borhood had heard the shot and ran out of their homes to the door lead- ing to the roof, banging on it and shouting to the soldiers to release the boy. Someone called for a Red Crescent ambulance. It arrived a few minutes later, but the soldiers on the roof still refused to release him. One of the ambulance attendants told me later that the soldiers sounded nervous, and were constantly talking on their radio, possibly to the military headquarters, for instructions.

A short while later, more jeeps arrived,, bearing a number of officers. They made their way through the crowd to the roof, and then directed the soldiers to release the boy to the ambulance. About twenty-five minutes had elapsed since the shooting. The ambulance rushed the boy to a nearby hospital, but he was declared dead on arrival. The attendant said that, upon retrieving the boy from the roof, he could feel only the faintest of pulses. The boy, he said, had bled to death.

I arrived shortly after the ambulance had returned the body to the parents' home in the quarter. Soldiers were huddled around their jeeps, radios were barking out exchanges in Hebrew, and curses in Arabic were raining down from the surrounding homes. After speaking to the ambulance attendants and to an army lieutenant, several neighborhood youths led me to the roof. Just inside the doorway, on the floor of the roof, a large puddle of blood still glistened, red becoming browh. At the edge of the puddle were some rolls of first-aid bandages with Hebrew inscriptions, and an empty packet of Israeli cigarettes.

The curses and the squawking army radios still filled the street. I found the lieutenant I had been talking to before, and from his eyes, constantly darting from my face to the stairway where the shooting had oc- curred, I guessed he was as nervous as I. As we talked, he visibly calmed down. I said that there was probably going to be a funeral tonight and would the army keep its distance? He replied, to my surprise, that enough had happened tonight, and the army wouldn't likely come near. This was one of the few occasions while I was in the West Bank that I found a cooperative army officer who, in a tense situation, pulled back instead of reaching for an ammunition clip. Shortly thereafter, the jeeps drove off.

Within an hour, several hundred Palestinians, many from neighborhoods further down the mountainside, had gathered on Twenty-Fourth Street. The mosques-playing their role as Palestinian telegraphs-had begun broadcasting news of the boy's death, in the form of a lament from the Quran. The shabab had suddenly become neighborhood guides, taking the visitors on tours of the night's events, and recounting stories of the recent army sweeps and the quarter's resistance.

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VIGNET'TES OF NABLUS 107

Soon the dead boy's family poured out their doorway and down the stairs to the street and into the growing crowd. Two young men held the flag-draped body on their shoulders. For a moment, I tensed as parts of the crowd surged towards the body to touch it. But two of the shabab, in a quick stroke of inspiration, starting singing Baladi-a nationalist an- them-and a sudden discipline took hold of the crowd. Flags were raised, and an old woman started ululating. I followed the procession to the Western Cemetery by car. At the cemetery entrance, the boy's older half- brother was holding their three-year-old sister in his arms. She stared, uncomprehendingly, at the crowd that stroked her face before they went in.

Jerusalem, for all of the world attention that it receives as the political and intellectual center for both Israelis and Palestinians, has remained relatively untouched by the intifada. While the Palestinian merchants in East Jerusalem are committed to following the intifada's commercial strike appeal by leaving their shops open for only three hours a day, and the debates among the Palestinian intelligentsia in the city's cafes dwell constantly upon the ongoing uprising, Palestinian Jerusalemites have rarely felt the sting of gunfire, tear gas, curfews, or early morning mass arrests. "While Palestine revolts, Jerusalem sleeps"-a slogan on a wall in a refugee camp near Nablus-may unfairly underestimate the financial and political support given by the city during the intifada, but it accurately reflects the antipathy among Palestinians in the smaller cities and towns in the West Bank towards the disparity in the sacrifices made between Jerusalem and themselves.

Nablus is a world apart. Terra incognita to foreigners, Israelis, and even to many Palestinians, Nablus and its neighboring camps and villages have witnessed some of the fiercest clashes and the harshest army reprisals of the intifada in the West Bank. The character of Nablus' resistance to the Israeli military rule-with its high death and injury toll, extended curfews, and general endurance of the daily humiliations of occupation-has only added to the nationalist mythology surrounding the city.

Its nickname-Jabal Elnar (Fire Mountain)-is said to have come from a clash with a battalion of Napoleon's expeditionary army in 1799. As the French troops were trying to fight their way from Egypt to the Medi- terranean port city of Acre, the citizens of Nablus ambushed them on the city's outskirts, trapping the soldiers in a burning forest and destroying

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much of the battalion. "The history of modern times," wrote an early twentieth-century French writer, quoted in Le Monde, "shows us Nablus in continual rebellion against the pashas of Damascus or of Acre whose job was to administer it."

Throughout the twentieth century, Nablus continued to be in frequent revolt against the succession of foreign rule-the Turks, British, Jordanians, and now the Israelis-over the city. Its ongoing reputation as a difficult city to govern is measured by the respect that Israeli soldiers give it. On several occasions, lower-ranking army officers told me that the morale of the troops stationed in Nablus was distinctly lower than the already fractured morale among soldiers in other postings in the West Bank. Said one: "Anxiety prevades our troop patrols here much more than elsewhere; no one likes coming here."

To a visitor fresh from Jerusalem, Nablus presents a grim face. Spray- painted slogans, written on the run with no chance for artistic adorn- ment, cover virtually every inch of available wall space. In the casbah and the adjacent downtown district, the metal shutters of the shops clang shut every day at noon. Within minutes, the vibrant chaos of the commercial quarter has evaporated, leaving only the six-soldier Israeli army patrols cautiously to claim the afternoon streets.

By 2 P.M., the urban character of Nablus has completely disappeared behind the doors and windows of its residential quarters. There, the city's 130,000 inhabitants will spend the rest of their waking hours per- forming their household chores, watching the contrasting coverage of the day's news on Jordanian and Israeli television, and, in the watchword of the intifada, remaining samed (steadfast). It is as if the city has folded its collective arms tight around its chest, turned its back on its tormentor, and closed its anguish and defiance within itself.

But, beginning at dusk, the city stirs again. The mosques call evening prayers from their minarets, and the amplified sound reverberates off the mountainsides and through the streets and alleyways. In Askar refugee camp, on the city's eastern edge, two Israeli military jeeps have been hit with rocks, and a clash erupts. Army reinforcements arrive, tear gas soon hangs like ground fog over the camp, and, in reply, a cascade of stones rains out of the camp from unseen arms. Shabab dart through the shadows, with wet handkerchiefs over their mouths as protection from the tear gas. They run with the confidence of alleycats, and the soldiers who eventually storm into the camp's main square in pursuit of the stonethrowers find only deserted streets and unlit houses.

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VIGNEFTTES OF NABLUS 109

Across town, in the comfortable quarter of Rafidia, soldiers have hauled a middle-aged lawyer out of his home to whitewash slogans off his front wall. A large, elderly woman, probably the lawyer's mother, directs a stream of salty curses in Arabic at the army lieutenant supervising the Tom Sawyer routine. Embarrassed, the lieutenant retreats to his jeep, fumbles with some papers, and finally turns up the two-way radio to drown out the old woman's invectiveness. When the lawyer finally fin- ishes, paint splattered all over his blue jalabya, the mother storms out of the yard to berate the lieutenant nose-to-nose. After the jeep pulls away, she shouts down her son's reproach: "You need a loud voice to liberate Palestine."

Having completed his studies at a UN teacher training college in Ramallah, Abu Khalid returned to Balata in the early 1970s to teach Eng- lish and history in Nablus-area schools. By then, the early hope that the Israelis would leave had faded. "The years 1967-70 really shook us all awake. Immediately after the Six-Day War, there was a lot of political organizing in the West Bank, and some open resistance to the Israelis. We learned how strong they were, but we also learned that they were not invincible, but merely human, like us.

"Then, in 1970, we thought, for a brief moment, that the PLO would bring down Hussein. But September turned black. In Balata, we listened day and night to the radio about the fighting in Jordan. When Hussein finally won, with thousands dead, we went into collective shock. It was worse than 1967. For once, we had stood up, and then we fell so far. Every house in the camp draped black on their doors, until the Israeli army came through and tore all the draping down."

After the PLO's defeat in Jordan, the Israelis gained the necessary political space to consolidate their hold on the occupied territories. In Nablus, political resistance diminished, and the old anxieties returned. "Our nationalism was always there; we just kept it a little more private. Hope was our oxygen, and there wasn't very much around." In 1975, the war in Lebanon broke out, sparked by right-wing hostility to the politi- cally-conscious Palestinian refugee population. The Likud party won the 1977 Israeli elections, and soon stepped up the construction of settlements in the West Bank. In 1978 the Camp David accords were negoti- ated over the heads of the Palestinians, promising them only a future of Israeli-dominated "autonomy."

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Along with the occupation came a slowly-rising standard of living for the Palestinians. For young men in Balata, employment meant working as gastarbeiten in Israel or in the oil fields in the Arabian Gulf. Manual jobs in a kibbutz orchard or a Tel Aviv restaurant kitchen earned enough money to build another room onto the house, or tuition for university. But it was no way to live.

"My two brothers worked for years in Netanya cleaning streets and collecting garbage, until they could find jobs in Nablus. They were forbidden by law to stay in Israel overnight, so they would either have to stay secretly in the boss's warehouse, or come back 60 kilometers each evening. Our father refused on principle to even consider working in Israel, even when there was no work in Nablus. I think that his time in prison changed him; he was less interested in politics after he was released the last time, and became pessimistic about change. But he wanted as little to do with Israelis as possible. Until his death in 1983, life for him revolved around the house, adding a new room, building a second floor, leaving something substantial for his family."

But some of the father's earlier activism had rubbed off. Abu Khalid worked closely with the Popular Front, one of the left-wing groupings within the PLO which attracted support both in the camps and among younger Palestinian intellectuals. Abu Khalid's talents as a writer and poet, usually written under a pseudonym, appeared in authorized and in underground publications. Several times, he had opportunities to work and live in Nablus or Jerusalem, but he preferred to stay in Balata. "Bal- ata is a much bigger world than many think. If I had the time to write novels, I would have the material for ten books about Balata. And not just a Palestinian Les Miserables. We have our own Huckleberry Finns and crazy dreamers. What living here gives me is faith in the act of recon- struction. That defeat is only the beginning of something new, which you then remake with your own hands. Look out into the streets. Don't you see hope in the way they walk, in their smiles? I waited a long time for this."

Indeed, about a week or so before, I had come across a patrol of Israeli soldiers arresting three young boys near the camp entrance. The soldiers had asked the boys to produce their identification cards, which every Pal- estinian over the age of 16 must carry at all times. Two of the boys' I.D. numbers appeared on the computer print-out security list the patrols carry with them. If someone's number is on the list, they are "bingo"- wanted for a security reason-and immediately arrested.

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VIGNETITES OF NABLUS 111

The two were led by soldiers to the camp entrance to await an army jeep. Their hands were tied behind their back with a plastic tie, which is the Israeli army's solution to the problem of shackling wrists that are too small for metal handcuffs. But it was the boys' "intifada strut" that caught my attention: long, rocking strides with the head held back, so different from their pedestrian gait a few minutes before. One of the youth was cuffed on the head by a soldier. As I was admonishing the military officer for allowing his soldiers to strike prisoners, I recalled an Israeli journalist's comment about the army's strategy to end the intifada. The army's driving purpose, he wrote, was "to wipe the smile from the face of Palestinian youth."

In the daylight, the Israeli military headquarters in Nablus is a squat, massive compound, with its stark, yellow stucco exterior ringed with barbed-wire, watchtowers, and electronic fencing. The compound was originally built by the British army in a classic quadrangle design, and uniformly reproduced throughout the old British Middle East. What saves the headquarters from utter sterility is the human activity: Israeli soldiers loafing in the compound yard, or streaming in and out of the entrance in jeeps and troop trucks; and Palestinians, under the shade of a tin shelter outside the compound entrance, talking in quiet voices to pass the hours while waiting for an army functionary to endorse a document or confirm a relative's arrest.

But by nightfall, all life has fled. High-intensity lights glow hard upon the yellow stucco, bathing the compound in an incandescent gloominess that sets it apart from the surrounding, darkened Arab neighborhoods. Whenever the soldiers patrolling inside the compound turned towards the lights, their faces and hands became chalk-pale.

Late one evening in early October, I was waiting outside the compound entrance for Captain Rami [not his real name], so that we could negotiate the terms for a burial. Earlier that evening, Israeli soldiers hid- ing in a commandered Arab van parked on a side street in a Nablus quarter had opened fire upon a group of Palestinian youths who were spray- painting nationalist slogans on neighborhood walls. One of the bullets hit Ghassan Hudhud in the side. As he fled towards a nearby orchard, he came across soldiers dressed in civilian clothes. Taking them for Palestini- ans, he shouted to them that he was wounded and needed help. The soldiers instead shot Hudhud in the face and chest, killing him instantly.

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His body was then loaded into the van and taken to the military headquarters, where his brother later identified him by his sneakers, his face being beyond recognition.

When Captain Rami finally appeared, he made it clear that there really wasn't very much to negotiate. I had dealt with Rami-a career army officer and a Druze-on other occasions, and found him to be a rare Israeli officer who tried to accommodate international observers. To- night, however, he had orders. No more than ten people at the burial, no women, and the body would not be released until midnight.

I explained the terms to the gathering of Hudhud's family and friends, and told them that these conditions were fairly standard for military-con- trolled burials. A further discussion with the captain upped the permitted number of mourners to twelve, but that was the only concession. So, with an hour to wait, the mourners fell into smaller groups to recount the events of the evening, or to take turns comforting an inconsolable brother. Together with a colleague I wandered among the mourners, taking statements from witnesses to the shooting in order to prepare a report.

Hudhud's body was released by the military around 12:30 A.M. The mourners were all squeezed into the back of a pick-up truck, with the body wrapped in a bloody shroud on the floor between them. Captain Rami's jeep led a vehicle convoy of soldiers, mourners and international observers through the deserted streets to the Western Cemetery. At the entrance, the soldiers left their jeeps idling and gathered into small groups, but did not enter the cemetery. I had been driving at the back of the convoy, so by the time I parked my car, the mourners had already entered into the cemetery with the body. Hoping that the presence of an international obsever would allow a quiet funeral, I followed.

Inside, towering pine trees blocked out the moonlight. Even waiting a few minutes for my eyes to adjust to the pitch-black didn't help, so I stum- bled my way to the far side of the cemetery. There the mourners were holding flashlights over the gravesite as two of Hudhud's brothers dug with a shovel and pick. One of the cemetery attendants set up an arc lamp, casting the gravesite in long streaks of light and shadow. Once I adjusted my eyes again, this time to the light, I noticed close to forty mourners. Most of them had apparently jumped a fence at the rear of the cemetery, secure in the knowledge that Israeli soldiers would not enter a darkened cemetery on enemy turf.

Beside the graveside lay Hudhud's body, with three or four men gathered around. The shroud had been pulled back, one of the men was

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VIGNEFTES OF NABLUS 1 13

washing Hudhud's shattered face, and the others were holding his stiff- ened hands and speaking to him in a sentimental yet earnest way: "Ya Habibi (my loved one), Allah will receive you in glory. Your blood will water the land and cleanse it." Some of the older mourners were standing around the grave, erect, their heads bowed and their hands turned up- right in front of them, praying.

While the shroud was pulled back, I was unable to look at his face, so I gazed instead at his high-ankle sneakers and rolled-up pant legs. Twelve or so hours before, he had laced his sneakers up the same way we all do, and now the lacing would last him forever. Then, a shout snapped me out of my reverie; the two brothers announced that the grave was pre- pared and called for the body. The solemnity vanished. A loud, melodic chant from the Quran was started up, interspersed with shouts for ven- geance or remembrance. There was no coffin. Hudhud was being buried in the clothes he died in, covered only by the bloody shroud. The brothers lowered Hudhud's body into the burial pit, and placed concrete slabs over it before refilling the hole with earth. During the refilling, the mourners' chanting became more intense, if more disjointed, and a Pales- tinian flag, forbidden by Israeli military decree in the occupied territories, was unfurled and waved.

The rising noise must have attracted the attention of the soldiers, because an army jeep, parked at the entrance to the cemetery, began flashing its headlights off and on, a signal to end the funeral. The mourners showed no sign of breaking off the ceremony, so on the third flashing of lights, I walked ahead to let an impatient Captain Rami know that the mourners were returning. As the procession filed out of the cemetery a few minutes later, I recounted the mourners: twelve. The rest must have left as they arrived, over the back wall and into the night. "In the dark- ness," one of the shabab had said at the funeral, "lie the colors of hope."

* * * a

Abu Khalid is no stranger to Israeli jails. His most recent stint was a six-month term in 1988. He was arrested at 2 A.M. "The soldiers sur- rounded the house, smashed opened the front door, and marched through. They dumped my library on the floor, destroyed some furniture, and thoroughly frightened everybody in the house. The whole neighborhood was up."

Abu Khalid was not tried, or even charged with an offense. Rather, he was kept under "administrative detention," which allows the military

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to hold a Palestinian for six months (since changed to one year) without charges or access to the legal process. More than 8,000 Palestinians have been in administrative detention since the beginning of the intifada, along with 50,000 Palestinians detained under other procedures.

"In Jneid Prison [on the western outskirts of Nablus], I was beaten and, for a couple of hours, they put a hood over my head while I was being interrogated. They wanted a confession out of me that I did this or that. I was very frightened while I was hooded, because you didn't know when and where they were going to hit you again. Someone in my family sent a lawyer to seek bail. That wasn't successful, of course, but it had the effect of stopping the beating."

Abu Khalid was later transferred to Ketziot, a large tent and barbed- wire prison in the desert near Gaza that had been set up to hold many of the administrative detainees of the intifada. "Life was both better and worse there, in comparison to Jneid. We weren't in cells, we could wander around the prison grounds, meet and talk politics. We organized study groups, and I also taught English. There were too many of us for the guards to do anything but watch over us.

"But, while beatings were infrequent, it was a miserable place to be. Part of my time there was in the summer. The heat was unbearable, the drinking water was putrid, and we had baths only every ten days or so. But, overall, morale was high. With universities shut down and the news- papers censored, it's in the prisons where the most important political debates take place."

Back in Balata, Abu Khalid has lots of time to write. While he still has his teaching job, the schools are often shut by curfews or military orders. What does he write? "Mostly poetry and some popular polemics. I'm hoping to write some short stories soon about how the intifada has changed life in the camp." His older daughter was married last summer in the kind of modest ceremony that characterizes the intifada's ethos of austerity. She is now expecting his first grandchild, the beginning of the third generation of his family to be born in Balata.

"These youth who are throwing stones, and who run the Popular Committees, I taught them in grade school. But I didn't have to teach them to fight. The occupation did that. They know who they are. They know they are Palestinians long before they even get to school. Ask any child here in the camp where he is from. He won't say 'Balata,' even though he's spent his whole life there. He'll tell you 'Haifa' or 'Acre' or some village in the Galilee, that his grandparents fled forty years ago. With roots like that, olive trees don't blow over very easily."

Dow


ay 2020

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Vignettes of Nablus · and Ibal, sprawling over the landscape like sleeping giants. Today, I am making one of my final trips to Nablus. October is an exhilarating time to travel through