It is not possible to be sane in an insane place. When I was in occupied Palestine, I had only two moments when I felt peaceful, serene, and sane. One was at the museum dedicated to the poet Mahmoud Darwish, where he is buried in Ramallah. A grand staircase of terraced limestone slabs, gardens on each terrace, leads up out of the chaos of Ramallah to his simple tomb. In the midst of intense chaos there is silence, and the people that I was with instinctively laid down on the stones to have a rare rest under the trees. Next to his simple but tall tomb is an inscription that reads, “from Palestine to Mahmoud Darwish.” Inside is a small room with a collection of his papers, his desk, small effects, pictures, and a video streaming of him reading, in Arabic of course, to a huge audience in a coliseum somewhere. Maybe he is reading this verse, maybe not:
I belong to there. I have many memories I was born as everyone is born,
I have a mother, a house with many windows, brothers, friends, and a prison cell
with a chilly window! I have a wave taken up by seagulls, a panorama of my own.
I have a saturated meadow. In the deep horizon of my word, I have a moon,
a bird’s sustenance, and an immortal olive tree.
There, one could feel a calm sense of purpose, beauty, and history.
The other place where calm descended over me momentarily was Al-Haram al-Ibrahimi mosque in Hebron. I was there with a delegation of teachers from the United States. To get there, we passed through a military checkpoint that reminded me, in scope, of Union Station in Los Angeles. There was a long concrete hallway with fluorescent lights and several sets of gates, where there was a constant buzzing of alert sirens, like you hear in the airport if you pass through a metal detector and accidentally set the alarm off. Except these sirens are constant and unending. At the end of the long hall an Israeli soldier with a rifle asked us what religion we were. We all said Christian, although this was a lie in almost all cases, in different ways. Jews and Jewish tourists go on one side of the holy place (which some call the Tomb of the Patriarchs) and Muslims and non-Jewish tourists on the other side, where we went.
Once we passed through the checkpoint, we could lay our hands on bricks erected in the first century, and walk on stone so old that it was worn soapy and slick. Inside the mosque, we donned coverings that all tourists wear, and when I took off my shoes I never wanted to put them back on. The cool stones and layers of lush red carpets soothed my sore ankles and legs, and I got the sense that a person could stay here forever to get away from what boiled outside. And indeed, as our guide H, from the Hebron Defense Committee, explained, the site had been a holy site for four thousand years, since the time of the prophet Abraham, who used the caves for tombs. The first structure was built by Herod, and successive structures were built layer by layer, one on top of the other, by Constantine, Muslim sultans, Crusaders, and then the sultan Saladin al-Ayubbi. H highlighted for us stones left thanking the Mamluks, slaves who had helped to build the mosque.
Luckily, H had brought his son Adam, who darted among us mischievously, mocking his father’s pedantic style with a missing-tooth grin. He showed us where we could spin the centuries-old wooden dowels on various ornamental carvings, and helped his father to pull back the rugs where the stairs to the original tomb had been cemented over. He sat in nooks and crannies, including the sacred mihrab, and read books for awhile, while hearing the same story over again, and then returned his attention and his contagious smile to us. The walls, inscribed all over in stone and golden writing, were themselves layered history, and the comforting serenity of time draped in thick green tapestries around us. We just wanted to sit down and be quiet on the large rugs. People prayed beside us. The tomb of Sarah was visible behind bullet-proof glass and green steel caging.
Then H showed us where the bullet holes had chipped away at the Roman stone when a settler entered the mosque in 1994 and emptied several clips into the crowded room of praying people. His comments were shock out of nowhere. Not as much of a shock as the bullets had been to the praying people, though.
On February 24, 1994, Baruch Goldstein, a Brooklyn-born Jewish man, walked right past the Israeli military checkpoint that day with the gun slung over his shoulder. He opened fire, killing and wounding 150 Muslims. He changed the clip on the semi-automatic several times to fire off twenty nine rounds. Fleeing Palestinians were prevented from leaving, their escaping bodies strewn on the cool stone. Goldstein was eventually disarmed and killed by survivors, and became a martyr to many settlers in the West Bank and those subscribing to his right-wing Kach movement.
After the incident, Palestinians were locked down under curfew and militia law for forty days to prevent reprisals. This was during the time that issues in Hebron were on the table at the Camp David peace agreement brokered by Bill Clinton, later known as Oslo. Adam, who I think was eight or nine years old, fingered the bullet holes before darting back through our group to show us a few things. In the Accords, the city would be divided into H1 and H2, one sector theoretically (“theoretically” meaning: like the treaties with Natives in the U.S.) under the control of the Palestinian authority. Huge barriers and military checkpoints were erected between the two.
On the way out, H showed us the tomb of Joseph, who had been a slave in Israel, behind a locked metal door in the Jewish part of the building. “Locked up in life, locked up in death,” he said, and grinned. We left quickly, although I would have liked to stay for longer.
We passed through a series of metal turnstyles. At the bottom of the hill was a military station where two young soldiers, around the age of 18, lounged with their rifles slung around them. One of them was a blonde woman, and when I saw her my poisonous thoughts started. She was the age of my former students when I taught high school, and the thoughts began like this: If she didn’t have that gun on her I could teach her a lesson. I started imagining ways to disarm her, and what I would do then. As it turns out, although I didn’t know it at the time, thinking this thought was sort of like being an alcoholic and taking the first sip of alcohol. The downward spiral began. But I didn’t know that yet.
We walked down a desolate street with military checkpoints at both ends. In the middle was an old stone house, which predated the occupation by several decades if not a century. On either end of the stone building, several rooms, including the ground floor, had been taken over by Israeli settlers. These living quarters flew the Israeli flag prominently out of the windows, and had tricycles and strollers out front. In between them, accessed by a yellow metal ladder baking in the sun that led to a window converted to a door, lived a Palestinian family. A metal grate on top of the makeshift door used by the Palestinian family protected it from things thrown at it and on them by the settlers living on the floor above. No one was on the street, besides soldiers.
At the end of the street, past another military station, we saw a school behind a ten-foot metal fence with another four feet of barbed wire on top. The writing was in Arabic. “This school is targeted by the settlers,” said H, and I wondered what “targeted” meant, but by that point I was not asking any questions, having lost the capability. Right next to the school you could duck through an old destroyed stone doorway, and if you were willing to walk across piles of shit and garbage, you could see a beautiful old reservoir. The day was boiling and the water was deep, with reeds. It used to be a water source for the city. But it had been fouled by the settlers. It wasn’t clear whether the shit in the path leading to the reservoir was human shit or animal shit, but as soon as I started to wonder which it was, I almost vomited. I was having digestive problems already anyway, and felt sick to my stomach. By the next day, many people on the delegation would be sick. Settlers with yellow license plates came peeling around corners, speeding aggressively past us and glaring maliciously. They didn’t slow down at the checkpoints nor to watch for foot traffic.
At this point, a red film made its way over my eyes. H walked us to some of the few shops that hadn’t closed. All the shops in Hebron have yellow metal sliding doors over them, and while this was once a bustling trade city- perhaps the capital of all the trade in the West Bank- most of them now remained closed, even on a Monday at mid-day. Some had been shut by the authorities for lack of permits, Hisham explained, but mostly they were closed due to lack of business. The narrow shops that were open featured blown glass, catching the light and spraying prisms and green, blue, red, and yellow everywhere. Wine glasses, water glasses, strings of evil eye decorations hung by long ropes. Evil eyes everywhere that didn’t seem too effective in warding off evil. Adam ran between us again, selecting things for us to buy with his carved pumpkin, gape-toothed grin. He was friendly with all the shop owners and they gave him little things, like bottles of water, and in one case a toy. He made sarcastic comments in Arabic that were somehow decipherable as good-humored teasing toward father, and he pinched Sallie’s cheek when she bent over.
We walked further on, but were stopped by another young soldier, probably Ethiopian, at another military station. We couldn’t continue down the same street because H and Adam were Palestinian. A young Palestinian woman in a rush, easily identifiable because of her red hijab, almost rushed past the military station on her way to somewhere in the neighborhood. But she was stopped by the soldier and turned back, at the invisible line down the middle of the neighborhood. The soldier got onto a military radio, the likes of which I’ve only seen on old television shows. She argued, sort of, for a few minutes, and then H stepped in to explain to her an alternate route to where she was trying to go. “She is confused or doesn’t know the rules,” he explained to our group. Such ignorance can cost you your life. Several settlers brushed past the station without stopping, walking briskly and glaring at us. One walked very close to me and I almost wished that he brushed into me, because I knew exactly what I would do.
At this point the red film over my eyes thickened like hot coagulating blood, and I could no longer hear what H was saying. There was buzzing in my ears. In my imagination this happened: a settler bumped into me as he was walking aggressively and maliciously by, and I attacked him, scratching his face, and then beating him senseless. Words started to flow through my mind, words that I had both heard and uttered on basketball courts, on the streets of the United States when my friends and I had been harassed or catcalled. Words that might have come up in counter-demonstrations against right-wing vigilantes in the U.S., and in my imagination toward people, both familiar and authoritarian, who had been aggressive toward me. Words like
I got no problem f**ing someone up;
Go ahead and bump into me and see what happens;
Keep looking at me, motherf**r, I got something to show you;
There’s pretty much no one here that’s going to be able to hold me back;
Who do you think you are you disgusting little piece of shit? Put down your gun and then we’ll see what’s up;
If you weren’t protected by the military/police I would drag you out of your car and… the words started to loop uncontrollably until I decided that I needed to say them out loud to my companions. I felt that I was rapidly losing control and was at serious risk of committing violence. I told people.
Reina grabbed on to me and held me as we walked. You’re too little to hold me back, Reina, I either thought or said. Samia shook me by the shoulders, and said, “This is why we run every morning, snap out of it.”
“Am I going insane?” I asked.
“You’re not insane, but you can’t do these things,” Jody said.
“I’m not going to do it. I’m not going to do it because I know the Palestinian brothers and sisters are asking me not to,” I said. And after saying the things out loud, it was marginally better. I could hear again. The red film over my eyes receded some.
We sat in the shade on a corner with a huge checkpoint where the metal had been covered over with wood made to look like the entrance to a nice Japanese garden or something. But really, this is the checkpoint that hundreds of kids needed to cross to get to school everyday. Often, they bunched up and waited for hours as each individual’s backpack was searched. This often meant missing critical examinations, or missing school entirely. If a child got impatient and threw a rock at a soldier, then, H explained, then came the tanker truck with the skunk water. The words “skunk water” rang ominously in my ears. A huge tanker with a water cannon sprays out fluid with a worse smell than the smell of sewage. “Once I got one drop on my shoulder, one drop!” H explained, “and I was disgusted by my own self for a week.” By this point being disgusted by oneself had taken on special meaning for me. “Imagine being a child and getting sprayed by it.” When the skunk water truck came out, children scattered, and school was over for the day. On this very corner had been a medical center, two photography studios (the faded sign of one, with the Mac symbol on it, still hung precariously from a building), a vegetable market, a busy bus stop, and a Saudi travel agent. They were all shuttered, because there was no more business. Plus, the neighborhood had been effectively fenced in. While this had been a part of the silk road, and well into the 1990s a center for trade, now there were no buses going anywhere, no access to markets or travel even in the West Bank.
We walked to the central souk, and H became nervous because a big demonstration was about to start. Palestinians were going to demonstrate against the occupation, and H was worried that we would get caught up in it, and possibly be targeted by the Israeli military if we were expressing solidarity. I wanted to march, but the consensus of H and the group was, “absolutely not.” If we got into the demonstration as some of us hoped, we would be disoriented, and a liability. Here again, most of the shops were locked up behind yellow metal sliding doors- a hint that they could, perhaps, open again one day. We had to hurry past the stalls of spices, clothing, fresh pressed juice, small toys, and jewelry. But here, nets spread above the shops to catch all the garbage thrown down onto them by the Israeli settlers in the appropriated buildings above. We looked up to see what kind of trash was being thrown down- soiled tissue, cardboard boxes, and pounds and pounds and pounds of plastic. We stopped only for a moment at a school in the middle of the souk, built for settler children literally on top of an Palestinian school of the past. Because it was built on top of history, it loomed menacingly over the market. Palestinians lived on the ground, where the sky was barely visible, and a whole other universe of settlers lived above in castles in the sky. War-zone castles that probably imprisoned their residents like Rapunsel in her castle, although it was literally impossible to imagine, from there underneath, what life was like for beings from this other world. In the middle of the school yard was a guard tower, where a soldier (again, probably of African origin) stood with his machine gun. This time, the machine gun was trained squarely on us. The tour ended at a major passageway, that had once connected the marketplace to major bus routes, which had now been walled off and enclosed in barbed wire. It smelled like human waste.
Unlike the residents of Hebron, we got on a bus and drove away. On the bus, Reina said to me, “Back there, that kind of language you were using, I know what that is when it comes up for me. It’s internalized male toxicity.” And she was right. We talked about our upbringing some. But this was a particular flavor of male toxicity- the kind brewed in a soup of colonial violence back home. There’s no way that I got out of control violent like that unless it was personal. Unless it had to do with me as a settler in the occupied United States.
There’s always the temptation to out-tough the tough guy, to kick the ass of the oppressor. For a few fleeting moments in human history, the balance of forces make this actually possible. At other times, these types of thoughts can jeopardize your sanity.
Maybe, at his grave and museum in Ramallah a world away from Hebron, in the grainy video Darwish was reading these words, but I really don’t know, all I could do was sit and watch him, enchanted:
The wound does not need its poet to paint the blood of death like a pomegranate!
On the roof of neighing, I will cut thirty openings in the meaning.
so that you may end one trail only so as to begin another.
Whether this earth comes to an end or not, we’ll slog over this endless road.
More tense than a bow. Our steps, be arrows. Where were we a moment ago?