Our flesh and their bones

By Samah Jabr*

Palestine Times of London/ March 2007

While driving me to the airport at 4 in the morning, my taxi driver showed some hesitance taking one street; he seemed confused and told me, “How tedious they are, those Israelis. They start by opening one street; if they find any Jewish bones, they stop. They cannot continue; their bones are so dear, it is disrespectful to touch them. They change the entire plan and open a new street.”

As soon as he finished, we were at Mode’en checkpoint separating the villages of Ramallah from the surrounding Israeli areas. There I saw the longest human line at a checkpoint. Several hundred dishevelled Palestinian men were waiting in a line shivering from the cold. “Those are labourers waiting for the checkpoint to open at 8 a.m. to go to work in Tel Aviv,” the driver tells me. That was our flesh stake; I’m haunted by such a scene.

At the airport, on my way to Boston to speak at MIT and Boston College on the topic of the ‘Occupation and the Mind,’ after a long interrogation and an exaggerated checking of my luggage, a security woman asked me to finally undress for a physical check-up. I argued that this procedure is not being done to others and that the machine is enough to detect any suspicious object I might be carrying on my body. The woman went to her supervisors and three of them came threatening that I would not be allowed to take the flight if I did not comply with the procedure. I was forced to comply, and I was angry; intellectualization is my defence mechanism in such events. I thought that she, having a job of discriminately undressing certain people, was in a worse position than me—having my flesh exposed for “security measures.”

I returned back to Palestine to observe an immediate reaction to the signing of the Mecca agreement by representatives of the Palestinian factions Fatah and Hamas, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and exiled Hamas political chief Khaled Misha’al, to form a national unity government; there were festivities among Palestinians, especially in Gaza, which suffered the worst events of internal violence.

The Palestinians are desperate for the government to come together smoothly and to succeed. The people hope that as well as bringing a halt to the fighting, the agreement will bring an end to a year-long international embargo against the Palestinians and ease the extreme living conditions in the West Bank and the other occupied territories.

But just because we hope does not mean that our hopes will come true. I personally find no reason to celebrate. Should we celebrate that we needed to go to Mecca to agree to stop killing each other? Forming a national government is old news for all of us; since the elections, Prime Minister Ismail Haniyyeh has been convincing people from other factions to join in the government, but they have shrugged their shoulders to him. Now that the regional political mood allows it, the Arab big brothers are pushing so that there is an agreement to a sharing of government posts. Still, there is no agreement on a governmental programme that leaves the door open for more conflicts. Moreover, the agreement does not tackle the causes of the violence in the Palestinian streets or prepare for a new kind of Palestinian leadership that can muster politics at an internal and a worldly level.

Just before people could express their cheer, the ominous signs came back. The Quartet said it would wait for the government to be formed before making its assessment. The U.S. was unimpressed. It is demanding an explicit statement of recognition of Israel. Israel and the United States have rebuffed the agreement; Israeli government spokeswoman Miri Eisin said the conditions for an end to the freeze had not changed.

Both Israel and the United States are not interested in peace; they are only interested in wasting time, hoping things can change to benefit their colonial projects in the region.

And the choice of Jerusalem at this moment was a strong enough answer to the symbolism of the meeting in Mecca, within sight of Islam's holiest place that has a profound meaning and effect for Muslims everywhere. Israel has the habit of giving such responses to Arab initiatives; remember their answer to the initiative of the Arab Summit in Beirut?

The very bones and stones in Jerusalem are political weapons in the age-old struggle for possession of the Holy Land. The current row over excavation work just outside one of the gates, the Maghrabi or Moors Gate, progressing to the compound of the Noble Sanctuary, the Haram, is evidence of that. Israel has always linked archaeology and politics. Especially after 1967, the Israelis made an intensive effort to dig into history to provide evidence that the Jews had been there and to use that as a pretext to their claimed right to still be there. "They were digging for God and country," as some of their leaders would say. Evidence of Jewish remains in the region of the Haram will be used as a pretext for the many who wait for the day when the Third Temple will rise on that site.

The reason for the protest does not really have much to do with archaeology, in fact. It is a protest about presence and control. The Palestinians and the wider Muslim world have an objection to anything the Israelis do that touches the Haram. Such work is seen as symbolizing a threat to Muslim identity and a rallying point for Palestinians to express their desire for their own space, their own State.

While for Palestinians, the United Nations and most of the world the Old City, which lies in East Jerusalem, is occupied territory, Israel arrogantly acts as if this landscape, without any other argument, is an undivided, eternal part of their capital. So the digging is one more colonial project, this time against a very sensitive place—the third holiest site in Islam—and at a very sensitive time. Palestinians are trying to pull themselves together to form a united front in their confrontation with Israel and the effort to end its occupation of their land.

So the embargo continues, because depriving us of basic needs is effective with respect to inciting fierce clashes that seem to be edging this society toward civil war. The roots of factional dispute are still there.

As for my work, we are back to striking since mid-February. The main gate of the Health Clinics in Ramallah is closed by 11 a.m. by the decision of the uni-factional-controlled worker’s syndicate. There is no option for those who oppose the strike to continue working after 11; so babies are left without vaccines, chronic patients without medications, etc, until somehow the government overcomes the embargo and pays us our salaries for the whole past year! If this condition were taking place in the Israeli community, the world would have cried: ‘Holocaust!’ Why? Because their ancient bones are deemed more important than our vibrant hearts and flesh.

The misery in Palestine fails to be a good enough ‘thriller’ for the people of the world who get, with time, more and more desensitized to human suffering. Our stories with regard to lack of jobs, food and medicine are regarded as ordinary news; nothing less than the images of Abu Ghreib or the film of the execution of Saddam or the cries of raped Iraqi women can reach the threshold of the Western human consciousness; maybe not even that. The more our exposure to man-made cruelty in this region, the more numb and apathetic we become in our safety zone. I wonder who among us is more dead than the other.

In this atmosphere, Israel promotes itself as a free and civilized nation. An Israeli newspaper report earlier in February explained how Israeli ecologists protest the Wall’s interference in the natural inbreeding of wild animals and advise constructing small holes in the wall to allow animals on the two sides of the Wall to meet. My mind goes to the thousands of Palestinians who the Wall prevents them from getting married to people outside their village or town because they cannot bear the difficulty of moving in and out or the constant threat of separation when the gates will eventually be closed. That is also one of the demands of human flesh.

In this total absence of a political horizon, and the extreme difficulties of everyday life, I feel that Israel is stealing our words, in addition to everything else, so that we will be silenced or radicalized.

Repeatedly you hear of Palestinians, but you do not hear them. Media reports typically slander their reputation, character, culture and religious principles, or treat them as mere statistics. Palestinians should at least exercise their right to speak for themselves.

Our challenge is to keep our discourse and our ability to communicate to tell the people that Palestinians are ordinary people who have arms and legs and flesh and blood and hearts and souls like everyone else. We are good and bad, smart and stupid like every other community. We are no better than any other nation, but, certainly, we are not worse than others, too. We hate sometimes and love so often; we have no wish to play the heroes of the victims on the stage of war; and like you, we want peace and dignity, too.

The flesh is demanding. It needs food, water, shelter, sleep and companionship. But the spirit also exists, even without meeting the needs of the flesh. We sometimes don’t recognize it until our flesh is humbled. The spirit is still high in Palestine. We can share, help a friend, appreciate honesty, love others without ulterior motives, seek fairness and desire a better world.

The Palestinians are generally spiritual; here the flesh does not rule! Deprive our flesh; our spirits will grow stronger and will turn our strife into glory, honour and peace—the peace of the spirits of those who truly believe.


*Samah Jabr is a psychiatrist living in Jerusalem.