This text was written following three trips to occupied Palestine and Israel, the last dating from 2009, during Operation “Cast Lead”. He does not want to justify the blood that is shed. Everyone has the right to security, to dignity, Israelis and Palestinians alike. But for the blood to stop flowing, we must try to understand.
There are people on the other side of my TV who are suffocating. During my stays, I learned their first name. I knew their songs in cafes, their jokes and their stories. They are rarely explosive, their stories… They don’t tell about the dead children.
Everyone here knows that. Mohamed, not the prophet, the hairdresser, the one who tells stories and sings at the Ramallah café, Mohamed changes the subject. In the evening, there are crowds to hear him sing. THE checkpoints and barbed wire won’t change anything. Neither do treaties. The people at the café don’t believe it anymore. Nor to the Palestinian Authority, for that matter.
They only believe in Mohamed the hairdresser. The one who has a photo in his wallet, that of a woman in a bikini. It’s his wife, he says. But we all know… and we don’t say anything. Mohamed is a barbershop prophet and the wallet woman, a hero. She is blonde.
And Mohamed tells another story. We smoke, we take a sip of tea, we swallow a pistachio. He always sings the same song, day after day, during the occupation.
And since I’m here, they all get involved. They occupy everything, they tell me. They occupy our travels with checkpoints. More than 500 checkpoints in the West Bank. For decades. Vegetables, fruits, engine parts, curly. Patients, doctors, humanitarian workers, observers, journalists, repressed people, the checkpoint is closed.
They occupy our families: 8,000 Palestinians detained in Israeli prisons, including 300 minors. Forty days of interrogation on average before going before a judge.
They occupy our homes. Tens of thousands of them, destroyed. Hundreds shaved every year.
They occupy the water, divert the Jordan. And the largest artesian wells in the northern West Bank are now on the other side of the wall.
They occupy our land, our olive trees. Hundreds of thousands of them beheaded for the construction of the wall, for everything, for nothing, we don’t know, we don’t dare to ask. Eight meters high, the wall, 710 kilometers long. He enters the land. Qalqiliya is literally surrounded. To the north, the wall. To the south, the wall. To the west, the wall. To the east, there is only one way out, barbed wire and a turret.
In the turret, behind sunglasses, a young, nervous soldier. Behind him, the world. They occupy all of Gaza. No one comes in or out. There is the Jabālīyah refugee camp: 116,000 inhabitants over 1.4 km2. The highest population density in the world. In 2009, they bombed everything. Even three UN schools, 42 dead in one of them. Even the UN headquarters and its warehouses; 1,300 Gazans died in 22 days, the majority civilians, including more than 400 children.
They occupy our mountains with their colonies, hope with their colonies, travel by roads to the colonies, rage with the thought that we will never have a country because there are too many colonies. These colonies which give birth to radicals that even the occupying army cannot control. In the West Bank, 250 settlements which occupy more than 40% of the territory and which are home to more than 700,000 settlers.
They control our death. The walls are covered with posters of martyrs, children, women, men. The posters are renewed.
We are not blind. We can see on the other side of the wall. The grass is actually greener. This is the only benefit of the wall, clumsily hiding the abundance of the occupant. The sound of his swimming pool. It doesn’t matter that the UN declares these settlements illegal, and so does the wall. It doesn’t matter that the IMF deplores the economic impact of closures on health, that the four Geneva conventions are ignored, that more than 80 UN resolutions are not respected. Nobody is outraged.
What remains in the womb of mothers? Between the Red Sea and the Dead Sea, they learn to live without leaven, without land, without tomorrow. Life is nothing more than smoke in a pipe, just a bubble from God’s hookah. And little by little, because of curfews and patrols, checkpoints and bombings, the streets are empty.
And the mosques are filling up. Mohamed the hairdresser becomes Mohamed the prophet. He stops singing folklore. He sings the praises of God and the M16, he tears the photo from his wallet and makes the lady in the bikini wear a veil. And the others listen to him. His children will have the green headband of jihad on their foreheads. If you want them to stop killing in the name of life, make them feel like they have one.