[mobglob-discuss] FW: [palsolidarity] The Message / Swept Clean

Tue Jan 21 19:32:59 PST 2003

-----Original Message-----
From: Huwaida Arraf [mailto:huwaidaa at yahoo.com]
Sent: Tuesday, January 21, 2003 4:22 PM
To: palsolidarity at yahoogroups.com
Subject: [palsolidarity] The Message / Swept Clean
1) The Message _ Susan Barclay
2) Swept Clean _ Annie Higgins
==========================

The Message
Date: January 19, 2003
Author: Susan Barclay
Area: Az'mout Village, Nablus, Palestine

Today the children, women and men of Az'mout village came together in a
demonstration against the massive trench created by IOF (Israeli Occupation
Forces) that completely cuts the village (and two others) off from all
access to the city of Nablus.  Emergency vehicles can not pass, people are
routinely denied the right to go to the hospital, students can not go to
school in the city and many men are being detained each and every day by the
APC or tank which creates a checkpoint.

These villages are literally being strangled as their inhabitants are denied
the right to food, to movement, to work, and to emergency services.  Many
children came to confront soldiers who occupy a checkpoint daily right in
between these villages and Nablus, blocking all possible routes into the
city and stopping and detaining at will the residents.  The soldiers at this
checkpoint are known to be particularly aggressive.  One man from the
village died because an ambulance could not reach him and another man was
beaten and hospitalized this week.

Today the school counselor asked a pertinent question that began the
protest: "If this situation is tolerable for you (speaking to soldiers) as a
human being, than we will accept it.  Is this humane?"

Silence followed for a minute, and then a discussion began during which the
villagers demanded their basic human rights.

Without doubt, the village will continue to fight for the right to live.

I stood in clump of children, my hands held by young girls on both sides,
and li tened to this articulate young man speak to the soldiers about the
injustice in this land: the confiscation of land by a nearby settlement, the
ongoing curfew, the systematic denial of human rights, and the trench; a man
to which the soldiers found very little to say.  As I listened, charmed by
his way and his arguments, one key organizer of the demonstration handed me
a piece of paper on which she had written things like:

"We want peace and life.  We want a simple life.  We want an end to the
occupation.  We don't want war."

These are the people of this land.  This is their message.

 =================

Swept Clean

Date: January 18, 2003
Area: Jenin

Author: Annie Higgins

The idea of Sharon with broom in hand is comical enough, but the suggestion
that he sweep the rooms of the Islamic Center that his soldiers left in
shambles made me laugh. My friend, who conducts Qur'anic study sessions,
always manages to find humor in the midst of the bleakest conditions. Her
laughter itself is a resistance against the gravity of oppression. The
Center's rooms have chairs, a cabinet with copies of the Qur'an, and floors
full of dust. The Army appropriated the computers that had been donated for
the advancement of the Refugee Camp community. Still the ladies come to
learn, to consider new ideas, compare interpretations, and especially to
address issues relating to martyrdom, remarriage of young widows, visiting
graves, handling grief, and pondering heaven. I take my turn with an infant
who is energetically doing calisthenics on my lap, and I comment on his
strength. "That's because he is from the Camp," beams his mother,
articulating the resiliency of Camp identity.

At home, the Qur'an teacher laughs as a sock attacks us when a coil of wire
it is caught in springs out of reach. "Sharon doesn't want us to go visiting
on the holiday/eid; he just wants us to work at home." Later, neighbors
chide me for not visiting during the three-day holiday of Eid al-Fitr, but
how could I abandon my friend whose house was raided as soldiers searched
for a "wanted" family member? Instead of holiday baking, we face oil in the
salt and sugar, and the pantry's many treasures mixed with pots, pans, lamps
and implements. The kitchen is picture-perfect compared with the bedrooms
knee deep in clothes, clothespins, dismembered notebook pages, shoes,
jewelry, framed pictures, manicure sets, and artificial flowers all swirled
together in heaps. We concentrate on the kitchen, with her daughter Maryam
expelling us to do the final clean sweep, swooshing plenty of water with a
fan-shaped hand-held broom.

Sweeping is part of the rhythm of home life. After a meal you gather the
fragments of bread, just as Jesus' disciples did following the post-sermon
meal on the hillside, and then you sweep up the crumbs. Dry sweeping, wet
sweeping, inside sweeping, outside sweeping seem almost like reflexes, and
assure a constant orderliness in the home and on the street. The Israeli
soldiers are acquainted with the manners and methods of the people whose
lands they occupy. The incredible messes they so frequently produce, for no
security reason, seem to be a physical and spiritual attack on hearth and
home.

But sometimes they too fall into the rhythm of local order and orderliness.
A family in Jenin city tells that when soldiers left a building they had
been occupying, they disposed of their garbage and then swept all of the
apartments in the building. During that period, one of the homeowners had
passed by an alley after the evening/maghrib call to prayer, and saw an
Ethiopian soldier in uniform clearing the ground to pray. He confided to the
local Jenin resident, "Shhh, I am Muslim. Don't tell."

One day on an ambulance mission, we yield as a house-toppling Caterpillar
bulldozer passes through the Saha area near the Camp's entrance. It is
escorted by a tank in front, and an armored personnel carrier behind. The
flat top of the last vehicle is littered with stones, with an empty cola
bottle where you would expect a headlight. And there, tucked into a crevice
on top, is a handle-less broom. To clean up after the destruction? This
little reminder of home economics looks so foreign in the heaving parade of
metallic hardware, and so innocent with its blue, yellow, and red fringes.
It is quickly lost in the black smoke spewed out to mask the vehicle and
cause confusion.

Another day brings more tanks on a street nearby. Amidst the detritus the
tank has sucked into the street is a broom which has become part of the
clutter it might clear away. I restore its mission, walking toward the tank
and sweeping the street with ritual, rather than practical, motions. This
has little effect on the rubble in the steet, but delights the children who
cheer this gentle defiance of the tank's bullying. I hope that the tank's
soldiers will not burst a bullet hole in my bubble of whimsy, but there is
no guarantee of their sense of humor. Very soon the boys, who have been
fearlessly lobbing stones and trash at the tanks, call me back with
uncharacteristic urgency. They report excitedly that an international friend
has been wounded. I think they are joking but they insist that some of the
boys carried her to safety on a home-made stretcher. She was getting a few
small children off a street when a tank sniper shot her. A local journalist
confirms the news, and we find her in the Emergency Room at the hospital.
Minutes later, another foreigner is wheeled in, and we learn that UNRWA's
Jenin  Refugee Camp director, Iain Hook, has been killed.

The escalation of violence calls for heightened security measures, so I go
back into the street where tanks are facing off with children, and walk
toward the lead tank. The hatch is open, and I call out to the soldier,
"Don't shoot! They are children!" Am I expecting him to read my lips? The
noise of the tank is deafening, and behind it a mega-machine is idling with
a bass roar. It is the first time I have encountered a monster-size tank.
The soldier in the hatch waves me aside, but I remain like a fly on the
windshield. The monsters lurch forward and I take a few steps back, still
facing them, then pick up my pace, jogging backward. With both tanks coming
toward me in high gear, I take refuge against the wall of a house. I realize
it was a poor strategy to come close to the tanks and leave the children
behind. The tanks brush by, churning up more mud in a dirty sweep.

Clean sweeps and holiness are related in Semitic tongues. In Arabic, a
church is called "kanisa/swept place," just as a Jewish holy place is called
in Hebrew, "bayt kaneset."

The same word is found, with modified transliteration, in the familiar name
for the Israeli Parliament, the Knesset.

The morning prayer on the Eid al-Fitr holiday closing the month of Ramadan
was held on the barren ground of the former Hawashin neighborhood,
alarmingly obliterated in the April invasion. When I heard of the prayer
plans, I realized that the boys I had seen collecting stones were not
resupplying their munitions, but making a clean-swept place for this holy
day.

The image of Sharon sweeping an Islamic center  in a Refugee Camp is still
comical. But elections are coming up. Perhaps the Knesset could use
sweeping.

 Annie Higgins in Jenin, Occupied Palestine

 ==================
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