Passing pictures from captive Palestine

The lightning visit to occupied Palestine raises you many questions and pains, more than it provides you with answers. My arrival coincided with a severe cold wave that almost pierces the bones, the like of which the country had not seen in March for a hundred years. The homes here are not prepared for such cold, and the farmers these days are separated from the fire and the use of firewood, and what is added to it from the remnants of the olive yield after its pressing, and it is called locally “peat”, which was added to the wood and kept the fire for hours and spread warmth throughout the small houses. People have generally replaced it with electric or gas heaters, which are hardly enough for anyone who puts them directly in front of them. Try to scoop as much information as possible and meet as many stakeholders, activists and thinkers as possible, to understand the picture for what it is as possible.

settler violence

On Tuesday evening, after the Beersheba operation, which killed four Israelis, settlers spread across the West Bank smashing everything in their path. They attacked people, cars and homes, and sprayed nails in the roads. They spread out in villages, cities, and highways, carrying weapons under their dark-coloured coats. Their deployment was at night in order to spread a higher state of terror in villages and residential areas near settlements. My village has had its share of violence and destruction. They entered the village from the completely closed northern fringes, with the aim of isolating the village immediately in case of emergency. At the main and only entrance to the town, the village youth set up night watch shifts, starting at ten in the evening and ending with the dawn prayer. About ten young men gather at night, taking turns to guard. They stop any car arriving in town to ascertain the identity of its owner. But the settlers chose the closed northern outskirts, so they entered at midnight and started breaking with batons and iron bars the cars and glass windows on the main street. The number of cars that smashed reached 21, in addition to smashing the windows of a number of homes. The farce is that the army came hours later at the request of the municipal council, which is connected to the Palestinian Preventive Security, which in turn informs the Israeli side. The patrol arrives late to give the settlers enough opportunity to practice their terror.

frustration or apathy

The majority of Palestinians are outside the political equation. They are frustrated because the horizon is blocked and the windows of hope are closed. And the state of helplessness that the Palestinian cause is going through mainly as a result of the authority's practices, which have shortened its role in broad security coordination. Leadership that has nothing to do with people's concerns and suffering, in light of the outrageous high prices. The same prices are paid by the Palestinian and the Israeli, but the average income of the latter may reach ten times the income of the Palestinian. The authority is concerned with dividing positions and positions among those with influence and the sons and daughters of officials. It is a small country and there is no secret of corruption and corruption.

Instead of talking about resuming negotiations and returning to the cylinder of the two-state solution, we are talking here about economic peace, as it seems that there are elements of the leadership promoting this kind of poisonous peace. There are many manifestations of such a trend, such as increasing the number of work permits inside, facilitating the passage of workers through certain crossings that Israel overlooks, and increasing acceptance of “unification” cases for families, most of whom are residents of the United States, knowing that the occupation authorities come home to visit, not to settle. The permanent, and their children are already attached to American society more than their parents, but there are those who want to make themselves popular by distributing this limited number of family reunification cards. Things are going here with clear and sure steps towards preparing for the post-Abbas phase. The few activists in the Palestinian Authority areas are closely monitored by the security services, and those who are a heavyweight in the Palestinian arena are attacked.

Jerusalem and public parks

The greatest danger to Jerusalem is not the repeated storming of Al-Aqsa Mosque by settlers and extremists under the protection of the security forces, but rather Israel’s plan, which is now being implemented to establish a number of “national parks” around the Jerusalem wall, as they call them.

The national parks have been planned since 1974, and extend around the perimeter of the walls of Jerusalem on their outer side, and include large populated areas in the Wadi Hilweh neighborhood of Silwan. More than 5,000 Palestinians live in this neighborhood in more than 250 buildings containing more than 700 apartments. Since the 1990s, the political association “Elad” entrusted with managing the parks, and other associations in the neighborhood, have settled about 60 settler families, numbering about 300 people. The danger of these gardens is not only in what they swallow up Palestinian land, but also in the number of Palestinian monuments, cemeteries and residential neighborhoods that will be bulldozed. The Elad Association, in cooperation with the Ministry of Tourism and the Ministry of Environment, seeks to rehabilitate Jerusalem, in order to accommodate ten million tourists annually. The construction of a number of synagogues has begun, including a synagogue that competes in its size with the Dome of the Rock, to give the impression that the Jewish monuments are no less massive than the Islamic and Christian monuments.

The second serious project that the authorities are working on is the “Silicon Valley” in the Palestinian Wadi Joz area. The Israeli authorities have approved the establishment of a high-tech industrial zone in this area east of Jerusalem at a cost of more than 600 million dollars, as 250 thousand square meters of the project are allocated For real estate and high-tech companies, in addition to another 100,000 square meters divided for trade and hotels. Wadi al-Joz is considered an important economic and industrial center for the Palestinians in occupied Jerusalem, where there are more than two hundred establishments of car repair shops, mechanics, shops and other services.

My teacher Mahmoud Shukair

On every visit home, I resolved to meet my teacher at the secondary school in Ramallah, Mahmoud Shukair, may God grant him a long life. But the numerous concerns and visits to the country and writing overwhelm me, and it is impossible to meet. This time I decided to visit it first. I arranged a visit with him before I arrived in Palestine. I have always been a constant follower and admirer of his prolific production. He and the late Khalil Al-Sawahri were the two most influential teachers on me and an entire generation of graduates of the Hashemite High School in Ramallah. They had a great sense of patriotism and consciousness and wrote for the progressive magazine New Horizon. As for Al-Sawahri, I met him in Amman after he was expelled from occupied Palestine. As for Mahmoud Shukair “Abu Khaled,” I only had the opportunity to meet him last Monday at his home with his children and grandchildren in his beautiful town “Jabal Mukaber,” overlooking Jerusalem from above. It was an intimate meeting, in which we participated in our friend, lawyer Hassan Abadi from Haifa, who is known for his constant defense of the prisoners of freedom in the prisons of the apartheid regime. I was keen to hear details about his creations, which are embodied in more than 60 books, including a novel, a story, a play, and a script for serials, for which he deserved this huge amount of honors, covering an entire wall. And my teacher liked to ask me about my experience at the United Nations. It pleased me that my teacher mentioned me in his autobiographical book “Those Places” issued in 2020, where he enumerated some of his creative students in all fields and included me under those who excelled in the diplomatic field.

Acre and distortion of history and language

It is inconceivable for me to visit the homeland, without going back to the beautiful home of Acre, which was described by the poet Rashid Hussein. The exceptional thing about Acre is that while you are in the old market inside the wall, you feel that you are in a completely Palestinian city and there is no trace of the Zionist occupation in it, were it not for the fact that some signs and store names are written in Hebrew alongside Arabic. And you have to visit Arafa Restaurant to eat the famous falafel. The restaurant has a story. Its owner uploaded a picture of Yasser Arafat in 1971, and the court sentenced him to seven years in prison. When he came out, he named his restaurant, Arafat, in order to deceive the name he had thrown into prison. What bothers me the most about my Acre trip is the distortion of the names of Palestinian towns and villages, not only by writing their names in Hebrew, but by rewriting the Hebrew names in Arabic letters. For example, the town of Hadera is written in the Hebrew letters, Hadera, and then its name is written in Arabic exactly, Hadera, moving away from the original name. Acre becomes Akko, Safed becomes its Arabic name, Tsfat, Sassa’ Balad Rashid Hussein becomes Sasa, Naqoura becomes Nakouri and Bassa becomes Betsit, and the name of Jerusalem in Arabic letters has completely disappeared, to be replaced by the name Jerusalem. They want to sever the connection of the Palestinians to their land, homeland, history and civilization, because they are afraid. They are really terrified because they are the ones who are on this land and are nothing more than “passers-by in passing words.”