Lines in the sand: Nablus and Balata
"Even the infants cannot stand to live like this. You can hear their protests."
This series was written in 2012. It was published by Crikey, one of Australia’s last great independent publications. My editor was the wonderful, generous enabler, Jason Whittaker, who let me write whatever I wanted, however I wanted, long after my used-by date had come and gone. This piece remains behind the paywall there. But given recent events, and the coverage around them, I thought it might be worth republishing here. The rest of the series is available on the main page of this Substack. All have been very lightly edited.
I return to Ramallah from Taybeh, beer and wine in tow, to find Shehada, the Palestinian violin maker from Bus 18, waiting for me outside the Al-Wehdeh hotel.
He is here to take me to his home in the Old City, to share iftar, Ramadan’s daily fast-breaking meal, with his family. It is an awkward honour. Only Shehada and his father, an architect, and his incredibly bright seven-year-old sister can speak English, and my Arabic is limited to the point of non-existence. But I am welcomed with open arms nevertheless and by a seemingly endless parade of relatives. Shehada’s mother, sisters, grandmother, aunts, and cousins are all very pleased, or so I am told, that I have come to Palestine for Ramadan. Shehada’s six-year-old brother is very pleased that I’ve come, too, but mostly because he likes strutting around in my aviator sunglasses, pot-belly puffed out and hair slicked back. “Don't worry about him,” Shehada says. “He’s crazy.”
It is difficult not to notice that there is a gender imbalance around the table: women outnumber men two-to-one. This, Shehada tells me later, stems from the fact that two of his uncles are currently serving time in prison: one for killing Israeli soldiers during the second intifada and the other for belonging to a “radical organisation”. A third uncle has recently been released, on charges that aren’t mentioned, but instead of joining us for qatayef and tea he is slaving away on the second floor of a nearby building, tiling the entryway to his house, which was left to deteriorate while he was away.
“He has to tile at night,” Shehada says, “because he works as a labourer in Israel during the day.”
After dinner, fully sated, we move downstairs to Shehada’s work room, where several of his early violins hang on their scrolls from a piece of fishing line, and a cello-in-progress, a half-finished gift for a friend, sits waiting to be coloured and varnished. Under the arbor of the courtyard outside, beneath a canopy of vine leaves and low-hanging grapes, Shehada fires up a shisha while his sisters and mother wait on our every beck and call, plying us with tea and dessert like waitresses, to my distinct discomfort. Shehada shows me a couple of episodes of an Egyptian web series in which a group of bank robbers on the run from the IDF’s evil leaders—one scene shows the generals deciding to invent a terrorist attack in order to justify a retaliatory strike—take refuge with Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Assads in Syria, and the Ayatollah in Iran. I can’t understand much of what’s going on, but it’s safe to safe that hilarity ensues.
Eventually, the episodes end, and talk turns to rather more serious matters. As the water pipe bubbles and clouds of apple-flavoured smoke meet the grapes, Shehada expresses anger at his uncles’ prison sentences. Recalling Ala Jaradat’s evocation of tensions on the home front, most of this anger seems to be aimed, not at the Israeli occupation, but rather at the Palestinian Authority. Hatred for the former never goes away, of course, but is constant enough to become part of the scenery. It is the sense of outrage at the latter that is new and, because it is new, so striking.
“The Israelis struggled to find my uncle for nearly seven years,” Shehada says. “The moment Abbas started cooperating with them, though, he was tracked down and arrested. There isn’t a member of my family who doesn’t believe that the Palestinian Authority is to be blame for this. The Palestinian Authority is Israel in disguise.”
Shehada says he doesn’t support any political group in Palestine, but then goes on to praise Hamas at length. “If I had to choose a group,” he says, “I would choose Hamas. They are the ones who believe what I believe.”
“And what’s that?” I ask.
“That we have to fight Israel,” Shehada says. “That we have to fight it to the death and defeat it.”
Two days later, on an hour-long bus ride, I content myself with the opening chapters of Thomas Friedman’s From Beirut to Jerusalem, the former foreign correspondent’s excellent memoir of his time in the region, which was written long before he ascended to the lofty heights of The New York Times’ op-ed page, contracted altitude sickness, and went mad. My Palestinian travelling companions and I pass the Israeli-only bus stops that pepper the the turn-off to the settler city of Ariel, patronised as they are by sidelocked Torah scholars and heavily guarded by nineteen-year-olds with guns, and before too long find ourselves in the northern West Bank city of Nablus. No sooner am I off the bus than a mustachioed Friedman lookalike, Hassanein Mobaraka, approaches me with a solicitous smile and flashes his “Licensed Tour Guide” lanyard. My initial instinct is to fob him off, but I have come to Nablus seeking a shave and a haircut—I could have gotten them in Rammalah, but why not make a day trip out of it?—and Hassanein claims to know a decent barbershop. As the barber begins to lather my face, Hassanein tells me about himself, reeling off what seems to me like a pre-rehearsed script.
“I went to the Bible College of Bethlehem,” he says. “Where I specialised in the scriptures. And became a qualified tour guide. And showed Christians around the Holy Land.” His sentences follow an immutable rhythm and he drags out the final word of each sentence. “I will take you to Jacob’s Well,” he says. “And I will tell you the story of it.”
“That’s okay,” I say, changing the subject. “I know the story of Jacob’s Well.” Instead, I ask Hassanein if he’s originally from Nablus.
“No,” he says. “My family is from Haifa. We are refugees. We live in Balata Refugee Camp. We have lived there since it was made only of tents.”
And then the pre-rehearsed sing-song rhythm falls away: “Shall I take you to see it?”
Balata is, of course, no longer a camp: it is a city on the outskirts of a city, climbing upwards because it cannot spread outwards, teeming with children of various ages, and decorated almost entirely with propaganda. My presence here appears to be a novelty, children running up to me and showing off their English, old men nodding and smiling toothless smiles. I am able to conduct a partial conversation with the local pharmacist, who cannot speak English, but is fluent, somehow, in Italian.
Hassanein leads me through the warren-like backstreets, pointing out families’ memorials to their “martyrs”—freedom fighters, terrorists, perhaps both, occasionally neither—and telling me the history of the camp.
“We were the first camp in the West Bank to rise up in the first intifada,” he says. “After Jabalia [a refugee camp on the Gaza Strip and one of the most densely populated places on the planet] we were the first to revolt. This,” he gestures down Balata’s so-called Street of Martyrs, “is the result.”
Posters of young, good looking men, draped in the colours of the Palestinian flag and packing serious heat, plaster the walls and hang from the balconies. Their poses call to mind those of American rappers, but where 50 Cent sports his diamond-studded crucifixes, the Dome of the Rock serves as bling in these parts, superimposed behind the boys in pixelated JPEG. At the end of the street, a little gate opens onto a cemetery, where those killed during the two intifadas are buried. In one of the only vacant lots in the entire densely-populated camp, whose thirty thousand residents occupy an area of only one quarter of a square kilometre, children play in the rubble where a building once stood: they open the front door and find that they’re still outside, and weave in and out of the now-disconnected water pipes that jut awkwardly from the ground. This, Hassanein says, is where one of the town’s greatest martyrs died. When the IDF found and eventually killed him in a shoot-out, they destroyed the house in which he was hiding for good measure: better not to leave a ready-made shrine.
It goes without saying that Hassanein has little positive to say about Israel or the IDF. When we walk between two buildings, which are so close together that we have to sidestep through the resultant alley, he overhears a baby crying and sees an opportunity to proselytise. “Even the infants cannot stand to live like this,” he says. “You can hear their protests.”
And yet Balata’s central role in the two intifadas has also allowed him to see the IDF and its strength up close, and his views on the Arab-Israeli conflict have been coloured in interesting ways as a result.
“I am resolved to the fact that I shall never see Haifa again,” he tells me as he leads me back to the camp’s entrance. “It is a tragedy, because my father would like me to take him, but that will never happen.”
“We have to use logic, you understand. We have to be rational. We can no more push the Jews into the sea than they can in good conscience oppress us forever. There will never be a Palestine from the river to the sea and there will never be a Israel from one to the other, either. Both are impossible. There must be two states.”
Hassanein admits that extremists on both sides—Zionist settlers, Hamas, and groups like the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, which turned Balata into a military stronghold at the end of last decade—threaten the resolve of the two populations to commit to such a solution. “I hate Hamas,” he says. “They are dangerous and they are self-defeating. Israel gave up Gaza and what did Hamas do? It fired rockets. It invited them back. Hamas do not want peace, which is why I do not want Hamas. The Martyrs’ Brigades want to turn Balata into a target, which is why I do not want them. The State of Israel exists. It is only by realising this that we will ever be able to exist ourselves.”
As for the Zionist settlers, Hassanein has a novel solution. “Declare a Palestinian state,” he says. “We will offer them Palestinian citizenship very happily. But I suspect that they shall emigrate.”
“We have to use logic,” he says again. “We have to be rational. We cannot continue to be two nations that pretend there is only room for one.”