January 4, 2004

AS Israel relentlessly wages what Ariel Sharon has called the second half of the 1948 war, Palestine continues to be grist to the media mills. Despite the apparent pre-occupation with the subject, its human dimension seldom, if ever, comes to the fore either in the media or academic debates. Obsession with grand political ideas pursued within a neo-realist paradigm subsumes and sometimes distorts the very meanings of injustice, occupation, dispossession and human suffering.

Except for the poetry of Mahmood Darwish, Samih al-Qassem, Tawaik Zayayad and more recently Suheir Hammad, novels by Ghassan Kanafani and Emile Habibi, memoirs by Jean Ganet and Ghada Karmi, Edward Said and Jean Mohr’s photographic journey through Palestine (1986) we have very little that tells us about the real Palestinian existence and suffering.

That lacuna has serious political implications too. Public opinion in the West still remains predominantly pro-Israel, kept alive with repeated reminders of the horrors of the Holocaust and now “Palestinian terrorism”.

Raja Shehadeh’s diary of Ramallah under siege obviously comes as a welcome addition to the limited literature on the Palestinian lives under Israeli occupation. Shehadeh, a West Bank lawyer and activist, earlier wrote his memoirs called Strangers in the House: Coming of Age in Occupied Palestine. The book under review chronicles Israel’s invasion of Ramallah last year following a series of suicide attacks inside Israel. Taniya Reinhart, an incredibly outspoken Israeli journalist, has noted that plans for a full-scale military operation were afoot even before the outbreak of the present Intifida in October 2000.

On March 29, 2003, Shehadeh woke to the screeching of Israeli tanks driving past his house. He knew that the “strike Prime Minister Sharon had warned would make us weep had begun”. Interspersed with comments on the failure of the Palestinian leadership and futility of an armed struggle, the diary records everyday life under occupation, destruction of institutions and infrastructure and the callousness of Israeli soldiers as they go marching into Palestinian homes.

The day the incursion begins Shehadeh comes to know that Israeli soldiers have besieged his brother’s house and are keeping the family captive. Shehadeh makes a phone call to the US consulate in Jerusalem seeking its intervention on the ground that the army had stormed the house without an order. “It doesn’t matter that they had no order. It doesn’t matter at all. The order comes later”, replies the emergency officer on line reminding Shehadeh “before Israel, the US is impotent”.

As the army declares a total curfew, Shehadeh finds himself captured within the narrow confines of his house, linked to the outside world only with a telephone and television. What follows is a poignant account of a population struggling to survive strangulation, allowed free movement only for a few hours when the curfew is lifted.

Shehadeh describes the excesses of the Israeli soldiers, as they capture houses and offices, abuse people, ransack the city, shoot indiscriminately at anyone who steps out into a street and prevent the injured to be taken to a hospital. The army lays siege on Yasser Arafat’s compound in Ramallah, trapping him and his aides inside for days. Added to the concern for Ramallah and its inhabitants, are reports of atrocities being committed in Jenin and Nablus, and the siege of the Church of Nativity in Bethlehem with some 200 people trapped inside.

Even as Shehadeh finds himself at the mercy of the Israeli army, he does not let vengeful emotions get the better of him. The news of another suicide attack in Israel does not make him rejoice. Instead he finds that momentary “victory” sour, embittering and sobering. “In that brief moment of silence, our enemy and we are joined together. Then we are both shattered and raised up into the air, together. Both remain suspended in the air before the pieces begin to fall and scatter on the ground and the victims are counted to determine whose casualties were greater, who was the winner and who the loser of this round. There are no winners and we both know it”.

By attacking Israeli civilians, Palestinians play right into the hands of Israel, allowing it to project them to the world as terrorists that need to be reigned in. Recalling the peaceful struggle that characterized the first Intifida (1987-93), Shehadeh notes, “our strength was in the justice and morality of our case”.

Disillusioned with Palestinian leadership and repeated diplomatic fiascos, Shehadeh has kept himself aloof from active political struggle of late, which is sad and disheartening. At times he sounds almost resigned to his fate. The story of Palestine continues and people like Shehadeh are needed not just to chronicle and interpret it but to shape it too. As Edward Said said, “The Palestinian struggle must strive towards a settlement that will enable coexistence based on human dignity, a settlement that will capture the imagination of the world.”

 

When the Bulbul Stopped Singing: A Diary of Ramallah under Siege

By Raja Shehadeh

Profile Books, London Available with Liberty Books (Pvt) Ltd, 3 Rafiq Plaza, M.R. Kayani Road, Saddar, Karachi. Tel: 021-5683026

Email: libooks@cyber.net.pk  Website: www.libertybooks.com

ISBN 1-86197-519-8

152pp. Rs250

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