The commander began to interrogate her. "My name, with whom I live, starting to ask me about the neighbors." Celine flashed her French passport and pleaded with them not to wake up her six-month-old, Hussein, sleeping in the next room. "I was praying that he would just stay asleep." She told the commander, "I just go from my house to my work, from work to my house." She didn't really know her neighbors, she said.
As it happened, the soldiers had blown off the door of the wrong flat. They would remove four more doors in the building that night, Celine recalled, before finding their suspect: her 17-year-old next door neighbor. "They stood questioning him for maybe 20 minutes, and then they took him. And I think he's still in jail. His father is already in jail."
According to Israeli Prison Services statistics cited by B'tselem, more than 5,300 Palestinians were in Israeli prisons in July 2011. Since the beginning of the occupation in 1967, an estimated 650,000 to 700,000 Palestinians have reportedly been jailed by Israel. By one calculation, that represents 40% of the adult-male Palestinian population. Almost no family has been untouched by the Israeli prison system.
Celine stared through the blinds at the street below, where some 15 jeeps and other military vehicles were parked. Finally, they left with their lights out and so quietly that she couldn't even hear their engines. When the flat was silent again, she couldn't sleep. "I was very afraid." A neighbor came upstairs to sit with her until the morning.
Stories like these -- and they are legion -- accumulate, creating the outlines of what could be called a culture of occupation. They give context to a remark by Saleh Abdel-Jawad, dean of the law school at Birzeit University near Ramallah: "I don't remember a happy day since 1967," he told me. Stunned, I asked him why specifically that was so. "Because," he replied, "you can't go to Jerusalem to pray. And it's only 15 kilometers away. And you have your memories there."
He added, "Since 17 years I was unable to go to the sea. We are not allowed to go. And my daughter married five years ago and we were unable to do a marriage ceremony for her." Israel would not grant a visa to Saleh's Egyptian son-in-law so that he could enter the West Bank. "How to do a marriage without the groom?"
A Musical Intifada
An old schoolmate of mine and now a Middle East scholar living in Paris points out that Palestinians are not just victims, but actors in their own narrative. In other words, he insists, they, too, bear responsibility for their circumstances -- not all of this rests on the shoulders of the occupiers. True enough.
As an apt example, consider the morally and strategically bankrupt tactic of suicide bombings, carried out from 2001 to 2004 by several Palestinian factions as a response to Israeli attacks during the second intifada. That disastrous strategy gave cover to all manner of Israeli retaliation, including the building of the separation barrier. (The near disappearance of the suicide attacks has been due far less to the wall -- after all, it isn't even finished yet -- than to a decision on the part of all the Palestinian factions to reject the tactic itself.)
So, yes, Palestinians are also "actors" in creating their own circumstances, but Israel remains the sole regional nuclear power, the state with one of the strongest armies in the world, and the occupying force -- and that is the determining fact in the West Bank. Today, for some Palestinians living under the 44-year occupation simply remaining on the land is a kind of moral victory. This summer, I started hearing a new slogan: "Existence is resistance." If you remain on the land, then the game isn't over. And if you can bring attention to the occupation, while you remain in place, so much the better.
In June, Ala' Shelaldeh, the 13-year-old violinist, brought her instrument to the wall at Qalandia, once a mere checkpoint separating Ramallah and Jerusalem, and now essentially an international border crossing with its mass of concrete, steel bars, and gun turrets. The transformation of Qalandia -- and its long, cage-like corridors and multiple seven-foot-high turnstiles through which only the lucky few with permits may cross to Jerusalem -- is perhaps the most powerful symbol of Israel's determination not to share the Holy City.
Ala' and her fellow musicians in the Al Kamandjati Youth Orchestra came to play Mozart and Bizet in front of the Israeli soldiers, on the other side of Qalandia's steel bars. Their purpose was to confront the occupation through music, essentially to assert: we're here. The children and their teachers emerged from their bus, quickly set up their music stands, and began to play. Within moments, the sound of Mozart's Symphony No. 6 in F Major filled the terminal.
Palestinians stopped and stared. Smiles broke out. People came closer, pulling out cell phones and snapping photos, or just stood there, surrounding the youth orchestra, transfixed by this musical intifada. The musicians and soldiers were separated by a long row of blue horizontal bars. As the music played on, a grim barrier of confinement was momentarily transformed into a space of assertive joy. "It was," Ala' would say later, "the greatest concert of my life."
As the Mozart symphony built -- Allegro, Andante, Minuet, and the Allegro last movement -- some of the soldiers started to take notice. By the time the orchestra launched into Georges Bizet's Dance Boheme from Carmen #2, several soldiers appeared, looking out through the bars. For the briefest of moments, it was hard to tell who was on the inside, looking out, and who was on the outside, looking in.
If existence is resistance, if children can confront their occupiers with a musical intifada, then there's still space, in the year of the Arab Spring, for something unexpected and transformative to happen. After all, South African apartheid collapsed, and without a bloody revolution. The Berlin Wall fell quickly, completely, unexpectedly. And with China, India, Turkey and Brazil on the rise, the United States, its power waning, will not be able to remain Israel's protector forever. Eventually, perhaps, the world will assert the obvious: the status quo is unacceptable.
For the moment, whatever happens in the coming weeks at the U.N., and in the West Bank in the aftermath, isn't it time for the world's focus to shift to what is actually happening on the ground? After all, it's the occupation, stupid.
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