Diary

Letters

Vol. 24 No. 15 · 8 August 2002

From Tania Tamari Nasir

Raja Shehadeh's Diary (LRB, 25 July) prompts me to report a recent harrowing experience on the Birzeit-Ramallah road. After several weeks without respite I heard that the curfew was to be lifted for a few hours. I set off from my home in Birzeit heading for Ramallah seven kilometres away, where I planned to visit my 90-year-old mother and my sister, a journey I made almost daily before the recent Israeli incursions.

Before I left, I asked about the situation on the road and was assured that it was safe. The soldiers manning the military checkpoint had gone, although cement blocks remained in place to prevent cars from passing through. In order to get to Ramallah one had to walk through the area around the checkpoint, a distance of about a kilometre.

I was happy at the prospect of being able to spend an ordinary day, to make a familiar journey. I passed a group of people from Ramallah, mostly students from Birzeit University, heading for the campus. We have a future to live for, I reminded myself.

I enjoyed the reunion with my sister and my mother, who smiled doubtfully when I promised I would resume my daily visit. She knows how difficult it is to keep such promises under the prevailing conditions. The time passed quickly and soon I found myself once again part of the milling crowd around the checkpoint. Suddenly an Army jeep appeared from around the bend, speeding crazily through the peaceful crowd. Instantly the quiet road resembled a battlefield. There were shouted orders coming from the jeep which no one could hear properly. All I knew was that we were being chased and dispersed and that there was panic and fear on the faces of all those around me. There were hundreds like me, running, scared, wondering what was happening: men carrying goods, women with shopping bags, their children confused, traumatised, clutching at their skirts, other women holding babies or trying to push prams, students with books, old people pleading for someone to help them along. Some took refuge in the rocky terraced hills, others in the vineyards and orchards below and some like me opted to remain on the main road. All this time tear-gas canisters were being thrown from the jeep.

Was the Army playing some kind of trick, we wondered, in removing checkpoints and then suddenly reinstalling them, creating this pandemonium? I remembered the Kufr Qassem massacre, when farmers from a northern Palestinian village were returning home after a long day in the fields, not knowing that a curfew had been imposed on their village by the Israeli Army. Without any warning they were shot as they approached their homes.

I struggled uphill among the scrambling crowd; the heat was suffocating. The jeep screeched to a halt next to me. A soldier jumped down and waved a tear-gas canister in his hand. I wanted to scream at him, but fear got the better of me and I kept running. A young woman warned me that the soldier was about to throw the canister. I ducked as I heard the explosion behind me and choked on the gas. I ran, coughing all the way, until after what seemed like an eternity I managed to get into a passing car that took me home. Behind me the madness continued.

This sort of incident happens almost every day in Palestine. The injustice is unbearable. There was no provocation. There was no threat. There was no danger to the security of Israel. Our only crime was that we dared to be ordinary citizens in our ordinary land.

Tania Tamari Nasir
Birzeit, West Bank