Vox Humana Literary Journal

By Jordan Gerstler-Holton

I. Samir

Samir does not blame the soldier for shooting him. He believes the political situation led Israeli soldiers to enter his village in 2003 during the second intifada. Samir, then fourteen, recalls what happened when he joined other teenagers in throwing stones: Samir waited in ambush from behind a wall of a house. When the soldier emerged, he threw his stone and turned to run, but not before receiving a bullet to his side. As villagers vividly recall, they found him with his intestines partially dislodged onto the ground. He was rushed to a hospital in Ramallah where, as Samir recounts, the doctor thought he would die. Six years later, Samir’s stomach is badly scarred and cannot handle substantial quantities of food. Carrying heavy items gives him pain.

Samir was no stranger to physical tragedy before 2003. Scars suffered from a car accident cover Samir’s thigh. His right hand is disfigured and scarred with all of its fingernails missing. On right side of his face, a dark smudge extends from his hairline to the bottom of his cheek. Ashamed of his condition, he uses his healthy right hand to shield his left. A hat hides portions of bare, marked scalp that cluster around his right ear. The injuries to his face and hand are the results of a burning accident suffered as an infant when his mother spilled boiling water.

Samir’s hat tends to shock fellow Palestinians more than the blemishes it hides beneath. It has the Israeli army acronym “Tzahal” featured on front in Hebrew letters and is green, appearing to have been once part of an Israeli army uniform. Samir’s decision to wear it stems from his relationship with B’Tzelem, an Israeli organization dedicated to defending human rights in Palestinian territories occupied by Israel, that began as a result of his gunshot injury in 2003. Samir credits B’Tzelem with saving his life by rushing him to the Technion, a renowned Israeli hospital in Haifa.

B’Tzelem helped in other ways as well. It covered the costs of countless successive operations and offered his mother several thousand shekels to help care for him throughout a string of procedures. Most recently, B’Tzelem paid Samir’s tuition of several thousand dollars to Birzeit University, where Samir is currently studying for an accounting degree.

Impressed by what he found to be, in his words, the existence of “good Jews,” Samir became part of what he loosely refers to as a group of people wanting peace. Some Israelis from B’Tzelem wear clothing of the Palestinian resistance movement, and some Palestinians, like Samir, wear the Tzahal gear. The idea is that if enough Palestinians and Israelis show solidarity with one another, a growing demand for peace that transcends identity politics will emerge and gather force.

Palestinians resent what they perceive as his support for an army they hold responsible for a long history of oppression, and Israeli soldiers have forced him to remove the hat, they said, because it amounts to him posing in Israeli uniform. Samir claims that people from his village would “kill him” if they didn’t know his story, that two of his brothers remain in Israeli prison, two others were wounded, and one was killed by Israeli forces.

II. Abu Malik’s Sons

Abu Malik, Samir’s father, is fifty two years old, but like most people I meet in this village, he appears at least ten years older than his real. One of Abu Malik’s sons, the twenty-one year old Muhammad, was released on May 13, 2009 after serving a four-year sentence. According to the family, the Israelis accused him of vague involvement in “resistance” activity. Abu Malik’s eldest son, Malik, age 27, has served only five of a twenty-five-year sentence. According to Abu Malik, the Israelis claim Malik killed a spy, an accusation that Abu Malik vigorously denies. His father hopes Malik will eventually be included, among thousands of other Palestinian prisoners currently held in Israeli custody, in an exchange for Shalit, who is still being held by Hamas.

Abu Malik’s face becomes animated with hope when I mention Gilad Shalit. Like many in this village, Abu Malik does not support Hamas, but he respects the organization for using Shalit to negotiate the release of Palestinians. Abu Malik hopes Hamas will capture more soldiers and release more Palestinians.

Yet Shalit’s name also brings resentment.

“How is it that the whole world knows the name ‘Gilad Shalit,’ Abu Malik asks, “while few have ever heard the names of thousands of Palestinians who languish in Israeli prisons?” To him this fact represents a double standard by which Palestinian life is considered cheap. As for Shalit’s treatment, Abu Malik tells me, rather incredulously, that Hamas is treating him so well that he no longer wants to be returned.

Despite Abu Malik appreciation for some of Hamas’s actions, he and his eight sons, two of which receive their salaries from the Fatah dominated Palestinian Authority, ultimately support Fatah. Abu Malik’s wife, who prays regularly, is the one true dissenter; she quietly supports Hamas. Though Samir claims he supports Fatah, he recently voted for the Communist “People’s Party” in recent elections at Birzeit, and he proudly sports a red shirt with the movement’s familiar hero, Che Guevara, emblazoned on the back. The “People’s Party” offered him three-hundred shekels ($75) for his vote while Hamas and Fatah only offered 60 -70 shekels ($15 – $17.50). He used this money to smuggle himself past Israeli barriers and checkpoints in the pursuit of women, free from the constraints of conservative Muslim society, on the beaches of Tel Aviv.

The fact that two of Samir’s brothers are in prison presents a major financial burden for family. With little else to do in prison, his boys smoke multiple packs a day, and two thousand shekels each month are spent on cigarettes. Two other sons, Marwan, (23), and Hasan, (21), work for the Palestinian Authority for twelve days and nights each month for a salary of approximately 2,000 shekels ($500) monthly. When they are not working for the Authority, they work at odd jobs in their village and neighboring ones. Marwan spends a thousand shekels a month to support his smoking. He has no savings, he says, and instead uses his earnings to augment an assortment of items he arranges about his room, among which are included stuffed animals, a fish tank, decorative plates, ceiling mobiles, and otherwise ordinary cutlery Marwan insists are exclusively for display. Samir tells me that Marwan is trying mimic Western lifestyle.

Marwan says he should begin saving for his wedding that he estimates will cost US$40,000.

III. Marwan

Marwan’s spending habits are a source of concern for other family members and is at least partly responsible for a break between himself and his mother, Hafida. As part of the payment arrangements I made with Marwan for living here, I needed to pay for water and electricity. Hafida told me not to pay Marwan, and that I should pay her because it is she who washes my clothes and feeds me. When I suggested paying Abu Malik, she objected as well, though not as strongly, ostensibly because Abu Malik would “spend the money to buy iron” (one of his professions is that of an iron worker; the other is that of make-shift plastic surgeon). I finally decided to pay Abu Malik, reasoning that he is head of the household (by Marwan’s admission) and hoped I could avoid the wrath of Marwan and Hafida who could at least be happy I hadn’t paid the other.

Needless to say, when Marwan discovered I had paid the father, he was disappointed. It just so happened that this was the day the final negotiations for a prisoner exchange between Olmert’s government and Hamas fell through. Marwan, as the with the rest of the family, usually favors Turkish soap operas or Arabic music channels over news stations. However, on this night he turned to Al-Jazeera. He let his head rest between his hands, gazing down with a look of anguish. He turned off the TV and entered his room silently, locking the door behind him. I once heard him complain to his mother and father, during one of his frequent bursts of anger, that Malik is always asking money from him. With the collapse of negotiations once again, there seemed little chance that Malik would be released soon. The cost of helping to support his family would help delay his $40,000 wedding further.

Once, Marwan were discretely drinking absolute Vodka I brought from Ramallah. For the occasion, he set up strobe lights and played some American songs, including classic hits such as Elton John’s “Can you feel the Love Tonight” and the Titanic theme song “My Heart Will Go On” that recalled numerable bar and bat mitzvahs when I was thirteen. Somewhere in the conversation, Marwan recounted to me how a settler’s car trampled and killed the woman to whom he was engaged to be married. He said that Zenib was from his town and that they had secretly loved each other since they were children. He dropped his head mournfully and passed me a small picture from his wallet. She was slim with whitish skin and long, straight, black hair. He said that the settler served six months in prison after pleading that he had hit her by mistake and that once he vandalized the settler’s car. When I asked if it bothers him that the settler lives while Zenib is dead, he replied that he doesn’t think about revenge anymore. He thinks about peace; the existence of a normal life without killing and destruction, soldiers and checkpoints. Comparatively, life before the intifada was good, he said. He used to visit Tel Aviv, and although checkpoints existed, violence was limited; “Now soldiers hit you for no reason,” he said.

Speaking with Samir almost two weeks later, I mentioned the story of Marwan’s girlfriend. He tried suppressing a grin; “he told you that?” he asked, followed by “ohhhhhhh” with the scarred hand moving up to cover his mouth. Samir said he believed Marwan cut off relations with her after losing interest, though he didn’t know for sure how their relationship ended.

One day later, in front of Samir and Hafida (Samir’s mother), I began recalling Marwan’s story to Abu Malik. No later had I begun, Samir broke down into uncontrollable laughter. Hafida and Abu Malik, eyeing Samir’s reaction, followed suit. Abu Malik turned to me jokingly, “We Arabs have a three day holiday where we lie.”

Samir’s admission that Marwan’s story was entirely fictitious opened a floodgate of admissions. First, Samir told me that he had not been shot through the back, as he had originally claimed, but rather through the stomach, and he lifted his shirt to show that he did not have a scar on his back. He replaced an earlier story, where he claimed he had been collecting stones for the older boys to throw at the time he was shot, with the one detailed in the beginning of this article. Though the veracity of the new version remains questionable, others villagers confirm its authenticity. He tells foreigners he was shot in the back, he says, to make his situation seem more pitiful. When he talks to Arabs from other areas he exaggerates in the opposite direction; he says that when he was in Jordan he told people he was shooting Israelis from on top one of their own tanks when he was shot.

I told him that in the West, some are skeptical of reports and pictures of Palestinian death and destruction. Samir then began recounting stories/events/new reports that he believes are fictitious. A year ago, he says, people were throwing stones at Israeli soldiers in Ramallah. No one was injured, but people performed falling “acts” for nearby cameras. The camera footage depicting the explosion in Gaza on June 9th, 2006, that killed 7 people, including three children, was created through re-enactment, he claims; “what, do you think that there just happened to have been a camera available at the scene within seconds from the time of the explosion?” During the latest war in Gaza, Samir claims, reporters were manipulated into reporting inflated civilian casualty figures.1

I asked Samir why many Palestinians feel the need to develop such fabrications when the tragic reality of military occupation can speak for itself. Samir explained that stories such as Marwan’s increase foreign sympathy for the plight of Palestinians because they return home with personal stories. “Besides,” Samir continues, “the Jews are even worse; they claim that 6,000,000 of them died in the Holocaust when really only, what… 2,000 were killed? And then they use that to justify stealing Palestinian land.”

1 The author of this essay does not endorse any of the claims mentioned in this paragraph but merely records them as the opinions of one Palestinian.