Breaking the fast - Ramadan under occupation
Hardly anyone I know lives up to her legends like Al-Quds (Jerusalem) does. The grand old lady of violent faith - chalky and inviting in daylight, golden and shimmering at sunset, forbidding yet enticing at night. I sit up in a garret-hole above Damascus Gate, where Israeli taxis will not normally take you. The call for prayer will sound in about ten minutes and already the crowd below my feet is starting to move as one body toward the dome of Al Aqsa. The gate opens up to a marketplace and a small amphitheatre-like arrangement of steps, with street vendors perched along every row. It is the next to last Friday of Ramadan and I cannot believe that I am here. It is wrong. It hardly means anything to me except what I can superimpose on the event from my own holy days. The matted shine from the bauble-shaped lights hanging on crisscrossed wires above the streets remind me of Santa Lucia with candlewax dripping onto her hair. The shooting star hung up next to where I’m sitting makes my mouth water after hot spicy wine and saffron buns.
I have climbed over a fence to get here, walked along the perimeter of the Old City wall in order to enjoy the sight of Muslim women and men flowing through the streets to their prayers. But I already know that there will be no familiar faces in the crowd. Earlier today, I hung around Qalandiya checkpoint for a couple of hours before midday prayers. Qalandiya looks like an air terminal. It is a huge complex of parking-lots, taxi-stands and automated turnstiles, x-ray machines with conveyor belts and metal detectors, obnoxious signs asking people to “empty their pockets”, wait their turn “patiently” and to “enjoy a safe and pleasant stay”. The letters of these signs are gradually being removed, the yellow plastic scratched and unintelligible. Orders are barked out by way of a loudspeaker system that continuously breaks down and soldiers rarely leave their booths.
Sometimes, the turnstiles are left open or malfunction, allowing people to run through the checkpoint. The week before, Israeli soldiers and police gassed and beat people with batons after about 300 people had made their way through the terminal in this way, desperate to reach Al-Quds before the prayers. This week, police were standing in two lines outside the terminal, refusing people entry into the waiting-area and even the parking-lot. Checking IDs, they claimed that the checkpoint was closed to all men under the age of 40, even if they had wasted hours in queues to obtain permits issued by the District Coordination Office (a civil administration division of the Israeli Occupation Forces). There was very little resistance this week. Only sighs and suppressed anger.
Beating their batons on the metal sheet walls of the terminal and shouting into the ears of people with their megaphones, the police quickly dispersed the crowd. An hour later, a row of abut 15 men stood facing the same white metal sheets with their heads bowed down. Thinking that they had been detained, I rushed toward them, only to realize that they were praying. No one could bare to look at them as they prostrated themselves in front of the terminal, renamed to the Israeli Atorot, not even the policemen themselves.
I thought of my friends who right at that moment were probably waiting in line at Huwarra or Beit Iba checkpoint, places just as ugly and disgusting as the terminal in front of my eyes. Of how arguments would probably start to simmer among the fasting, tired people and how that would break the spirit of Ramadan so carefully kept since the morning. I have seen how soldiers take care not to insult people during Ramadan, instead lounging around their post, closing the checkpoint at will, wasting people’s time even more than usual. I have heard how Israeli commanders admit, not without pride, to enjoying the sight of so many suffering irritable people, to purposefully making them wait a couple of more hours in the blistering sun. I have seen how they smile as two old women start to yell at- and beat one another with their bags, arguing about who jumped the line. The generosity and forgiveness of the holy month that are now revealed to be sullied and fragile, without any relevance to the lives led here in the wretched corners of the earth.
I know that many people, men and women, would risk many years of imprisonment and even torture in order to be able to reach the Al-Aqsa mosque. They dream of sneaking around checkpoints and falsifying permits – all desperate strategies at last foiled by their concern for their loved ones, the urgent demands of family life. With thousands of extra border police milling about the Old City and setting up checkpoints at every street corner, it would be almost impossible for a Nablusian without a permit to pass unnoticed.
That is why I am sitting here, marveling at the beauty of rooftops at nightfall, hoping that at least someone will be able to relive this night vicariously through my words when I return to Nablus, and trying to block out the cold. A cold I imagine that my friend Azem would not be able to feel, were he able to get here. As one more man is turned back by a garish blonde policewoman at his last checkpoint, I wonder how far he has traveled, looking for clues as to his origin from his style of dress. Looking at his face, her small manicured hands waving nonchalantly in front of it, it feels like something just broke that cannot be fixed.
I have climbed over a fence to get here, walked along the perimeter of the Old City wall in order to enjoy the sight of Muslim women and men flowing through the streets to their prayers. But I already know that there will be no familiar faces in the crowd. Earlier today, I hung around Qalandiya checkpoint for a couple of hours before midday prayers. Qalandiya looks like an air terminal. It is a huge complex of parking-lots, taxi-stands and automated turnstiles, x-ray machines with conveyor belts and metal detectors, obnoxious signs asking people to “empty their pockets”, wait their turn “patiently” and to “enjoy a safe and pleasant stay”. The letters of these signs are gradually being removed, the yellow plastic scratched and unintelligible. Orders are barked out by way of a loudspeaker system that continuously breaks down and soldiers rarely leave their booths.
Sometimes, the turnstiles are left open or malfunction, allowing people to run through the checkpoint. The week before, Israeli soldiers and police gassed and beat people with batons after about 300 people had made their way through the terminal in this way, desperate to reach Al-Quds before the prayers. This week, police were standing in two lines outside the terminal, refusing people entry into the waiting-area and even the parking-lot. Checking IDs, they claimed that the checkpoint was closed to all men under the age of 40, even if they had wasted hours in queues to obtain permits issued by the District Coordination Office (a civil administration division of the Israeli Occupation Forces). There was very little resistance this week. Only sighs and suppressed anger.
Beating their batons on the metal sheet walls of the terminal and shouting into the ears of people with their megaphones, the police quickly dispersed the crowd. An hour later, a row of abut 15 men stood facing the same white metal sheets with their heads bowed down. Thinking that they had been detained, I rushed toward them, only to realize that they were praying. No one could bare to look at them as they prostrated themselves in front of the terminal, renamed to the Israeli Atorot, not even the policemen themselves.
I thought of my friends who right at that moment were probably waiting in line at Huwarra or Beit Iba checkpoint, places just as ugly and disgusting as the terminal in front of my eyes. Of how arguments would probably start to simmer among the fasting, tired people and how that would break the spirit of Ramadan so carefully kept since the morning. I have seen how soldiers take care not to insult people during Ramadan, instead lounging around their post, closing the checkpoint at will, wasting people’s time even more than usual. I have heard how Israeli commanders admit, not without pride, to enjoying the sight of so many suffering irritable people, to purposefully making them wait a couple of more hours in the blistering sun. I have seen how they smile as two old women start to yell at- and beat one another with their bags, arguing about who jumped the line. The generosity and forgiveness of the holy month that are now revealed to be sullied and fragile, without any relevance to the lives led here in the wretched corners of the earth.
I know that many people, men and women, would risk many years of imprisonment and even torture in order to be able to reach the Al-Aqsa mosque. They dream of sneaking around checkpoints and falsifying permits – all desperate strategies at last foiled by their concern for their loved ones, the urgent demands of family life. With thousands of extra border police milling about the Old City and setting up checkpoints at every street corner, it would be almost impossible for a Nablusian without a permit to pass unnoticed.
That is why I am sitting here, marveling at the beauty of rooftops at nightfall, hoping that at least someone will be able to relive this night vicariously through my words when I return to Nablus, and trying to block out the cold. A cold I imagine that my friend Azem would not be able to feel, were he able to get here. As one more man is turned back by a garish blonde policewoman at his last checkpoint, I wonder how far he has traveled, looking for clues as to his origin from his style of dress. Looking at his face, her small manicured hands waving nonchalantly in front of it, it feels like something just broke that cannot be fixed.
posted by lina at 12:14 PM
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