Erella Dunayevsky’s stories bring home what Daniela Kitain terms (above) “the daily reality of Palestinians’ lives under occupation.” What follows is Dunayevsky’s own letter to her readers and two of her urgent yet timeless stories. First of the Month will post more of Dunayevsky’s dispatches in upcoming months.
……….
Dear Reader,
The stories before you take place over many years.
Figures and places vary, but the essence of the stories is identical, whether they took place during the nineties of the previous century or are taking place right now.
The Hebrew language only has four tenses: past, present, future and imperative. I actually need more tenses, as there are in English for example – past continuous and present continuous – so that you, the reader, will correctly interpret the stories before you. They constitute one story about ongoing occupation. A glimpse into the souls who constantly experience it. Something that began to take place once and continues to take place into time unknown.
So, dear Readers, when reading this book, please read it as if we have a past continuous in Hebrew to the present, and from the present continuous into an action that is still taking place.
With love,
Erella
……….
No Room Left in the Heart for Hatred
August 2014, Operation “Protective Edge”
I’ve been sitting for an hour facing the empty screen and can’t find words to describe the pain. The pain of those who see. Pain of the sober. The pain of those who know that the demon in the bottle grows and when it comes out, it’s unbearable. And it has come out.
Last night, I talked to Mustafa, my good friend in Gaza. Through the telephone, he heard the noise of the Gazan Qassam rocket exploding near us in the open field, and I heard the Israeli aerial bombing falling near his home.
We talked. He said: “You know what my best dream is? That in my lifetime I’ll have coffee with you and your family in my kitchen, here in Gaza. And afterwards we’ll go to the beach and sit and count the waves, as we did in 1999, remember?”
“I remember” I said, and could say nothing more because of the tears stifling me. Tears of simple love, tears of human longing for relationship that can only materialize in thought.
I remembered another conversation, with Ali from the South Hebron Hills. He called last night, too, asking how I was because of the rockets. When we talked about the whole situation, Ali said: “What do I want? To get up in the morning and smell the earth I plow, and harvest in the spring, and then bring flour, food for my children. And that you would be here with us to share the tabun bread. I know you like it. And I’ve also been waiting for a permit to enter Israel, it’s issued for Ramadan, I really wanted to finally visit you in your home. But now, closure, and no permits are being issued. I am so angry about that.” This is what Ali said. And I said: “I feel the same.”
When my friend Mustafa from Gaza spoke to me, he added: “Let’s write something together!” “For whom?” I asked. “For the world”, he said. I reminded him that 14 years ago, during the 2000 crisis, I wrote something with another mutual friend in Gaza, something “for the world”. I told Mustafa that this was an exact reflection of the situation: If something from 14 years ago is relevant now as well, it’s probably because nothing has changed. Nonetheless, I did send Mustafa what I wrote back then, 14 years ago, and he said he would distribute it to his students and to others. I asked him to write, too, and said that I would share it out.
Today I’ll call him again.
There are more phone calls like that from our friends in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, and from us to them.
As a friend from Salem near Nablus said to me today:
“Whoever doesn’t have ties like ours, it’s easier for hatred to enter his heart. But in my heart there is no room for hatred. It is filled with love.”
Thank you, dear friend, for the wording, its Hebrew is so simple and its truth so real.
Beyond that, I have nothing to say.
……….
So this is what I wrote 14 years ago:
It happens again.
Again the blood counter is activated.
We’ve already been in this film. And because we’ve already been in this film, we know what will happen in the coming episodes.
Now there is fear.
One fear – of the monster on the other side, that of the victim and that of the perpetrator; that of the weak and that of the strong; the monster of the side that has no state yet, and the monster of the side that once had no state.
……….
And a second fear – seeing the domestic monster and being afraid to say it out loud.
The domestic monster is especially dangerous because it magnifies and activates the monster on the other side.
The next episode is more blood. A lot of blood. Because these monsters are very hungry. The fear becomes hatred, the pain becomes weapons. And the blood counter? Counts the blood.
And the next episode is also known in advance – the hatred will birth more fear and the monsters will monitor the death.
The leaders are afraid. Especially of the domestic monster, for this is the one that might bring them down. So they stop seeing it, and see only its shadow projected on the neighbor’s wall.
We – Palestinians and Israelis, Arabs and Jews, secular and religious people – call upon anyone who has enough courage to meet his own fear and pain, instead of acting from within them, so that he is able not only to be just, but mainly wise and attuned to the other side’s fear and pain as well – We call upon all of them to empower each other and their leaders, in order to manifest agreements already achieved, and to continue to seek a solution for whatever is still contentious.
And keep remembering – when the monsters are on the prowl, there is no longer a way to see the wound.
……….
Thank You, Jinba
November 20, 2008
Greetings to all our friends,
The weatherman said it would rain in the south on Thursday. It didn’t. An autumn wind was blowing, caressing the South Hebron Hills, all the way to the Arad Valley and the Judean Desert, gently cradled in the sleepy morning fog. We were there, Ehud and I, and our local friend Mohammad who led us to Jinba. We went to see the new blockades on the only route left open to Jinba until now, and to listen to the villagers. If we hadn’t been on our way to see the new barriers, the beautiful view alone would have taken our breath away. But our breath was taken away again because of the burning pain and again by the contradiction between the two.
We walked down the track to Jinba through Bir Al Eid. It’s a dirt track made in 1989 with Jinba villagers’ money (120,000 NIS) a western route, shorter than the eastern one crossing the area of the cave dwellers, on the way to the district town of Yatta. Both are hard dirt tracks and only tractors can travel there. On the shorter route, it would take a tractor two hours and on the longer route it would wind its way for five hours to reach the long-anticipated Yatta – to buy food for the family and the sheep, run various errands or, God forbid, get a doctor.
However, crossing via the shorter track has already been blocked for the people who built it by two Jewish settlements, the Yaakov and the Havat Yair outposts, settled on land that doesn’t belong to them. They are far enough from the outposts but not far enough from blindness, authority and supremacy.
Ten days ago, the longer route was also blocked.
When we reached Jinba, Moussa told us:
“They closed it a month and a half ago. An army bulldozer came and closed off the track in several places with piles of earth, but a few days later they came again and opened the blockades about 3 meters and we could get through with our tractors. Then, ten days ago,” Moussa goes on in fluent Hebrew, “they closed it off again in even more than ten places”, says Moussa, imagining them in order to give us the exact number. “Piles of dirt over a meter and a half high. No tractor can get through. We are totally cut off from Yatta.”
The water problem is the worst”, he says. “We should have water for another two months. From our ten open wells. We have another ten wells but, over the years, the army filled them in. In 1987, a central water hole was filled in. We recently appealed to the Hebron Civil Administration to let us clean it up, not dig a new one God forbid. They said they had to involve the Antiquities Department to approve this measure. Did they? They didn’t. And they won’t either. The villages nearby have only four wells, the water has already been used up and it’s impossible to get water from European Union tankers as we did before the tracks were blocked. So, the villagers come to us for water. Right now, they don’t have any, and we have a little, so we share. They will have water for another few days and we for another month instead of two. Balancing out.”
So simple, I say to myself, reminded of a sentence written by Lao Tze in the year 600 BCE:
“They lived together in freedom, giving and taking without knowing that they were generous… so their actions received no titles. They didn’t make history.”
All this time, we were sitting in Moussa’s cave. While Moussa spoke, his wife served flatbread, goat cheese and olive oil in a dish. With no apology and without complaint, she simply shared with us what they had.
At the same time, from the entrance of the cave, we saw an army vehicle speeding towards four young men from Yatta who had tried their luck getting into Israel to find work. They would not be crossing today.
Moussa proceeds, describing the latest blocking process: “A week ago, I walked over to the soldier operating the bulldozer and asked him: ‘Why are you blocking?’ The soldier replied: ‘So no Palestinian workers without permits will cross into Israel and no terrorists either’.
I asked him: ‘Why don’t you block your own territory? Why do you cage us in and not let us live?’ He said: ‘Ask the ones in charge. I’m not the commander.’”
“I don’t need to ask the ones in charge”, Moussa told us and his face became very clear. “I know. They want the land without the people.”
“You see,” Moussa continues our conversation, “before the Israelis there were Jordanians. They did a lot of bad things to people. Before them were the British, and before that, the Turks. And now the Israelis, and then the Palestinian government will be here. But they will also fall. Governments fall. Governments whose intentions are not clean don’t last. But I don’t belong to governments, I belong to the land, they will not evict me because I belong to the land.” Moussa said this in his usual light way, as if these things were clear, well-known and obvious. There was no trace of pomposity in his confident voice, only a simple inner truth that he felt he could share with us.
I could hear the familiar tone of occupiers and settlers and outposters and grabbers, the tone of those who say: “We won’t be evicted because the land belongs to us”. A closed, stiff, tight sensation gripped my heart that was wide and open from what Moussa had said. Suddenly, like enlightenment, a small distinction opened up before my heart, like the Arad Valley and the Judean Desert stretching out in front of me, wide, open, huge, lazy and simple in the noon sun on an autumn day, the everyday sun that will shine tomorrow and that also shone yesterday. Opening up in exactly the same way was the simple knowing of the distinction between “they will not evict me because I belong to the land” and “they will not evict me because the land belongs to me.”
Erella