This is the recent blog my daughter wrote. She is staying in Ramallah, at a friend's apartment. She's been sick for the last week, but this blog let her anxious parents know that she is on the mend.
Where: Jerusalem
Who: Sheikh Jarrah residents, Israeli Solidarity activists, me
I am shifting my body’s position every few minutes, in futile attempts to sleep comfortably in a strange bed in West Jerusalem. When I do fall asleep, I wake up sweating, or have dreams of being back at home with my mother’s cool hand on my forehead.
The man sleeping with his back to the thin mattress on the ground, on the other hand, is breathing deeply & regularly. I don’t know him really, which maybe is adding to my sleeplessness. The kitten we’re caring for is making rounds from bed to floor to chair to my head. I appreciated watching the man’s gentle and affectionate interactions with her earlier, but right now I just want her to be still. Her name is Majnoona, which means ‘crazy’ in Arabic.
Earlier this Friday, I take Bus #18 through the Qalandia checkpoint to the neighborhood called Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem, one of many that Israeli settlers are taking over while the Israeli police serve eviction notices to Palestinians families, already refugees to these neighborhoods in 1948. I am meeting up with the Israeli activist who will later sleep on the floor next to me (Let’s call him D), and to participate in the weekly Israeli & Palestinian solidarity demonstration that has become a focal point for the Israeli left’s resistance to their government’s apartheid & occupation policies. I join up with the demonstration as it is winding down for the day, with young Israelis playing drums at the center of a crowd of all different ages & backgrounds. Across the street three settlers hold Israeli flags aloft and wear calm smiles. A Palestinian boy plants himself in front of them, waving a Palestinian flag defiantly. I watch this happen as music blares from the settlers’ compound, clearly in an effort to drown out the chants of the protestors. An Israeli activist announces that a settler just attacked some of the demonstrators, and points out that this is a danger the Palestinian residents of the neighborhood face every day.
I meet a Palestinian man we will call N: who welcomes me immediately, making jokes about how my name means “my husband” in Arabic. After talking for a little while, he leads me down the road and points out the house his extended family of 36 people lived in until they were evicted several years ago. We stand facing the building, gazing silently at the compound that was blasting the music earlier. D translates the Hebrew words now nailed across the roof: “The Border Lies Here.”
Later that evening the Palestinian neighbors and the Israeli activists set up for a party celebrating a family’s rare win in court: They will not face eviction from their home, at least not for now. I float around the yard of the house across from N’s former home as the semicircle of Palestinian mothers who had been gossiping on the sidewalk carry their chairs inside and leaders of the Solidarity movement set up speakers and snacks. This house is its own spectacle. Israeli courts declared the front extension of the home built by the Palestinian family illegal, and proceeded to allow settlers to move into the same extension. The Palestinian family now remains confined to the inadequate back rooms of the house. The yard seems weary & battle-torn, with spray painted hostilities scrawled across the walls and a worn tent erected where activists sometimes remain to monitor the interactions with the settler residents, who they explain often use intimidation tactics such as making rounds with their aggressive dog.
Tonight, we blast hip-hop in a mixture of Arabic and English. Crews of little girls and pubescent boys play carelessly, seeming to release some of the tension I noted in their young faces earlier. A father distributes tiny cups of sweet tea. The matriarchs clap along to the music, even more enthusiastically as a line of Orthodox settlers vacate the premises, and more enthusiastically still as an Israeli activist extricates a large Palestinian flag from her car and plants it firmly in the gateway to the yard
-Diary & photos by the talebearer
http://talebearer88.tumblr.com/
For more information about the Sheikh Jarrah Solidarity Movement, go to this link: http://www.en.justjlm.org/