Beita

The rusty hiccoughing of donkeys, the muezzin’s call to prayer from the little stone Mosque at the village’s summit and the occasional drone of a tractor are about the only sounds you hear on warm days like the ones of my visit here in September 1988. Like most of the northern West Bank, Beita is Fatah territory. But even after April 6, 1988, journalists didn’t discuss its politics. “Militant” and “fiery” were used about villages like the Communist Party stronghold Salfit, to Beita’s south, or Qabatya to its north, where, in February of 1988, a collaborator was axed to death. Of Beita they wrote “lost in the hills” and sleepy.”

With its women carrying jerry cans of water on their heads and its little storefront where men sit fingering their worry beads and sipping coffee, Beita looked to me at first like one of Giovanni Verga’s villages. The only thing that struck a very different note—a sign of the nine-month-old intifada (literally, “the shaking-off’ or “shuddering”)—was the wall-writing I saw everywhere: The cruelty and violence of the army will only increase our struggle,” signed, “Fatah.” “Yes to national unity under the leadership of the PLO. No to attempts at division,” signed, “Unified National Leadership.” “Yes to civil disobedience.” “Strike the 17th and 26th.” And my favorite: “We salute you, castle of steadfastness,” also signed Unified National Leadership.

My borrowed Peugeot with its blue plates—blue is for Arabs; yellow for Israelis; to drive with yellow plates into a village like Beita in the heat of the intifada is to court stoning by the children—struggled up narrow, stony paths past a dog sleeping in the dust and under two tattered Palestinian flags hanging from electricity wires. I counted three demolished houses before my attention was diverted by an inspection detail of small, rough boys who

pulled up on either side of me on donkeys. I stopped, explained through my translator where I wanted to go, and got escorted at a canter to a high point in the village near the mosque.

The Salih house in Beita was like dozens I’ve visited in the West Bank over the past nine years—a little, iron, painted gate, a tiny courtyard, a goat tied in an alcove beside cement stairs that mounted steeply to a scrubbed but barren set of small rooms on the first floor. I came with Hafiz Barghuti, a journalist from a large and important family near Ramallah, an hour and a half to the south. There are trade-unionist Barghutis and medical Barghutis; during the days of clan rule in Palestine the family members were effendis– landowners.’

The Mother’s Story

This particular Barghuti had lived several years in Italy. His Italian was better than his English, my Italian was adequate, so we hobbled along with each other in that language, which made our hostesses and the children believe, firmly and approvingly, that I was Italian. (I didn’t disabuse them: being from the United States doesn’t get you high marks in these parts.) A child brought me a chair; instead I chose the little, lean cot by the window and instantly regretted it. The sun beat down on my shoulders, my pants were damp against my thighs and sweat trickled down my sides. I wondered how the three women sitting opposite me– Munira Salih’s two sisters and her mother—could stand the September heat wave in their long, heavy dresses.

An unwritten rule of Israeli occupation in the territories seems to be: those who are punished will be punished for their punishment. This was the case, for example, in the southern town of Halhul where I did my first West Bank reporting in 1979. In the course of a high-school students’ demonstration against the Camp David accords in April of that year, two of Halhul’s teenagers were murdered either by a soldier or by a settler from nearby Kiryat Arba (it was never established which; there was no conviction) and a twenty-three-hour-a-day thirty-day curfew was levied on the hapless town.

The Salih’s story was this: a settler from Elon Moreh had shot and killed twenty-one-year-old Musa, the son of the oldest woman and the brother of the two younger ones. Of the countless settler depredations in the region, this one was the most dramatic. Musa’s sister, Munira was shown her brother’s body in the presence of his murderer. In her grief and rage she picked up a rock and struck and severely injured him. For this act Munira, wife of Taysir Da’ud, mother of three and four months pregnant with her fourth, was jailed, convicted of “aggravated assault” and sentenced to seven months in prison. After Munira’s arrest the army came into the village and demolished the house Taysir’s father had built for the couple six years earlier.

Munira’s mother is a tall, spare, dark woman in her sixties. She has a hawk-like nose and a pale, vertical line of blue tattooing in the middle of her lower lip, a traditional decoration of older countrywomen here. Her two other daughters have her dark, aquiline leanness and so, their mother told me, does Munira.

“Munira’s youngest is sick because he misses his mother. And the littlest keeps crying, ‘I want my mother,”‘ she said. Munira would get out of prison in three months, by which time her child would be born. Every two weeks the mother went to visit the daughter; the prison authorities allowed her the usual half-hour conversation through bars. When I asked about Musa she began a long lamentation: “I raised him all by myself; his father died when he was seven months old. He was always the best in his class; he was in his second year at Najah University. He played the flute. If he was a moment late coming home from university, I’d be going in the streets asking about him.” At any sign of “trouble” in the village—demonstrations or clashes with the army—she would take Musa to the neighboring village where she was born. “I dreamed of seeing him walking hand and hand with his wife through the streets of this village,” wept his mother, “but now he’s lying in his grave! If your house has been demolished, you might rebuild it. If you lose your money, you might regain it. But if you lose your son….”

A child clinging to his grandmother’s legs burst out crying. “Shhh!” said Barghuti. The child cried even harder when Barghuti shushed him again. “Ma’alish—never mind!” I said. This journalism business was a super-added tax on a family already visited with Biblical punishments. I said I would do what I could to publicize the family’s case; I would try to return. “Ahlan wa sahlan—welcome,” said Munira’s mother in a hollow voice. “Your daughters have your eyes,” I said as I was turning to leave. She kissed me then on both cheeks: “You are a nice person.” “Ciao! Ciao…” called one of the older children enthusiastically as we walked down the road.

Someone had thrown orange drink at the windshield and side window of the Peugeot. No doubt one of the little boys from earlier. American freelance filmmakers staying at my East Jerusalem hotel said they had literally been disarmed by Beita children, a tough lot. “It was, like, creepy, man,” said the group’s producer. “They were outta control when they saw our cameras. They started throwing stones. The adults couldn’t do anything about them, it was like Lord of the Flies.” I poured water over the windshield and wiped off the orange drink. A vast assortment of journalists, writers and filmmakers from all over Western Europe and the United States had pounced on Beita

immediately after its April tragedy. Little, if any, material aid had resulted from all the voyeurism.

Breakfast in the Grass

In the dozens of US news accounts about Beita, the name of the Palestinian Antigone, Munira Da’ud, was never mentioned. Instead, the media lit on a Jewish girl, fifteen-year-old Tirza Porat, accidentally killed April 6 by the same man who had killed Musa Salih. Overnight, Tirza became an international martyr. She was from a Jewish settlement, Elon Moreh, located near the West Bank’s largest city, Nablus. Elon Moreh is a stronghold of Gush Emunim Bloc of the Faithful—the religious-nationalist spearhead of settlements since 1967. On April 6, with other Elon Moreh teenagers, she had gone picnicking in the Palestinian hills. This seemed a rash thing to do at the height of the intifada, but then these children believe in manifest destiny: all of Eretz Yisra’el, from the ocean to the river Jordan, for the Jews.

The teenagers settled down for breakfast at a spring near Beita. With the group were two armed bodyguards, one of them twenty-six-year-old Roman Aldubi. This was a man, as it would happen, of such extremism and violent tendencies that the Israeli army had banned him the year before from entering Nablus, where he had been a party to the killing of a Palestinian child, ‘Aysha Bahash, in her father’s bakery.

From a distance, some farmers who had been tending their land saw the teenagers and the armed men and became alarmed. They sent one of their number running into Beita a kilometer away, and very soon after word of the settlers went out over the village mosque’s loudspeaker. More villagers, among them Musa Salih, rushed to the aid of their neighbors near the spring. At some point the villagers threw stones at the settler-teenagers to drive them away. Instead of running away with his group, Aldubi began running towards the farmers. He fired his gun, hitting Musa Salih in the head.

Accounts vary about what happened next, but several facts seem clear. During the course of the next hour or so, the group, surrounded by Beitans, moved from the spring to the village itself. Villagers and some of the teenagers tried to keep Aldubi from shooting again. Nevertheless, he killed another villager and critically wounded a third. And he killed Tirza Porat.

The first Israeli reports screamed that Tirza Porat had been stoned to death by bloodthirsty Arabs. These reports were echoed in the U.S. press. A united front of the Right attended the girl’s funeral—former Defense Minister and current Trade Minister Ariel Sharon; Rabbi Meir Kahane, founder of the Jewish Defense League and head of the racial supremacist Kach (Thus) party; and Rabbi Chaim Druckman, of the National Religious Party, who declared that Beita “should be wiped off the face of the earth.” “The heart of the entire nation is boiling,” intoned Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir. “God will avenge her blood.”

The real story came to light very soon after. By then irreparable damage was in progress. Bowing to the settlers’ pressure, the army moved in and destroyed fifteen houses, including the Da’uds’. Fifteen other houses, including Munira’s mother’s, were damaged accidentally because of the force of other explosions. Some of that damage was extensive. All the demolitions look place before the inhabitants had been accused of any malfeasance. One of the houses belonged to a family that had tried to protect the settler-children. Some belonged to people who hadn’t even been in Beita at the time of the incident.

In the terrible days that followed, another Beitan was shot and killed while fleeing from the army: after April 6 the military authorities dragnetted the village, arresting successive waves of villagers before they settled on a final nineteen to be brought to trial. Finally, six Beitans were deported. The other Palestinians exiled over the past twenty-one years have all been accused of being leaders of political revolts. These were the first men ever exiled for that most daily and banal of resistance activities, stone-throwing.

At the Store

Someone gave me the name of Munira’s husband, Taysir Da’ud, and a phone number where he could presumably be reached in Nablus. For a futile week I kept calling Nablus, only to be told by a cautious female voice that Da’ud’s whereabouts were unknown. That was when Barghuti and I went to Beita on our own initiative and found Munira’s mother.

Making connections at this point in the intifada wasn’t easy. The uprising had become a sort of natural condition like the weather, ever present, ever- honored, changing the whole rhythm of life. The universal merchants’ strike had collapsed the working day into a scanty three hours. At nine every morning, all stores in East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza opened promptly and at noon the metal shutters slammed down over everything except designated pharmacies. If you didn’t get all your business done during that time, you were stuck until the next day. There was also the constant violence. Mass arrests took place in the northern West Bank the first week of my stay, and all during my visit there was fresh weekly news of deaths and injuries—the army by now was routinely using live ammunition against the population. In the atmosphere of continual crisis tracking people down could therefore take several times as long as it would have ordinarily.

And then, the paranoia: it wasn’t that people weren’t wary in February, when I had made an earlier visit. It was just that they were warier now, and for good reason: by September over ten thousand Palestinians were in prison. These days, one was even more likely than during the time of my earlier visit to be imprisoned for anything the military authorities decided was an “incitement,” which, of course, included being known as a press contact. The press itself had also fallen into some disrepute. This was because the Shin Bet (Israel’s FBI) had posed as journalists— how often it was impossible to tell, but the result was that Palestinians were now suspicious of any journalist who didn’t come personally recommended by someone they knew and trusted.

“Ahlan wa sahlan,” Da’ud greeted me without surprise when I was finally brought to him. “I was busy with my case,” he said. He sat in a dusty little cave of a store—one of those ubiquitous Third World places that sells everything from Royal Crown Cola to plastic sandals. On top of a battered refrigerator that stood by the door were boxes of the latter. I took note of the wares on a rickety red and green table towards the back—boxes of eggs; plastic, dusty bags of sunflower seeds; some colored boxes containing bubble gum. Outside, the sun shimmered hotly and from somewhere in the olive groves a donkey kept braying.

Da’ud has a B.A. in sociology and psychology from Najah University. “All the people are Muslims here,” he said, twirling his worry beads. “More than two thousand of us have emigrated from Beita abroad. That began even before ’67 but it increased greatly after.” This is typical of the region, where twenty years of Israeli occupation have roadblocked development and self-sufficiency. Young Palestinian men have had to choose either menial work in Israel or emigration to ensure their families’ survival. According to Da’ud, thirty Beitans with B.A.s are employed as teachers. Seventy others work as hotel cleaners and in other menial service jobs in Israel because of unemployment. The village’s revenue has suffered a 30 percent cut since the beginning of the intifada. “We had 600 workers going to Israel before the intifada. Now there are only 150. Many of them were hit and beaten by Jewish persons in the cities because it was known they were from Beita, so most of them are afraid to work in Israel now. And others don’t want to work in Israel because of the intifada.”

Da’ud was to go to the United States for graduate work but “the Incident” brought his plans to a halt, he said. There is no other employment, so he works here in his father’s store. Or rather, a poor substitute for his father’s original store, which was “accidentally” demolished by the force of the explosion that destroyed the Da’uds’ house adjacent to it. The earlier store

dated from 1948 when, along with thousands of others, Taysir Da’ud’s father was forced to flee Haifa by the invading Jewish army.

The Da’ud family is like countless others in the West Bank and Gaza, rich in stories about the disinherited past and riven with present hardship. The particular hardships attending “the Incident” included the army roundup of wave upon wave of villagers who got herded into the village schoolyard, Da’ud among them. “The first day alone they arrested maybe one hundred people. They put them in the school courtyard, they beat them with sticks, with their hands, with guns. All that night, from seven o’clock until four in the morning, they put a big projector with a searchlight on our eyes.” The soldiers wouldn’t let their captives move, go to the toilet, or smoke, even though they themselves demanded cigarettes from the people. The next morning Da’ud was released with many others. “This continued from April 6 to April 9, taking, freeing, taking, freeing. The settlers claimed the people used a gun or a bomb, they claimed we were terrorists. But there was much time for the villagers to kill all of them [the settler teenagers], and the villagers killed no one. It was Aldubi who killed Musa and another Taysir, who had only wanted to talk to him.”

I was curious about Munira. “Just a housewife,” her husband said. “She was never active. The day of the Incident she was getting clothes with her mother for a woman who had just given birth in Beita.” The authorities had offered her favors in return for her cooperation; she refused.

As Da’ud spoke, a small group of men collected at the entrance of the store and swapped prison stories. “In jail,” said one, “I met a person from al-‘Ayn refugee camp who had been in jail before. The day he was released from jail, he got home at three-thirty and at eight the same evening they came and arrested him; they accused him of throwing stones on a day when he was in jail the first time. He is in jail still…”

Thank You For Your Cooperation

Two other men, absent from Beita during the Incident, volunteered that the army had destroyed their houses as well as Da’ud’s. Muhammad `Ali, an unemployed land surveyor with a degree in engineering, laughed after telling me he was thirty- eight. “I look older, don’t I?” The ruins of his house were on the outskirts of the village, a mess of rubble and slabs of crumpled walls against a background of olive trees. `Ali said he had nine children—five boys, four girls, ranging from fourteen and a half years to eight months—and one on the way. Sure enough, seven of the nine, playing under the trees, came running to meet us. They kissed ‘Ali’s hand and bowed their foreheads o it four or five times in the traditional, strict Muslim way and then stood wriggling their bare toes in the red earth while their father told me about the demolition of his house.

He was in Ramallah on April 6 and the next day, when curfew hushed the village. The day of the curfew, settlers came to the ‘Ali house and banged for a long time on the doors. `Ali’s wife hid with the children in one of the bedrooms, covering the mouth of one crying baby with her hand. After what seemed a very long time, the settlers left the house and the mother and children crept out, making their way through the trees up the hillside into the heart of the village. They had to run for a while when the settlers spotted them and fired some shots. When ‘Ali returned from Ramallah, the couple decided not to return to their house, but to stay the night with relatives. The next day villagers rushed to tell them that soldiers had surrounded their house and were probably about to demolish it. Running down the road the ‘Alis encountered an army checkpoint. ‘Ali offered the soldiers his keys, pleading that they should search the house; there was no reason for them to demolish it. The soldiers ignored `Ali’s pleas and gave the couple five minutes to retrieve what possessions they could from their house. Entering, they found most of their furniture broken, food strewn on the floor, doors and windows damaged. Then bulldozers destroyed the house and most of the family’s belongings. They also damaged the well and water cistern. ‘Ali is not permitted to rebuild on his land until the Israeli High Court issues a permit for him to do so (this is an ordinary Israeli military proceeding and the rebuilding permit can take years to be issued). He is also forbidden to clear up the rubble or clean out his water cistern, which was filled with bricks and dirt by the explosion. The family was never told why their house was demolished.

Since ‘Ali is an expert (“I have fourteen years of experience in my profession,” he told me), the villagers chose him to be their spokesman in the unlikely event that the military authorities decided to compensate the village for its losses. He had made blueprints of all the destroyed properties and invited me to see them.

The ‘Alis’ temporary house was a moldering three-room stone affair from the Turkish period. The pantry and makeshift privy were two small, musty basement rooms with old-fashioned vaulted ceilings. The upstairs room, about twelve by fifteen feet, contained a battered refrigerator, a small double bed, a little drafting table, a metal cabinet and mattresses stacked in the Arab fashion in shelves recessed in one wall.

I found my eyes fixing abstractedly on the purplish-gray bloom of the drafting sheets ‘Ali handed tome. An elegant tracery of black lines delineated on this pretty paper what had once been rooms in Beita’s demolished buildings. A child brought glasses and a large container of the Palestinian-

produced, salty-sweet Royal Crown everyone was drinking at the time (the unified National Leadership had urged a boycott of Israeli goods).

“It is nothing,” ‘Ali smiled and bowed slightly when I praised the quality and fastidiousness of his work. “I do it because it is my duty.” It was hard to concentrate on what he was saying because of the heavy silence emanating from his wife. At the roadblock, she had told the soldiers she wanted the children to witness the demolition “so as to tell everyone about it until Doomsday.” When portly ‘Ali smiled and laughed, her face remained grim. In her ninth month of pregnancy, she was as small and thin as ‘Ali was stout, her wrists and neck like sparrow bones at the sleeves and collar of her long dress. I got up to leave as soon as it was decently possible, saying that I would try to do what I could to publicize the village’s tragedy. ‘Thank you,” said ‘Ali in his formal English, smiling and bowing again. “Thank you for your cooperation.” The children lined up on the staircase for a photograph. When I flashed the camera, nine hands lifted, and nine index and third fingers all made the intifada victory sign.

Liberty or Death

Several Palestinian acquaintances said they felt Beita wasn’t repre- sentative. “Too much,” was one judgement. “Overdone by the press,” another. According to Hafiz Barghuti, Beita was a monochrome study in suffering and victimization. Other villages were more militant. Hafiz offered to take me to fiery Qabatya where the collaborator had been killed after he had maddened a crowd of demonstrators by firing on them and killing a four-year-old with his Israeli- donated Uzi. In Qabatya, promised Hafiz, he could introduce me to a man whose hand had been permanently damaged by soldiers in a savage beating; to people whose crops had been destroyed by the army.

I took Barghuti up on his Qabatya offer several days later, but I was hardly prepared to abandon Beita. When I asked Taysir Da’ud whether Beita had been a traditionally “quiet” village before the Incident, he said with some irony, “We can say every village in Palestine was quiet. But what happens throughout Palestine influences us. There are writings on the walls, there are flags. The soldiers come every two or three weeks and order people to clean the walls.” Beita was, in short, a West Bank Everyplace. In Da’ud’s mind its tragedy didn’t make it an exception, but a stunning example of intifada period martyrdom. “The people here believe they are a symbol of Palestine,” he said.

1936

Not far from Taysir Da’ud’s mother-in-law’s house is the house of an old peasant who claims his forebears established Beita 300 years ago. The hajj—a respectful term for a Muslim who has performed the pilgrimage to Mecca; the feminine form is hajja—turned out to be a thin, well-preserved old man with bright, shrewd brown eyes and a tanned face as deeply furrowed as a freshly- tilled field. He sat beside me on a mattress on the floor in a large, sunny, stone- floored room and described his experience of the thawra—the great revolt that began in 1936 and was finally crushed by the British three years later.

Beita was self-sufficient until the British Mandate, said the hajj, when young men began going to Haifa to work. They would stay away for a month or more, transport being so difficult at that time. There was only one family in Nablus with a car, and it traveled the road between Nablus and Hawwara, the village next to Beita. Everyone else before World War II used horses and donkeys to get around. That was the sort of place Beita had been at the time of the revolt.

The thawra, unlike the intifada, was an armed revolt. ‘We fought the British in the streets, in the mountains…” His eyes lit up with youthful fervor as he spoke, and the twenty-five men who collected in the room to hear the interview smiled with him in his enthusiasm. The tactic in those days was “hit and hide”—strike at the British, then retreat to caves in the hillsides or to hiding places in the villages. Was he willing to name people he had fought with? “That was a long time ago,” said someone, laughing, “there’s no danger in giving their names.” As vividly as if he were recalling yesterday’s events, the old man listed seven of his fallen comrades.

The general strike that began the thawra was different from the current strike: businesses were continuously closed. The people either sneaked food in or lived on stored goods like oil, bread, beans and lentils. “Generally, we are not like Westerners. We can live on very little, even on grass and wild plants.” The British instituted a policy like Yitzhak Rabin’s “Iron Fist,” killing many leaders and crushing the revolt. Some of the old local leadership remained in 1948, but by then the thawra had long since become a memory. The next period of resistance in Beita, as in the West Bank generally, was the nationalist upsurge after Camp David. Arrests and imprisonments also ended this briefer period of militancy.

“Inshallab (God willing) this intifada won’t be stopped,” said a hefty younger man who sat next to the hajj. He was a programmer who had studied computer science in Amman and was only one course shy of his master’s degree. He had worked for an American company in Dubai, but when he

returned to live in Beita he could get work in Israel only as a cleaner in a hotel. “Because of such things,” he said, “the intifada continues.”

Return to the Land

Beita’s first contribution to the uprising was the burning, at four in the morning on January 20, 1988, of the bus that had customarily taken Beita workers to their Israeli jobs. Soon after the bus was destroyed soldiers stormed into Beita, seized a group of men including Taysir Da’ud, took them to a crossroads, and beat them. After the bus-burning and before “the Incident” there were periodic confrontations with the army—the usual stone-throwing, the usual retaliatory chasings, beatings and jailings.

Like other villages I had visited since 1979, Beita was the kind of place where, after “incidents,” people used to shrug and sigh, “But what can we do? This is our fate.” The intifada put an end to that fatalism. Between my February and September visits to the West Bank, the character of the uprising had also changed. It had become a permanence in which history was divided into two parts: before the intifada and during. No one talked about “after.” There was an in-it-for-the-long- haul, present-oriented pragmatism that precluded predictions. The intifada’s continuous present had a less dramatic but more pervasive character than in February, when, for instance, I had seen barricades, or remnants of old barricades— piles of stones, rusty stove doors, anything that might stop the army’s passage— everywhere. Now I didn’t see very many barricades; clashes between the army and demonstrators didn’t seem to be a daily occurrence, but took place mainly on the strike days called by the national leadership.

But another, invisible barricade had gone up between the people and Israel: a whole new grassroots civic government had displaced the Israeli military administration wherever possible. As far as I could tell, the “popular committees” were soviets that dealt with all areas of life, from trash disposal and public safety to health and education. By the time I arrived in September the committees had been banned by Israel and people weren’t talking about them. But their existence could still be divined indirectly. During the interview with the old peasant, for instance, someone volunteered that people in Beita who had money donated it to people who didn’t, adding that this was typical of the West Bank where people had been taking up collections for victims of military brutality. Popular committees had also been responsible for media work, including producing the wall posters announcing various points of the Unified National Leadership’s program for any given period. The number and character of Beita’s graffiti moved me to feel that their posting was organized rather than spontaneous. Whose idea, moreover, had it been to make the life-sized doll representing the guerrilla fighter? Without some organization, he wouldn’t have existed. He hung against an electricity pylon near Taysir Da’ud’s store, now a tattered remnant of his former self. Before Israeli soldiers had disfigured him, he had been a complete resistance fighter with kaffiya, shoes, a full outfit of clothing and a Palestinian flag.

Other signs of the organized intifada in Beita: the chickens, which scurried and pecked freely everywhere. “Free-running chickens,” joked a man who had been in the crowd at the old peasant’s house, and then he explained: “They’re healthier that way.” The Unified National Leadership had urged the population to become self-sufficient in food production, and the process seemed well underway in Beita. “Before the intifada,” said the organic poultry advocate, “I used to buy eggs. But now I have my own chickens, and I even sell eggs.” In a hay-strewn shed near the hajj’s house was the new farmer’s wealth: several victory goats, a victory cow and the omnipresent victory chickens. The organic fanner was actually a former accountant. “The shaking off” has also meant a shaking-up of Palestinian society in which members of the professional elites have been forced by necessity back to the land and into daily contact with the peasantry and manual laborers. “Photograph?” the ex- accountant volunteered, posing under the cow and pretending to pull at its udders. Then he posed next to one of the goats, both arms affectionately around its neck, his head pressed against its muzzle. Amidst general laughter and a showing of V-signs I flashed a photograph, this time not of Beita’s sorrow, but of its triumph.

The Happiest Couple in the Village

Hafiz had other journalistic fish to fry besides the ones he could catch while translating for me. On his departure I found Nadia, a twenty-five-yearold British- educated Palestinian with a charming Cockney accent who was working as a part- time reporter for Agence France Presse. I had purposely looked for a woman to be my interpreter: introduced by a man, one has access only to men, since women won’t talk intimately in men’s presence.

Women were on my mind throughout my visits to Beita and its more militant northern neighbor, Qabatya. A friend had jubilantly announced to me before my trips to the two villages that the intifada had started women’s liberation in the West Bank. Women, he said, were heading popular committees. So many thousands of men had been imprisoned that the communities now looked to women for real leadership that went far beyond the usual maternal, sororal and filial acts of courage.

Maybe this liberation was taking effect in refugee camps and towns, but as far as I could tell the great “shaking off’ hadn’t shaken up the situation of women in the northern Muslim villages at all. Staying with a Qabatya family of nine brothers and their wives and mother, I was, as usual, an honorary man—as was Nadia, who got asked several times if she was truly “an Arab like us.” We were waited on by the brothers’ mother and their wives, who retreated to the kitchen when we took our meals with the men. At night one of the wives and her sister crept in to talk with us. “How old are you?” they asked me. “Are you married? Do you have children?” There was a silence, then a chorus of “What a shame! What a shame!” when I said I had a husband but no children. And still they were fascinated by Nadia and me: how strange to travel by oneself! And how wonderful, even if frightening… “Poor thing,” murmured Nadia about the sister after the women had left. “She is twenty-nine but still not married. She will stay here the rest of her life looking after her nieces and nephews.”

I kept thinking about those women, and also about Munira. How would she emerge from her time in prison? “Just a housewife” before, it was certain she would come out with far more political sophistication. And then…? In February I had been in a women’s demonstration in a village to Beita’s south, with peasant women like Munira. In a hard, freezing rain they marched through pools of icy water chanting slogans and singing nationalist songs. With women like them in the larger town, el- Bireh, I had taken shelter in an apartment after the army closed in on their demonstration: “And if the army breaks in here what’s the worst they can do to us?” shrugged one woman after hugging me to calm my fears. She lit a cigarette nonchalantly: “Perhaps they beat us, then they leave…”

In Beita I had also met Maryam, the village kindergarten teacher. She lived in a little stone house near the Beita Charitable Society, which housed the kindergarten as well as a tiny clinic and rooms for classes in literacy, maternal health and child health. There is a garden in front of Maryam’s house; the privy is out back. Against the garden’s front wall is the rusted-out hulk of a Volkswagen Beetle, where a small flock of victory chickens clucks and mutters. Pots of flowers cluster on the low balustrades of the little porch. On the walls of a tiny living room are the usual glories: a diploma and a photograph of the graduate, Maryam’s husband, Walid. And then, posters featuring soccer players—Walid used to head a Beita sports society—and a round straw tray woven in the colors of the Palestinian flag. Inside a frame that looks like cardboard covered with tinfoil are photographs of Maryam and Walid at their wedding, with a smaller oval photograph of their four-year-old son, Bashir, when he was an infant. There is also a large colored Keane-like poster featuring a greeneyed woman with streaming, platinum-

blond hair and exaggeratedly slanting blue eyes, holding a blue-eyed Persian cat. Maryam herself has big, dark eyes: a quiet little twenty-seven-year-old woman with a round face and olive skin. Bashir looks like her. She wore the conventional long skirt, long-sleeved, high-necked blouse, high heels and wimple-like scarf, though her hair turned out to be short when she took the scarf off in the house. She cooked lunch and then she talked. “We believe, as a younger generation, that women have our role to play in the intifada. But most of the women here don’t participate. There is a lot of pressure from our families.” Maryam’s sister-in-law, Jinan, kept getting up to chase after her own toddler and called back to me over her shoulder, “Some families prefer the women to be in the kitchen instead of getting educated, and this is wrong.” When she sat down she said that with a year to go toward her high school diploma, she had married, vowing to finish her studies. But she and her husband moved into a single room in a house with fifteen people. After three days of trying to study in that chaos, Jinan gave up. Sixteen-year-old Mikhaya, Jinan’s sister, sat quietly throughout most of the conversation. She was tall and dark-haired, with very pale skin, hazel eyes and a serious expression. Maryam told me proudly that Mikhaya was first in her class. So would she go on to university? “I only wish…” murmured Mikhaya. “But I don’t think my family…” “They won’t let you?” “You see, the high school is mixed, boys and girls, and they are against that. So I might not even finish high school.

And then there are my brothers to consider. Their education comes first.”

“We talk about this a lot,” Maryam told me. Then she turned to Mikhaya: “It’s your fault. You let them get used to governing you. Now, at your age, you have to start from zero. With me it didn’t start from zero. I started refusing what they wanted when I was very young, and I succeeded. I went on hunger strike.” “How long?” I asked in amazement. Maryam shrugged: “Until they saw it was serious. I would starve if they didn’t give in. And they did.”

At an early age, the rebel Maryam was promised in marriage to her cousin. She rejected that destiny as well. Because she didn’t love the cousin, she said she would never marry him. Her father relented, knowing from her earlier revolt that she meant business. He suggested a number of alternate candidates, among them the handsome head of Beita’s sport club, the serious young Walid. “I don’t mind,” said Maryam diffidently when her father lighted on him. The couple married a year later: Maryam took out the wedding announcements shyly and showed them to me and Nadia. One day, six months after the wedding, the men from Israeli security came for Walid. “We’ll return him to you today,” the security men assured Maryam, who was pregnant at the time. Instead, Walid was jailed, put on trial for membership in one of the illegal Palestinian organizations and sentenced to fourteen years

in prison. The framed wedding and baby photographs are his work: the tinfoil turned out to be the insides of toothpaste tubes, some of the only art material available to Walid in Nafha prison near Beersheba. The belt woven out of the outsides of coffee bags, a present for Maryam, is also his creation. She modeled the belt for us, and then started weeping silently. “We were the happiest couple in the village,” she said, tears coursing down her cheeks.

In intifada weddings, the men don’t do the dabka, the line dance adopted as the hora by Jewish immigrants to Palestine. Neither do the women shimmy for hours as they do in normal times, vying with each other for sensuality and grace. There are no drums, there is no oud, no singing, no clapping. The intifada wedding is a silent affair because this is a time of mourning for the hundreds of martyrs who have died at the hands of the Israeli army.

Nadia and I were invited to the beginning of such a wedding in the village, the part where the bride sits on her dais surrounded by all the village women. The Beita bride was dressed in white tulle, a veil over her face. She clutched a corsage of red carnations and sat very still while the village women sat around in front of her on wood chairs, fanning themselves. A few little flower girls with their rouged cheeks and eyes ringed with kohl mingled with other children who came up to Nadia and me, touching our notebooks wonderingly. After a while the grandfather came in—none other than the old hajj. With other male relatives, he gave the customary pre-wedding money to the bride. Because she is to be torn from her father’s family and enter her husband’s, a Palestinian bride is supposed to cry before her wedding. This particular bride had been stifling yawns and embarrassed smiles, and now she dabbed dutifully at dry eyes. In a hot press of female bodies we were carried down the narrow stone stairs of the house and out into the bright sunlight where cars waited to transport the bridal party to the groom’s village. An old woman with a tattooed lip grabbed my elbow and steered me to the front of the first car: “Photograph!” she commanded, so I took the bride from several angles.

Had the marriage been arranged? Had it been a love match? There was no time to ask such questions, and in any case the love-match question was a forbidden one: love before marriage is frowned on in villages like Beita. The mere knowledge that a couple has fallen in love before the wedding is enough, one village woman told me, to ruin a woman’s reputation forever. I drove one last time to the village’s high point. Some boys were throwing stones across a steep drop just beyond the mosque where the fateful announcement about the settlers had issued on April 6. They were calling out something about the jaysh, the army. ‘Where is the army?” I asked playfully, the way adults do when they want to enter into a children’s game. A barefoot thirteen-year-old with tawny, dusty hair and blue eyes looked at

me pityingly. “There is no army,” he replied, “we’re just training. We stockpile stones. Then we throw them.” I thought of a boy the same age I had seen in a hospital in February. He had been dark, with glossy crow’s-wing black hair, and a big bandage around his middle. He, too, had been throwing stones in the West Bank refugee camp of Shu’fat and had been shot in the back. The bullet fragmented, spraying his small intestines with shrapnel. He had been in a demonstration, one of the barricade-builders: ‘We didn’t want the soldiers to follow us,” he told me. ‘When they did, we started throwing stones.” Then he made a slingshot gesture and grinned. “Are you afraid?” I asked him. “No,” he replied, “they are human, like me.”

“Are you afraid of the soldiers?” I now asked. The Beita trainee tossed back his head dismissively. He had seen his first soldier at four; at six he had begun training. “But from the beginning of the intifada, I really began throwing stones,” he explained. If schools had been open he would just be entering junior high. “All the people in this village are heroes,” volunteered another, smaller boy. How long would the intifada last? “God knows! Until liberation!” answered the blond boy in a grown-up voice in which I heard both resignation and defiance.

Chapter 6 of the anthology Intifada: The Palestinian Uprising Against Israeli Occupation, edited by Zachary Lockman & Joel Beinin (Middle East Research and Information Project: Washington, D.C. 1989)

Beita

Ellen Cantarow

Before April 6, 1988, Beita (pronounced BAY’tah, pop. 7,500) was known, when it was known at all, for its fine olive crops and its beauty. It is a white, stony little place whose narrow, unpaved streets twist and turn precipitously up terraced hills that burgeon with olive trees. The rusty hiccoughing of donkeys, the muezzin’s call to prayer from the little stone Mosque at the village’s summit and the occasional drone of a tractor are about the only sounds you hear on warm days like the ones of my visit here in September 1988. Like most of the northern West Bank, Beita is Fatah territory. But even after April 6, 1988, journalists didn’t discuss its politics. “Militant” and “fiery” were used about villages like the Communist Party stronghold Salfit, to Beita’s south, or Qabatya to its north, where, in February of 1988, a collaborator was axed to death. Of Beita they wrote “lost in the hills” and sleepy.”

With its women carrying jerry cans of water on their heads and its little storefront where men sit fingering their worry beads and sipping coffee, Beita looked to me at first like one of Giovanni Verga’s villages. The only thing that struck a very different note—a sign of the nine-month-old intifada (literally, “the shaking-off’ or “shuddering”)—was the wall-writing I saw everywhere: The cruelty and violence of the army will only increase our struggle,” signed, “Fatah.” “Yes to national unity under the leadership of the PLO. No to attempts at division,” signed, “Unified National Leadership.” “Yes to civil disobedience.” “Strike the 17th and 26th.” And my favorite: “We salute you, castle of steadfastness,” also signed Unified National Leadership.

My borrowed Peugeot with its blue plates—blue is for Arabs; yellow for Israelis; to drive with yellow plates into a village like Beita in the heat of the intifada is to court stoning by the children—struggled up narrow, stony paths past a dog sleeping in the dust and under two tattered Palestinian flags hanging from electricity wires. I counted three demolished houses before my attention was diverted by an inspection detail of small, rough boys who

pulled up on either side of me on donkeys. I stopped, explained through my translator where I wanted to go, and got escorted at a canter to a high point in the village near the mosque.

The Salih house in Beita was like dozens I’ve visited in the West Bank over the past nine years—a little, iron, painted gate, a tiny courtyard, a goat tied in an alcove beside cement stairs that mounted steeply to a scrubbed but barren set of small rooms on the first floor. I came with Hafiz Barghuti, a journalist from a large and important family near Ramallah, an hour and a half to the south. There are trade-unionist Barghutis and medical Barghutis; during the days of clan rule in Palestine the family members were effendis– landowners.’

The Mother’s Story

This particular Barghuti had lived several years in Italy. His Italian was better than his English, my Italian was adequate, so we hobbled along with each other in that language, which made our hostesses and the children believe, firmly and approvingly, that I was Italian. (I didn’t disabuse them: being from the United States doesn’t get you high marks in these parts.) A child brought me a chair; instead I chose the little, lean cot by the window and instantly regretted it. The sun beat down on my shoulders, my pants were damp against my thighs and sweat trickled down my sides. I wondered how the three women sitting opposite me– Munira Salih’s two sisters and her mother—could stand the September heat wave in their long, heavy dresses.

An unwritten rule of Israeli occupation in the territories seems to be: those who are punished will be punished for their punishment. This was the case, for example, in the southern town of Halhul where I did my first West Bank reporting in 1979. In the course of a high-school students’ demonstration against the Camp David accords in April of that year, two of Halhul’s teenagers were murdered either by a soldier or by a settler from nearby Kiryat Arba (it was never established which; there was no conviction) and a twenty-three-hour-a-day thirty-day curfew was levied on the hapless town.

The Salih’s story was this: a settler from Elon Moreh had shot and killed twenty-one-year-old Musa, the son of the oldest woman and the brother of the two younger ones. Of the countless settler depredations in the region, this one was the most dramatic. Musa’s sister, Munira was shown her brother’s body in the presence of his murderer. In her grief and rage she picked up a rock and struck and severely injured him. For this act Munira, wife of Taysir Da’ud, mother of three and four months pregnant with her fourth, was jailed, convicted of “aggravated assault” and sentenced to seven months in prison. After Munira’s arrest the army came into the village and demolished the house Taysir’s father had built for the couple six years earlier.

Munira’s mother is a tall, spare, dark woman in her sixties. She has a hawk-like nose and a pale, vertical line of blue tattooing in the middle of her lower lip, a traditional decoration of older countrywomen here. Her two other daughters have her dark, aquiline leanness and so, their mother told me, does Munira.

“Munira’s youngest is sick because he misses his mother. And the littlest keeps crying, ‘I want my mother,”‘ she said. Munira would get out of prison in three months, by which time her child would be born. Every two weeks the mother went to visit the daughter; the prison authorities allowed her the usual half-hour conversation through bars. When I asked about Musa she began a long lamentation: “I raised him all by myself; his father died when he was seven months old. He was always the best in his class; he was in his second year at Najah University. He played the flute. If he was a moment late coming home from university, I’d be going in the streets asking about him.” At any sign of “trouble” in the village—demonstrations or clashes with the army—she would take Musa to the neighboring village where she was born. “I dreamed of seeing him walking hand and hand with his wife through the streets of this village,” wept his mother, “but now he’s lying in his grave! If your house has been demolished, you might rebuild it. If you lose your money, you might regain it. But if you lose your son….”

A child clinging to his grandmother’s legs burst out crying. “Shhh!” said Barghuti. The child cried even harder when Barghuti shushed him again. “Ma’alish—never mind!” I said. This journalism business was a super-added tax on a family already visited with Biblical punishments. I said I would do what I could to publicize the family’s case; I would try to return. “Ahlan wa sahlan—welcome,” said Munira’s mother in a hollow voice. “Your daughters have your eyes,” I said as I was turning to leave. She kissed me then on both cheeks: “You are a nice person.” “Ciao! Ciao…” called one of the older children enthusiastically as we walked down the road.

Someone had thrown orange drink at the windshield and side window of the Peugeot. No doubt one of the little boys from earlier. American freelance filmmakers staying at my East Jerusalem hotel said they had literally been disarmed by Beita children, a tough lot. “It was, like, creepy, man,” said the group’s producer. “They were outta control when they saw our cameras. They started throwing stones. The adults couldn’t do anything about them, it was like Lord of the Flies.” I poured water over the windshield and wiped off the orange drink. A vast assortment of journalists, writers and filmmakers from all over Western Europe and the United States had pounced on Beita

immediately after its April tragedy. Little, if any, material aid had resulted from all the voyeurism.

Breakfast in the Grass

In the dozens of US news accounts about Beita, the name of the Palestinian Antigone, Munira Da’ud, was never mentioned. Instead, the media lit on a Jewish girl, fifteen-year-old Tirza Porat, accidentally killed April 6 by the same man who had killed Musa Salih. Overnight, Tirza became an international martyr. She was from a Jewish settlement, Elon Moreh, located near the West Bank’s largest city, Nablus. Elon Moreh is a stronghold of Gush Emunim Bloc of the Faithful—the religious-nationalist spearhead of settlements since 1967. On April 6, with other Elon Moreh teenagers, she had gone picnicking in the Palestinian hills. This seemed a rash thing to do at the height of the intifada, but then these children believe in manifest destiny: all of Eretz Yisra’el, from the ocean to the river Jordan, for the Jews.

The teenagers settled down for breakfast at a spring near Beita. With the group were two armed bodyguards, one of them twenty-six-year-old Roman Aldubi. This was a man, as it would happen, of such extremism and violent tendencies that the Israeli army had banned him the year before from entering Nablus, where he had been a party to the killing of a Palestinian child, ‘Aysha Bahash, in her father’s bakery.

From a distance, some farmers who had been tending their land saw the teenagers and the armed men and became alarmed. They sent one of their number running into Beita a kilometer away, and very soon after word of the settlers went out over the village mosque’s loudspeaker. More villagers, among them Musa Salih, rushed to the aid of their neighbors near the spring. At some point the villagers threw stones at the settler-teenagers to drive them away. Instead of running away with his group, Aldubi began running towards the farmers. He fired his gun, hitting Musa Salih in the head.

Accounts vary about what happened next, but several facts seem clear. During the course of the next hour or so, the group, surrounded by Beitans, moved from the spring to the village itself. Villagers and some of the teenagers tried to keep Aldubi from shooting again. Nevertheless, he killed another villager and critically wounded a third. And he killed Tirza Porat.

The first Israeli reports screamed that Tirza Porat had been stoned to death by bloodthirsty Arabs. These reports were echoed in the U.S. press. A united front of the Right attended the girl’s funeral—former Defense Minister and current Trade Minister Ariel Sharon; Rabbi Meir Kahane, founder of the Jewish Defense League and head of the racial supremacist Kach (Thus) party; and Rabbi Chaim Druckman, of the National Religious Party, who declared that Beita “should be wiped off the face of the earth.” “The heart of the entire nation is boiling,” intoned Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir. “God will avenge her blood.”

The real story came to light very soon after. By then irreparable damage was in progress. Bowing to the settlers’ pressure, the army moved in and destroyed fifteen houses, including the Da’uds’. Fifteen other houses, including Munira’s mother’s, were damaged accidentally because of the force of other explosions. Some of that damage was extensive. All the demolitions look place before the inhabitants had been accused of any malfeasance. One of the houses belonged to a family that had tried to protect the settler-children. Some belonged to people who hadn’t even been in Beita at the time of the incident.

In the terrible days that followed, another Beitan was shot and killed while fleeing from the army: after April 6 the military authorities dragnetted the village, arresting successive waves of villagers before they settled on a final nineteen to be brought to trial. Finally, six Beitans were deported. The other Palestinians exiled over the past twenty-one years have all been accused of being leaders of political revolts. These were the first men ever exiled for that most daily and banal of resistance activities, stone-throwing.

At the Store

Someone gave me the name of Munira’s husband, Taysir Da’ud, and a phone number where he could presumably be reached in Nablus. For a futile week I kept calling Nablus, only to be told by a cautious female voice that Da’ud’s whereabouts were unknown. That was when Barghuti and I went to Beita on our own initiative and found Munira’s mother.

Making connections at this point in the intifada wasn’t easy. The uprising had become a sort of natural condition like the weather, ever present, ever- honored, changing the whole rhythm of life. The universal merchants’ strike had collapsed the working day into a scanty three hours. At nine every morning, all stores in East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza opened promptly and at noon the metal shutters slammed down over everything except designated pharmacies. If you didn’t get all your business done during that time, you were stuck until the next day. There was also the constant violence. Mass arrests took place in the northern West Bank the first week of my stay, and all during my visit there was fresh weekly news of deaths and injuries—the army by now was routinely using live ammunition against the population. In the atmosphere of continual crisis tracking people down could therefore take several times as long as it would have ordinarily.

And then, the paranoia: it wasn’t that people weren’t wary in February, when I had made an earlier visit. It was just that they were warier now, and for good reason: by September over ten thousand Palestinians were in prison. These days, one was even more likely than during the time of my earlier visit to be imprisoned for anything the military authorities decided was an “incitement,” which, of course, included being known as a press contact. The press itself had also fallen into some disrepute. This was because the Shin Bet (Israel’s FBI) had posed as journalists— how often it was impossible to tell, but the result was that Palestinians were now suspicious of any journalist who didn’t come personally recommended by someone they knew and trusted.

“Ahlan wa sahlan,” Da’ud greeted me without surprise when I was finally brought to him. “I was busy with my case,” he said. He sat in a dusty little cave of a store—one of those ubiquitous Third World places that sells everything from Royal Crown Cola to plastic sandals. On top of a battered refrigerator that stood by the door were boxes of the latter. I took note of the wares on a rickety red and green table towards the back—boxes of eggs; plastic, dusty bags of sunflower seeds; some colored boxes containing bubble gum. Outside, the sun shimmered hotly and from somewhere in the olive groves a donkey kept braying.

Da’ud has a B.A. in sociology and psychology from Najah University. “All the people are Muslims here,” he said, twirling his worry beads. “More than two thousand of us have emigrated from Beita abroad. That began even before ’67 but it increased greatly after.” This is typical of the region, where twenty years of Israeli occupation have roadblocked development and self-sufficiency. Young Palestinian men have had to choose either menial work in Israel or emigration to ensure their families’ survival. According to Da’ud, thirty Beitans with B.A.s are employed as teachers. Seventy others work as hotel cleaners and in other menial service jobs in Israel because of unemployment. The village’s revenue has suffered a 30 percent cut since the beginning of the intifada. “We had 600 workers going to Israel before the intifada. Now there are only 150. Many of them were hit and beaten by Jewish persons in the cities because it was known they were from Beita, so most of them are afraid to work in Israel now. And others don’t want to work in Israel because of the intifada.”

Da’ud was to go to the United States for graduate work but “the Incident” brought his plans to a halt, he said. There is no other employment, so he works here in his father’s store. Or rather, a poor substitute for his father’s original store, which was “accidentally” demolished by the force of the explosion that destroyed the Da’uds’ house adjacent to it. The earlier store

dated from 1948 when, along with thousands of others, Taysir Da’ud’s father was forced to flee Haifa by the invading Jewish army.

The Da’ud family is like countless others in the West Bank and Gaza, rich in stories about the disinherited past and riven with present hardship. The particular hardships attending “the Incident” included the army roundup of wave upon wave of villagers who got herded into the village schoolyard, Da’ud among them. “The first day alone they arrested maybe one hundred people. They put them in the school courtyard, they beat them with sticks, with their hands, with guns. All that night, from seven o’clock until four in the morning, they put a big projector with a searchlight on our eyes.” The soldiers wouldn’t let their captives move, go to the toilet, or smoke, even though they themselves demanded cigarettes from the people. The next morning Da’ud was released with many others. “This continued from April 6 to April 9, taking, freeing, taking, freeing. The settlers claimed the people used a gun or a bomb, they claimed we were terrorists. But there was much time for the villagers to kill all of them [the settler teenagers], and the villagers killed no one. It was Aldubi who killed Musa and another Taysir, who had only wanted to talk to him.”

I was curious about Munira. “Just a housewife,” her husband said. “She was never active. The day of the Incident she was getting clothes with her mother for a woman who had just given birth in Beita.” The authorities had offered her favors in return for her cooperation; she refused.

As Da’ud spoke, a small group of men collected at the entrance of the store and swapped prison stories. “In jail,” said one, “I met a person from al-‘Ayn refugee camp who had been in jail before. The day he was released from jail, he got home at three-thirty and at eight the same evening they came and arrested him; they accused him of throwing stones on a day when he was in jail the first time. He is in jail still…”

Thank You For Your Cooperation

Two other men, absent from Beita during the Incident, volunteered that the army had destroyed their houses as well as Da’ud’s. Muhammad `Ali, an unemployed land surveyor with a degree in engineering, laughed after telling me he was thirty- eight. “I look older, don’t I?” The ruins of his house were on the outskirts of the village, a mess of rubble and slabs of crumpled walls against a background of olive trees. `Ali said he had nine children—five boys, four girls, ranging from fourteen and a half years to eight months—and one on the way. Sure enough, seven of the nine, playing under the trees, came running to meet us. They kissed ‘Ali’s hand and bowed their foreheads o it four or five times in the traditional, strict Muslim way and then stood wriggling their bare toes in the red earth while their father told me about the demolition of his house.

He was in Ramallah on April 6 and the next day, when curfew hushed the village. The day of the curfew, settlers came to the ‘Ali house and banged for a long time on the doors. `Ali’s wife hid with the children in one of the bedrooms, covering the mouth of one crying baby with her hand. After what seemed a very long time, the settlers left the house and the mother and children crept out, making their way through the trees up the hillside into the heart of the village. They had to run for a while when the settlers spotted them and fired some shots. When ‘Ali returned from Ramallah, the couple decided not to return to their house, but to stay the night with relatives. The next day villagers rushed to tell them that soldiers had surrounded their house and were probably about to demolish it. Running down the road the ‘Alis encountered an army checkpoint. ‘Ali offered the soldiers his keys, pleading that they should search the house; there was no reason for them to demolish it. The soldiers ignored `Ali’s pleas and gave the couple five minutes to retrieve what possessions they could from their house. Entering, they found most of their furniture broken, food strewn on the floor, doors and windows damaged. Then bulldozers destroyed the house and most of the family’s belongings. They also damaged the well and water cistern. ‘Ali is not permitted to rebuild on his land until the Israeli High Court issues a permit for him to do so (this is an ordinary Israeli military proceeding and the rebuilding permit can take years to be issued). He is also forbidden to clear up the rubble or clean out his water cistern, which was filled with bricks and dirt by the explosion. The family was never told why their house was demolished.

Since ‘Ali is an expert (“I have fourteen years of experience in my profession,” he told me), the villagers chose him to be their spokesman in the unlikely event that the military authorities decided to compensate the village for its losses. He had made blueprints of all the destroyed properties and invited me to see them.

The ‘Alis’ temporary house was a moldering three-room stone affair from the Turkish period. The pantry and makeshift privy were two small, musty basement rooms with old-fashioned vaulted ceilings. The upstairs room, about twelve by fifteen feet, contained a battered refrigerator, a small double bed, a little drafting table, a metal cabinet and mattresses stacked in the Arab fashion in shelves recessed in one wall.

I found my eyes fixing abstractedly on the purplish-gray bloom of the drafting sheets ‘Ali handed tome. An elegant tracery of black lines delineated on this pretty paper what had once been rooms in Beita’s demolished buildings. A child brought glasses and a large container of the Palestinian-

produced, salty-sweet Royal Crown everyone was drinking at the time (the unified National Leadership had urged a boycott of Israeli goods).

“It is nothing,” ‘Ali smiled and bowed slightly when I praised the quality and fastidiousness of his work. “I do it because it is my duty.” It was hard to concentrate on what he was saying because of the heavy silence emanating from his wife. At the roadblock, she had told the soldiers she wanted the children to witness the demolition “so as to tell everyone about it until Doomsday.” When portly ‘Ali smiled and laughed, her face remained grim. In her ninth month of pregnancy, she was as small and thin as ‘Ali was stout, her wrists and neck like sparrow bones at the sleeves and collar of her long dress. I got up to leave as soon as it was decently possible, saying that I would try to do what I could to publicize the village’s tragedy. ‘Thank you,” said ‘Ali in his formal English, smiling and bowing again. “Thank you for your cooperation.” The children lined up on the staircase for a photograph. When I flashed the camera, nine hands lifted, and nine index and third fingers all made the intifada victory sign.

Liberty or Death

Several Palestinian acquaintances said they felt Beita wasn’t repre- sentative. “Too much,” was one judgement. “Overdone by the press,” another. According to Hafiz Barghuti, Beita was a monochrome study in suffering and victimization. Other villages were more militant. Hafiz offered to take me to fiery Qabatya where the collaborator had been killed after he had maddened a crowd of demonstrators by firing on them and killing a four-year-old with his Israeli- donated Uzi. In Qabatya, promised Hafiz, he could introduce me to a man whose hand had been permanently damaged by soldiers in a savage beating; to people whose crops had been destroyed by the army.

I took Barghuti up on his Qabatya offer several days later, but I was hardly prepared to abandon Beita. When I asked Taysir Da’ud whether Beita had been a traditionally “quiet” village before the Incident, he said with some irony, “We can say every village in Palestine was quiet. But what happens throughout Palestine influences us. There are writings on the walls, there are flags. The soldiers come every two or three weeks and order people to clean the walls.” Beita was, in short, a West Bank Everyplace. In Da’ud’s mind its tragedy didn’t make it an exception, but a stunning example of intifada period martyrdom. “The people here believe they are a symbol of Palestine,” he said.

1936

Not far from Taysir Da’ud’s mother-in-law’s house is the house of an old peasant who claims his forebears established Beita 300 years ago. The hajj—a respectful term for a Muslim who has performed the pilgrimage to Mecca; the feminine form is hajja—turned out to be a thin, well-preserved old man with bright, shrewd brown eyes and a tanned face as deeply furrowed as a freshly- tilled field. He sat beside me on a mattress on the floor in a large, sunny, stone- floored room and described his experience of the thawra—the great revolt that began in 1936 and was finally crushed by the British three years later.

Beita was self-sufficient until the British Mandate, said the hajj, when young men began going to Haifa to work. They would stay away for a month or more, transport being so difficult at that time. There was only one family in Nablus with a car, and it traveled the road between Nablus and Hawwara, the village next to Beita. Everyone else before World War II used horses and donkeys to get around. That was the sort of place Beita had been at the time of the revolt.

The thawra, unlike the intifada, was an armed revolt. ‘We fought the British in the streets, in the mountains…” His eyes lit up with youthful fervor as he spoke, and the twenty-five men who collected in the room to hear the interview smiled with him in his enthusiasm. The tactic in those days was “hit and hide”—strike at the British, then retreat to caves in the hillsides or to hiding places in the villages. Was he willing to name people he had fought with? “That was a long time ago,” said someone, laughing, “there’s no danger in giving their names.” As vividly as if he were recalling yesterday’s events, the old man listed seven of his fallen comrades.

The general strike that began the thawra was different from the current strike: businesses were continuously closed. The people either sneaked food in or lived on stored goods like oil, bread, beans and lentils. “Generally, we are not like Westerners. We can live on very little, even on grass and wild plants.” The British instituted a policy like Yitzhak Rabin’s “Iron Fist,” killing many leaders and crushing the revolt. Some of the old local leadership remained in 1948, but by then the thawra had long since become a memory. The next period of resistance in Beita, as in the West Bank generally, was the nationalist upsurge after Camp David. Arrests and imprisonments also ended this briefer period of militancy.

“Inshallab (God willing) this intifada won’t be stopped,” said a hefty younger man who sat next to the hajj. He was a programmer who had studied computer science in Amman and was only one course shy of his master’s degree. He had worked for an American company in Dubai, but when he

returned to live in Beita he could get work in Israel only as a cleaner in a hotel. “Because of such things,” he said, “the intifada continues.”

Return to the Land

Beita’s first contribution to the uprising was the burning, at four in the morning on January 20, 1988, of the bus that had customarily taken Beita workers to their Israeli jobs. Soon after the bus was destroyed soldiers stormed into Beita, seized a group of men including Taysir Da’ud, took them to a crossroads, and beat them. After the bus-burning and before “the Incident” there were periodic confrontations with the army—the usual stone-throwing, the usual retaliatory chasings, beatings and jailings.

Like other villages I had visited since 1979, Beita was the kind of place where, after “incidents,” people used to shrug and sigh, “But what can we do? This is our fate.” The intifada put an end to that fatalism. Between my February and September visits to the West Bank, the character of the uprising had also changed. It had become a permanence in which history was divided into two parts: before the intifada and during. No one talked about “after.” There was an in-it-for-the-long- haul, present-oriented pragmatism that precluded predictions. The intifada’s continuous present had a less dramatic but more pervasive character than in February, when, for instance, I had seen barricades, or remnants of old barricades— piles of stones, rusty stove doors, anything that might stop the army’s passage— everywhere. Now I didn’t see very many barricades; clashes between the army and demonstrators didn’t seem to be a daily occurrence, but took place mainly on the strike days called by the national leadership.

But another, invisible barricade had gone up between the people and Israel: a whole new grassroots civic government had displaced the Israeli military administration wherever possible. As far as I could tell, the “popular committees” were soviets that dealt with all areas of life, from trash disposal and public safety to health and education. By the time I arrived in September the committees had been banned by Israel and people weren’t talking about them. But their existence could still be divined indirectly. During the interview with the old peasant, for instance, someone volunteered that people in Beita who had money donated it to people who didn’t, adding that this was typical of the West Bank where people had been taking up collections for victims of military brutality. Popular committees had also been responsible for media work, including producing the wall posters announcing various points of the Unified National Leadership’s program for any given period. The number and character of Beita’s graffiti moved me to feel that their posting was organized rather than spontaneous. Whose idea, moreover, had it been to make the life-sized doll representing the guerrilla fighter? Without some organization, he wouldn’t have existed. He hung against an electricity pylon near Taysir Da’ud’s store, now a tattered remnant of his former self. Before Israeli soldiers had disfigured him, he had been a complete resistance fighter with kaffiya, shoes, a full outfit of clothing and a Palestinian flag.

Other signs of the organized intifada in Beita: the chickens, which scurried and pecked freely everywhere. “Free-running chickens,” joked a man who had been in the crowd at the old peasant’s house, and then he explained: “They’re healthier that way.” The Unified National Leadership had urged the population to become self-sufficient in food production, and the process seemed well underway in Beita. “Before the intifada,” said the organic poultry advocate, “I used to buy eggs. But now I have my own chickens, and I even sell eggs.” In a hay-strewn shed near the hajj’s house was the new farmer’s wealth: several victory goats, a victory cow and the omnipresent victory chickens. The organic fanner was actually a former accountant. “The shaking off” has also meant a shaking-up of Palestinian society in which members of the professional elites have been forced by necessity back to the land and into daily contact with the peasantry and manual laborers. “Photograph?” the ex- accountant volunteered, posing under the cow and pretending to pull at its udders. Then he posed next to one of the goats, both arms affectionately around its neck, his head pressed against its muzzle. Amidst general laughter and a showing of V-signs I flashed a photograph, this time not of Beita’s sorrow, but of its triumph.

The Happiest Couple in the Village

Hafiz had other journalistic fish to fry besides the ones he could catch while translating for me. On his departure I found Nadia, a twenty-five-yearold British- educated Palestinian with a charming Cockney accent who was working as a part- time reporter for Agence France Presse. I had purposely looked for a woman to be my interpreter: introduced by a man, one has access only to men, since women won’t talk intimately in men’s presence.

Women were on my mind throughout my visits to Beita and its more militant northern neighbor, Qabatya. A friend had jubilantly announced to me before my trips to the two villages that the intifada had started women’s liberation in the West Bank. Women, he said, were heading popular committees. So many thousands of men had been imprisoned that the communities now looked to women for real leadership that went far beyond the usual maternal, sororal and filial acts of courage.

Maybe this liberation was taking effect in refugee camps and towns, but as far as I could tell the great “shaking off’ hadn’t shaken up the situation of women in the northern Muslim villages at all. Staying with a Qabatya family of nine brothers and their wives and mother, I was, as usual, an honorary man—as was Nadia, who got asked several times if she was truly “an Arab like us.” We were waited on by the brothers’ mother and their wives, who retreated to the kitchen when we took our meals with the men. At night one of the wives and her sister crept in to talk with us. “How old are you?” they asked me. “Are you married? Do you have children?” There was a silence, then a chorus of “What a shame! What a shame!” when I said I had a husband but no children. And still they were fascinated by Nadia and me: how strange to travel by oneself! And how wonderful, even if frightening… “Poor thing,” murmured Nadia about the sister after the women had left. “She is twenty-nine but still not married. She will stay here the rest of her life looking after her nieces and nephews.”

I kept thinking about those women, and also about Munira. How would she emerge from her time in prison? “Just a housewife” before, it was certain she would come out with far more political sophistication. And then…? In February I had been in a women’s demonstration in a village to Beita’s south, with peasant women like Munira. In a hard, freezing rain they marched through pools of icy water chanting slogans and singing nationalist songs. With women like them in the larger town, el- Bireh, I had taken shelter in an apartment after the army closed in on their demonstration: “And if the army breaks in here what’s the worst they can do to us?” shrugged one woman after hugging me to calm my fears. She lit a cigarette nonchalantly: “Perhaps they beat us, then they leave…”

In Beita I had also met Maryam, the village kindergarten teacher. She lived in a little stone house near the Beita Charitable Society, which housed the kindergarten as well as a tiny clinic and rooms for classes in literacy, maternal health and child health. There is a garden in front of Maryam’s house; the privy is out back. Against the garden’s front wall is the rusted-out hulk of a Volkswagen Beetle, where a small flock of victory chickens clucks and mutters. Pots of flowers cluster on the low balustrades of the little porch. On the walls of a tiny living room are the usual glories: a diploma and a photograph of the graduate, Maryam’s husband, Walid. And then, posters featuring soccer players—Walid used to head a Beita sports society—and a round straw tray woven in the colors of the Palestinian flag. Inside a frame that looks like cardboard covered with tinfoil are photographs of Maryam and Walid at their wedding, with a smaller oval photograph of their four-year-old son, Bashir, when he was an infant. There is also a large colored Keane-like poster featuring a greeneyed woman with streaming, platinum-

blond hair and exaggeratedly slanting blue eyes, holding a blue-eyed Persian cat. Maryam herself has big, dark eyes: a quiet little twenty-seven-year-old woman with a round face and olive skin. Bashir looks like her. She wore the conventional long skirt, long-sleeved, high-necked blouse, high heels and wimple-like scarf, though her hair turned out to be short when she took the scarf off in the house. She cooked lunch and then she talked. “We believe, as a younger generation, that women have our role to play in the intifada. But most of the women here don’t participate. There is a lot of pressure from our families.” Maryam’s sister-in-law, Jinan, kept getting up to chase after her own toddler and called back to me over her shoulder, “Some families prefer the women to be in the kitchen instead of getting educated, and this is wrong.” When she sat down she said that with a year to go toward her high school diploma, she had married, vowing to finish her studies. But she and her husband moved into a single room in a house with fifteen people. After three days of trying to study in that chaos, Jinan gave up. Sixteen-year-old Mikhaya, Jinan’s sister, sat quietly throughout most of the conversation. She was tall and dark-haired, with very pale skin, hazel eyes and a serious expression. Maryam told me proudly that Mikhaya was first in her class. So would she go on to university? “I only wish…” murmured Mikhaya. “But I don’t think my family…” “They won’t let you?” “You see, the high school is mixed, boys and girls, and they are against that. So I might not even finish high school.

And then there are my brothers to consider. Their education comes first.”

“We talk about this a lot,” Maryam told me. Then she turned to Mikhaya: “It’s your fault. You let them get used to governing you. Now, at your age, you have to start from zero. With me it didn’t start from zero. I started refusing what they wanted when I was very young, and I succeeded. I went on hunger strike.” “How long?” I asked in amazement. Maryam shrugged: “Until they saw it was serious. I would starve if they didn’t give in. And they did.”

At an early age, the rebel Maryam was promised in marriage to her cousin. She rejected that destiny as well. Because she didn’t love the cousin, she said she would never marry him. Her father relented, knowing from her earlier revolt that she meant business. He suggested a number of alternate candidates, among them the handsome head of Beita’s sport club, the serious young Walid. “I don’t mind,” said Maryam diffidently when her father lighted on him. The couple married a year later: Maryam took out the wedding announcements shyly and showed them to me and Nadia. One day, six months after the wedding, the men from Israeli security came for Walid. “We’ll return him to you today,” the security men assured Maryam, who was pregnant at the time. Instead, Walid was jailed, put on trial for membership in one of the illegal Palestinian organizations and sentenced to fourteen years

in prison. The framed wedding and baby photographs are his work: the tinfoil turned out to be the insides of toothpaste tubes, some of the only art material available to Walid in Nafha prison near Beersheba. The belt woven out of the outsides of coffee bags, a present for Maryam, is also his creation. She modeled the belt for us, and then started weeping silently. “We were the happiest couple in the village,” she said, tears coursing down her cheeks.

In intifada weddings, the men don’t do the dabka, the line dance adopted as the hora by Jewish immigrants to Palestine. Neither do the women shimmy for hours as they do in normal times, vying with each other for sensuality and grace. There are no drums, there is no oud, no singing, no clapping. The intifada wedding is a silent affair because this is a time of mourning for the hundreds of martyrs who have died at the hands of the Israeli army.

Nadia and I were invited to the beginning of such a wedding in the village, the part where the bride sits on her dais surrounded by all the village women. The Beita bride was dressed in white tulle, a veil over her face. She clutched a corsage of red carnations and sat very still while the village women sat around in front of her on wood chairs, fanning themselves. A few little flower girls with their rouged cheeks and eyes ringed with kohl mingled with other children who came up to Nadia and me, touching our notebooks wonderingly. After a while the grandfather came in—none other than the old hajj. With other male relatives, he gave the customary pre-wedding money to the bride. Because she is to be torn from her father’s family and enter her husband’s, a Palestinian bride is supposed to cry before her wedding. This particular bride had been stifling yawns and embarrassed smiles, and now she dabbed dutifully at dry eyes. In a hot press of female bodies we were carried down the narrow stone stairs of the house and out into the bright sunlight where cars waited to transport the bridal party to the groom’s village. An old woman with a tattooed lip grabbed my elbow and steered me to the front of the first car: “Photograph!” she commanded, so I took the bride from several angles.

Had the marriage been arranged? Had it been a love match? There was no time to ask such questions, and in any case the love-match question was a forbidden one: love before marriage is frowned on in villages like Beita. The mere knowledge that a couple has fallen in love before the wedding is enough, one village woman told me, to ruin a woman’s reputation forever. I drove one last time to the village’s high point. Some boys were throwing stones across a steep drop just beyond the mosque where the fateful announcement about the settlers had issued on April 6. They were calling out something about the jaysh, the army. ‘Where is the army?” I asked playfully, the way adults do when they want to enter into a children’s game. A barefoot thirteen-year-old with tawny, dusty hair and blue eyes looked at

me pityingly. “There is no army,” he replied, “we’re just training. We stockpile stones. Then we throw them.” I thought of a boy the same age I had seen in a hospital in February. He had been dark, with glossy crow’s-wing black hair, and a big bandage around his middle. He, too, had been throwing stones in the West Bank refugee camp of Shu’fat and had been shot in the back. The bullet fragmented, spraying his small intestines with shrapnel. He had been in a demonstration, one of the barricade-builders: ‘We didn’t want the soldiers to follow us,” he told me. ‘When they did, we started throwing stones.” Then he made a slingshot gesture and grinned. “Are you afraid?” I asked him. “No,” he replied, “they are human, like me.”

“Are you afraid of the soldiers?” I now asked. The Beita trainee tossed back his head dismissively. He had seen his first soldier at four; at six he had begun training. “But from the beginning of the intifada, I really began throwing stones,” he explained. If schools had been open he would just be entering junior high. “All the people in this village are heroes,” volunteered another, smaller boy. How long would the intifada last? “God knows! Until liberation!” answered the blond boy in a grown-up voice in which I heard both resignation and defiance.

Zionism made its first entry into global feminist for each other”), but her family was almost idyllically
“Jewish in a totally organic way. My parents’ social life was totally connected to our synagogue.”
Pogrebin’s break with Judaism came at age 15, when her mother died, and she was told she would not
count in the minyan (male quorum) where Kaddish (the Hebrew prayer for the dead) was being said. For
years after that she practiced Judaism only because, as she put it, “I was superstitious about giving up
traditions.” She went to synagogue on high holy days “just in case” of divine retribution. “But it was
completely pro forma,” she recalls, “like becoming a super-reformed Jew.” As to the Jewish homeland,
for a long time she was even “anti-Israel.” “I was critical,” she explains, “for feminist and leftist reasons.
There was a sort of Israel-right-or-wrong attitude in this country without regard for the feelings of
others.”