"Midnight at the Oasis" in Ramallah, Palestine

by Ray Hanania (Palestine/USA)

(Ramallah, Palestine) — I spent all of Tuesday wandering around with my friends in Ramallah, visiting relatives and just talking to Palestinians. It is amazing how much you learn when you listen to the people and you ignore the biased and hate-driven mainstream American news media.

Palestinians want peace. They don’t want the Islamicism that some Palestinians in America wear on their hearts like the new religion. Hamas is irrelevent, they say and only a temporary movement reflecting the growing frustrations and the internal divisions that separate Palestinians. The rising Islamicism, though, in the Gaza Strip and in the West Bank is of concern, they say, because the Islamicists are as crazy as the Israeli settlers, although I am not sure who is worse. The most recent threats from the Islamicists in Gaza against the female journalists at Palestine TV — if they put on their Hijabs the fanatics said they will “slit their throats” from ear-to-ear. It is such a bastardization of Islam and while so many Muslims I met denounce it, I have yet to hear the Islamic leaders speak out on it forcefully.

The fact is that women are abused, ignored and mistreated in palestinian society whether we like to admit it or not. And rather than close my eyes, I would rather stick up and defend the rights of Palestinian Women and will continue to do that. It’s not about Israel or the anti-Arabism that exists. It is about helping and supporting Palestinian women who are under siege in the Islamicist wave of fanaticism sweeping through the Gaza Strip and putting pressure on Ramallah.

I sat at the “Stars & Bucks” at Manara Square (Light House Square) with its Lions and tall tower plastered with posters of the late great Palestinian revolutionary Yasir Arafat. Next to the lions were many journalists and camera-crews reporting ont he escalating terrorism between Hamas and Fatah factions. This kind of internal feuding did not exist before until the Hamas — which is controlled by fanatics in Syria — came into power. But that is going to change in the next elections, unless Hamas and the Islamicists have their way.

I was leaning out the 3rd floor window of the coffee shop which looks exactly like Star Bucks (I thought it was until I looked closely at the name), sucking on a Nargeela (Sheesha pipe) and sipping Arabic coffee with my friends, African American Jewish comedian Aaron Freeman and his wife Sharon, and Mohammed Najib, one of the West Banks most professional journalists. Mohammed was helping reporters at the Wall Street Journal and the Chicago Tribune and is probably the most reliable and most professional Palestinian journalist based in Ramallah. He knows everyone and to him it is about journalism, not self-serving partisan political rhetoric.

We leaned back and enjoyed. The Nargeela tobacco choices were apple or the “cocktail” mix which is a combination of fruit “tobaccos.”

We visited El-Bireh and the shopping mall built by Sam Bahour, who came by the comedy show at the Ambassador Hotel and roared with laughter along with the 200 plus others, mostly Palestinians. Israel, which claims Jerusalem is an Open City, denied entrance to every Palestinian journalist who doesn’t have a Jerusalem “residency” card. In otherwords, if you are Palestinian and not Israeli, you cannot enter the so-called Open Jerusalem. (It’s as closed as Berlin used to be during the Cold War. Even in Berlin, some outsiders could get in, but very few. Jerusalem is a city under oppression and lock-down, like a prison. So many people are prevented from entering, only because they are Palestinian, Muslim or Christian combinations. Now, Israel does allow Christians to enter, but not if they are Palestinian. And they do allow some Palestinians with an American passport to enter, but not if you have a stamp from an Arab country.

You should have seen them grill me over my trips to Arab countries which are not even stamped in my main passport, but in the State Department Passport I have to keep because Israel AND the Arab countries give travelers a hassle entering if they have each other country’s passports. Don’t just think it is the Arab countries. Israel is no different than they are.

Still, I got in. We drove to the Qalandiya CheckPoint which is the most frightening place I have ever been in my life. It reminds me of a concentration camp wall. The 26 foot grey walls are ugly and frightening. The Towers with the soliers and their automatic weapons hanging from their shoulders. They have this cockiness that is so ugly when they greet you. Some Israelis say that is the attitude of the Russians. They are so hateful. I don’t know. All I know is that Israeli soldiers really hate Palestinians. The hatred is in their eyes when you see them and when they stop you. They have this attitude like you are nothing more than a piece of shit and your life hangs int he balance of their hands. If they don’t like you they can tell you tog o to hell and get out. I heard several Palestinian women crying because soldiers turned them away.

The place is a mass of barbed wire, concrete walls, gun tureet towers, military vehicles, and people behind windows the kind I might have imagined seeing trying to enter the Old Communist Bloc countries. It is a prison. It’s people management. Control. And they are not nice people those soldiers at the border.

I have also learned that many Israelis just close their eyes to this horror that their country imposes on the Palestinians. All they talk about is what the Palestinians have done to them.

But I can only offer this joke, a piece of humor from my comedy act that Israelis respond to with enthusiasm recognizing the harsh reality that the joke portrays.

“Israelis tell me that they wish the Palestinains could control their people the way they control their people. Control your extremists and stop the violence and terrorism. I know. In the past three months, the Palestinaisn have killed two, maybe three Israelis. I wish the Palestinians could learn to control their people the way the Israelis control their own people. During the same period, the Israelis have killed 67 Palestinians.”

At the Mall in El Bireh, I bought a Fulla Doll covered in an Abaya, or Berqa, with their head covered (They also sell Western style Fulla dolls, about 79 Shekels or $22). I use it in my act. But the women of Ramallah and the area are both Western and Islamic, many wearing Hijabs so tight they push the flip ear side of their cell phones under the tightly pulled Hijab and it literally can be held against the ear by the silk and cotton Hijabs as they walk and talk and wave their hands or hold packages. It’s amazing!

Men walk the streets of Ramallah selling all kinds of roasted nuts in makeshift baby buggies with tall pipes spewing smoke scented with the sweet smell of the nuts. Tea as the many clicks the cups together calling out with his soothing drink for a few Shekels. There is the guy with the large cart that he pushes up the streets with fresh cherries piled high, and carts with other fruits and the soft, green almonds, I think.

I spoke with one resident whose house was in the center of a gun battle during the beginning of the Intifadah. He told about how the Israelis took over the buildings around him and ordered him and his children to hide int he house and not come out. The tank was backed up against its building and every time it fired its canon it crashed back against the house brick walls, shaking the home and shattering their ability to hear for days …

“They fired the big guns at buildings and the tank would smash against our house and the whole house would shake and everything was breaking and flying everywhere. The tile was flying up from the ground and the bricks were shattering from the walls. Plaster fell from the ceiling. Shelves fell and my children, who were very young, we crying in fear. They wouldn’t let us out to get food or even through the garbage out, One day when it looked like they had gone, my son grabbed the giant bags of garbage and dragged them out to the dump across the lot. The smell was so bad after days and days of huddling in the house. And suddenly the soldiers came up and ordered him to stop. I faced the possibility of seeing death for the first time.

“They were all pointing their weapons at my son who was around 9 years old. I thought they were going to shoot him right there where he stood. I started yelling and waving a white flag and they pointed their guns at me and I thought I was going to die but I didn’t care because I wanted to save my son. And I tried to tell them we just wanted to get the garbage out of the house so we could live. We begged them for water and food. It’s all we tried to get scrounging around and barely could find anything to eat. Anything.”

He talked about how the Israeli soldiers broke into the big shoe store across the parking lot and grabbed the Nike gym shoes trying them on.

“When it didn’t fit the soldier would throw it into the center of the parking lot and then fire his automatic at it. These are big loud guns. Bam. Bam. Bam. Bam. And then he’d rip through another set of boxes trying to find a pair of Nike gym shoes that fit. They used to sit in front of our home and lay back pointing their weapons at the wall of the building nearby and they fired their guns playing tic-tac-toe on the wall.”

He pointed to the wall which is still marked by bullet holes in an eerie formation of ups and downs.

“They fired at everything. They seemed bored. They had us huddling in our homes. No one was firing on them. And they just beat us up, fired on us or yelled at us. It was the worst 40 days I have ever gone through in my life.”

Another man, a dentist, spoke about the certainty that Israel will be defeated if it refuses to make peace.

“We want peace. Every time we try to offer peace, they build settlements. They murdered Yitzhak Rabin, not us. They killed Rabin, theonly Israeli leader who wanted to make a real peace. And then they destroy the peace process and they provoke the conflict and the Intifda and they kill civilians and when we respond, we become the terrorists. They never acknowledge their own crimes. They use their media to blame everything on everyone else. Always us. Never them.We want peace. We want to be acknowledged. We want what they did to us in taking our land, people from lands so far away I have never heard of them, saying that my father had no right to live on the land that they now say is Israel. They want us to recognize them but they refuse to recognize us. We want peace. We will even compromise. But they don’t want compromise. They want the land and they play a very deceitful game of speaking peace and talking anger, violence against civilians. They just shoot civilians and no one cares. And they call them terrorists. Littlke children are killed every day. They don’t care. They justify it like little children dying because they are targeting Islamic Jihad fighters. Imagine if we tried to shoot soldiers and killed civilians. We are the terrorists. Not them. It’s wrong. But, if this continues, we will win. This is 59 years only. We Palesitinians have been occupied for thousands of years. And the occupier say the same thing. We have no rights. But we are the people who are here and all of the occupiers, everyone of them, are gone. Gone. The Israelis will either make peace and be fair or they will be gone one day, too.”

None of them cared that I filmed or taped. They just don’t care. In fact, they are so happy that anyone will listen to them. They are so happy that anyone cares. The news media doesn’t care. It’s controlled by Israel, they point out accurately. Israel consistently refuses to allow journalists who might not be under their influence to tner the territories. (They denied a group of Palestinian journalists from entering the Open Jerusalem to cover my comedy shows.) The only journalists who can cover the stories are those who play by Israel’s rules. You veer to far off the reservation and you are punished, expelled or censored. Every journalist I met said the same thing. The Israelis have a tight pressure on them. If they report something Israel does not like, they are barraged with complaints, hassles and pressure. Sometimes pressure is worse than censorship, they said.

But then I sip the Nargeela and relax. I take a sip of the Arabian coffee and stare outside and watch the thousands and thousands of Palestinians walking up and down the streets of Ramallah. There may be a war going on around the. They may be living in a prison, so few if any allowed to travel to the “Open” city of Jerusalem. They may not know which among them will be the fatalities of the next day, ignored for the most part by the media coverage except as mounting statistics. But int he end, they know they are going to win.

That takes courage to live in that nightmare called the Occupation.

– Ray Hanania
www.hanania.com