no joy at eid 

Hello all and apologies for being impersonal and sending this group email to everybody I know but there is so much to write about Palestine and I feel obliged to tell the world. You better get a cup of tea first, it's a bit long but no apologies this time. So not to beat around the bush and to launch straight in. The town in which I am living, Nablus , would under any other circumstances be an attractive bustling character-filled town. Instead it is a town dying on its knees. It is not the surrounding hills and palm tress that grab your attention but instead the military stations positioned around the hilltops. This is once you are in the town. On your way in you have to go through a Fort Knox style checkpoint - there are six in all which surround the town – getting in is easy, getting out is another matter. The town is trapped, both physically and psychologically, encircled on all sides and the people here, as all over Palestine , are being pushed to the brink. It is little more than an open-air jail. Here we have just celebrated Eid, the equivalent of Christmas. Government and public sector workers have not been paid for 8 months. I gave up asking people if they had a nice Eid I could not handle the stories. “No, my son is in prison, no my family’s village is closed, no we could not buy any presents for the children”. There is no money, people are surviving on credit. Shops stay open to maintain an air of normality but you feel it is all going to collapse at any minute. People who were previously comfortable have run up huge debts. It is like an illusion – you walk around the streets and the city seems to be functioning but when you look closer it is not. The market and shops are open but there are few customers. At night Nablus is filled with noise. It begins at 6pm with the call to prayer from the mosque. Then we hear firecrackers and bangers – the past time of all children in the city. There is nothing else to do but I do find it a bit strange as you’d think they’d have had enough of bangs. Sometimes I feel like I am in the Wild West here. Coming back from a few days away last week I got out of the taxi in town at 4pm and was greeted by a round of gunfire. Welcome to Nablus . Last night I was walking down the street with a friend when a man further down the road leaned out of his taxi, stuck his gun in the air and fired a few shots. Turned out he was shooting to catch the attention of his mate up the street and say hello. Also happened that the mate was the friend I was walking with! Post midnight the sound of firecrackers change to gunfire. The Israelis come out from their hilltop hideouts and roll into the old city and the three refugee camps, the base for the Palestinian resistance. They shoot their way through the camps looking for their targets, sometimes they get them, sometimes they don’t, sometimes they get the wrong person. They take over houses and tunnel through walls leaving the occupiers terrified. Sometimes the fighters might manage to blow up an Israeli jeep. In which case we will all hear about the success as they take over the mosques to let us know, what ever hour of the day or night. Since arriving there has been pretty much a death of a Palestinian at the hands of the Israelis every night in Nablus. It does not even make the news outside occupied Palestine. It is no wonder the camps form the base for the resistance movements. They are rife with poverty, unemployment and oppression. Even within the Palestinian community the people of the camps – which have been here for up to 30 years – experience discrimination. They were once comfortable well-off people living in nice homes with families and jobs. Now all they have is their redundant house keys from the homes in Israel from which they were driven out years ago. One teacher I know went back to his home and knocked on the door, telling the Jewish inhabitants who had taken over the house following the creation of Israel , “this is my house”. They weren’t long telling him to sling his hook. Nobody can blame the fighters for trying to resist the oppression and abuse of their people but with every victory they know Israeli retribution will be en masse, without discrimination and that the curtain of control will be lowered even further. The children will be further hardened and their childhood further erased. The mothers will fear the death or imprisonment of their sons. Imprisonment of Palestinians seems to be a past time for the Israelis. Just as the Israelis must do their military service it seems Palestinian men must do their time in jail – the figure stands in the thousands. They usually let men finish their studies and then round them up. Sometimes they’ll just get them midway through their degree. The cynics would say they don't want them to get an education. The fact they are innocent of any crime does not seem to be an impediment to imprisonment. Their age and their gender is enough. The teaching co-ordinator at the organisation I am working for was lucky enough only to get a year in prison without trial for the fictional crime of throwing a stone. If he had really thrown a stone at an Israel armoured jeep he would have been shot in the back and paralysed from the waist down like the 16 year old boy down the road. The most strikingly oppressive tool used by the Israelis to oppress and humiliate the Palestinians is without doubt the checkpoint. Having read about the checkpoints at home I have come to the conclusion that the word is meanignless without experiencing it.The checkpoints are not just a quick formality to check documents. If you are a male under 35 years you cannot leave the town without special permission and this permission is rarely granted by the Israelis. Everyday the main checkpoint outside Nablus is filled with hundreds of Palestinians trying to go about their daily business – students going to university, villagers going to the market, people trying to get to work, to hospital appointments, to visit friends and family. At the checkpoint they queue up in a shack that can only be described as an animal pen. Taxi drivers who work in Nablus can only drive as far as the checkpoint. Then they must get out and walk how ever many kilometres it is to their home. Every day. Just to earn a living. The Palestinians queue like animals going to the slaughter while the young Israeli soldiers lord over them with their guns. These 20 year-old kids humiliate middle-aged men in front of their children and bully the university students. Occasionally you may see in the eyes of a soldier a hidden shame and embarrassment at what they are doing, a knowledge that it is wrong and that they are uncomfortable with it. More often you see power and control, motivated sometimes by fear, often by contempt. If it is a Jewish holiday or if they feel like it they will close the checkpoint. The university students will not get home, the villagers will not get back to their village, the pregnant woman may be reduced to giving birth at the side of the road. The young inhabitants of Nablus will not go anywhere. They will not make it to visit relatives they have not seen for 6 years. They will not make it to the beautiful city of Jerusalem . They will remain imprisoned in Nablus , struggling to breathe while their oppression gnaws away at their minds, stopping them sleeping and sending them into a depression that is palpable on the face of every new person you meet. As one friend commented, “We all need psychological doctors”. They are desperate for freedom and normality but there is little to give hope so they just think about the near impossible dream of getting out. That's all for now but please bear with me and don't let the kettle get too cold, I will be back again in the near future............... Love Catherine.