anathemas anathema: [act of] curse, condemnation, disapproval

The original idea was to go to Jerusalem but for different reasons, some of us change our minds. A. is coming and I will like to see him again, this time in occupied Palestine. In any case we take the day off and we decide to go shopping in the main street to support the local economy. I am advised to buy soap, hand made with olive oil.

There have been children waiting at our door every day so far, shouting “what’s your name, what’s your name!” all the time. Most faces change every day, but the boy that served us tea on our first day here is on our doorstep every day, waiting for us to come out to the street to wish us a good morning in his own way. Today the children are not waiting – we are going out of the house at mid morning so it is to be expected that they are all in school. But our constant friend is here today too, this time with a school bag on his back.

With our ultra basic Arabic we ask him why he is not in school. Knowing that we won’t understand him if he speaks in Arabic to us, he uses basic English and gestures. First he says “school” making a face of disgust. Then he spits. Then he steps his foot strongly on the spit. Then he points at himself with his first finger and then, with the same finger, he points at the pictures of the dead fighters.

Back home, we tell this to a Palestinian comrade, M., who tells us that the boy’s case is not an isolated one, but that the Palestinian people, at the end of the day, are not that much different from any other people; he says that every one wants to have a normal life, raise a family, go to work to support it, and come back from work and hug their children. He says they are not violent people, and that if the children want to be fighters, and if people blow themselves up killing other people, it does not come out from within them, that is not their way of being; it comes from desperation, from the occupation and from the unbearable conditions of such occupation. We respond to this with silence, as we did with the child this morning.

Y. comes to the flat to take us somewhere else today. “Whoever wants to come and see my society, you can come now”. Every one gets ready. No one makes a comment, and for some reason, I am too afraid to ask. For some reason I assume that “my society” means some secret and/or clandestine society. So I just walk with the group, almost in complete silence, which reinforces my assumption. To my pleasant surprise, the “society” is something like a mainstream youth club where he and other committed people try to get the local youth of the spiral of violence that ends up in a picture on a poster in the street.

He tells us about the activities that take place here, recreational and educational as I understand them. He also tells us the stories of some of the young people, shebab, that have been kind of “his pupils”. Some have gone on to university, some have stayed in the camp, some have been arrested, a few have been killed.

He also tells us about activities that the women from the community here carry out, and the handicraft they make with their hands.

We go back to the flat and while we are cooking dinner a friend comes to visit, E. She is very upset because she has heard the news about the boy we found dead. She has also learnt more things from the acquaintances of the victim and she is seeing the manipulation of the media and the Israeli authorities, for the n-th time.

It seems that the other two victims, who have survived, have said that they had gone to the mountain to explore a derelict building that they had seen one day. I remember seeing that building on the night we found the boy; it looked like a mosque. What they are saying in the news is that they were trying to plant a bomb. They have also changed the age of the victim, adding years, and the way in which he did. E. has been thinking about the way we found him and these are some of her conclusions…

She saw blood, but not only in his head, where he had a huge wound. The army is saying that they didn’t shoot to kill, they always say that they shoot to the legs, but there is no shot on the head if you are aiming to the legs; besides the size of the wound in his head makes it obvious that he was short at point-blank distance. They also say that the boy was running away, and that is why he fell down on the stones where we found him, on one side of the road. However E. says that he also had blood on his trousers, although he was not bleeding from any of his legs. Her conclusion is that the boy was executed in such a position that the blood fell on his trousers, so most probably he was on his knees when he was shot, and he bent over his stomach as he fell, and blood from his head fell on his trousers. And then they took him to where we found him to make it look like he was running away. Which they didn’t do very well because the body fell on its back. When you are running you do not fall on your back.

These are her conclusions and here they are. I personally think they sound very logical and quite more sound than the army’s explanations, and I would be very surprised if, in the remote case that the army or the media ever bother to try and refute these allegations, their explanations could resist the merest analysis. And, in any case, this tactic of shooting first and then self-justify seems to me as aberrant here as it is in London. The difference is that in here these people can not even demonstrate any more than their own pain because the army smashes them, and, at the end of the day, since it was just one Palestinian man from a refugee camp, he is not even worthy enough to open an internal investigation.

This time there seems to be enough elements to have some hope and we have heard that an independent law person is investigating.

The original idea was to go to Jerusalem but for different reasons, some of us change our minds. A. is coming and I will like to see him again, this time in occupied Palestine. In any case we take the day off and we decide to go shopping in the main street to support the local economy. I am advised to buy soap, hand made with olive oil.

There have been children waiting at our door every day so far, shouting “what’s your name, what’s your name!” all the time. Most faces change every day, but the boy that served us tea on our first day here is on our doorstep every day, waiting for us to come out to the street to wish us a good morning in his own way. Today the children are not waiting – we are going out of the house at mid morning so it is to be expected that they are all in school. But our constant friend is here today too, this time with a school bag on his back.

With our ultra basic Arabic we ask him why he is not in school. Knowing that we won’t understand him if he speaks in Arabic to us, he uses basic English and gestures. First he says “school” making a face of disgust. Then he spits. Then he steps his foot strongly on the spit. Then he points at himself with his first finger and then, with the same finger, he points at the pictures of the dead fighters.

Back home, we tell this to a Palestinian comrade, M., who tells us that the boy’s case is not an isolated one, but that the Palestinian people, at the end of the day, are not that much different from any other people; he says that every one wants to have a normal life, raise a family, go to work to support it, and come back from work and hug their children. He says they are not violent people, and that if the children want to be fighters, and if people blow themselves up killing other people, it does not come out from within them, that is not their way of being; it comes from desperation, from the occupation and from the unbearable conditions of such occupation. We respond to this with silence, as we did with the child this morning.

Y. comes to the flat to take us somewhere else today. “Whoever wants to come and see my society, you can come now”. Every one gets ready. No one makes a comment, and for some reason, I am too afraid to ask. For some reason I assume that “my society” means some secret and/or clandestine society. So I just walk with the group, almost in complete silence, which reinforces my assumption. To my pleasant surprise, the “society” is something like a mainstream youth club where he and other committed people try to get the local youth of the spiral of violence that ends up in a picture on a poster in the street.

He tells us about the activities that take place here, recreational and educational as I understand them. He also tells us the stories of some of the young people, shebab, that have been kind of “his pupils”. Some have gone on to university, some have stayed in the camp, some have been arrested, a few have been killed.

He also tells us about activities that the women from the community here carry out, and the handicraft they make with their hands. Fig 13.

We go back to the flat and while we are cooking dinner a friend comes to visit, E. She is very upset because she has heard the news about the boy we found dead. She has also learnt more things from the acquaintances of the victim and she is seeing the manipulation of the media and the Israeli authorities, for the n-th time.

It seems that the other two victims, who have survived, have said that they had gone to the mountain to explore a derelict building that they had seen one day. I remember seeing that building on the night we found the boy; it looked like a mosque. What they are saying in the news is that they were trying to plant a bomb. They have also changed the age of the victim, adding years, and the way in which he did. E. has been thinking about the way we found him and these are some of her conclusions…

She saw blood, but not only in his head, where he had a huge wound. The army is saying that they didn’t shoot to kill, they always say that they shoot to the legs, but there is no shot on the head if you are aiming to the legs; besides the size of the wound in his head makes it obvious that he was short at point-blank distance. They also say that the boy was running away, and that is why he fell down on the stones where we found him, on one side of the road. However E. says that he also had blood on his trousers, although he was not bleeding from any of his legs. Her conclusion is that the boy was executed in such a position that the blood fell on his trousers, so most probably he was on his knees when he was shot, and he bent over his stomach as he fell, and blood from his head fell on his trousers. And then they took him to where we found him to make it look like he was running away. Which they didn’t do very well because the body fell on its back. When you are running you do not fall on your back.

These are her conclusions and here they are. I personally think they sound very logical and quite more sound than the army’s explanations, and I would be very surprised if, in the remote case that the army or the media ever bother to try and refute these allegations, their explanations could resist the merest analysis. And, in any case, this tactic of shooting first and then self-justify seems to me as aberrant here as it is in London. The difference is that in here these people can not even demonstrate any more than their own pain because the army smashes them, and, at the end of the day, since it was just one Palestinian man from a refugee camp, he is not even worthy enough to open an internal investigation.

This time there seems to be enough elements to have some hope and we have heard that an independent law person is investigating.