West Bank Curfew: "I Just Want to Go Out in the Sun and Play"

By Brother Patrick White

At 4 am on Jan 17, I was awakened by Israeli jeeps racing around Bethlehem blasting out on their loudspeakers in Arabic: " Mamnoua tjawal! " (Forbidden to go outside!) I knew then that it was war in the Gulf. In the darkness of my room the radio told me the rest, of the massive destructive US and allied air strikes in both Kuwait and Iraq.

That seems a long time ago. "Forbidden to go outside! " has punctuated the still air of Bethlehem ever since. A nation, a whole people, 1.7 million Palestinians imprisoned for week after week and nobody, nobody, it seems, says a word.

We have several Americans in our community. I asked one New Yorker who has worked with the Palestinian people for nearly 20 years whether I should send articles to America about the present curfew we were experiencing in the whole of the West Bank and Gaza. "You're wasting your time. They don't want to know. Do you think they are going to be interested in what is happening to people in Gaza and the West Bank in this present Gulf situation? They have fixed ideas about Palestinians and they certainly don't want some Englishman telling them otherwise."

Needing to Say Something

I still felt I should say at least something about what is happening here. I will never forget my several summer visits to Washington, DC, with its spacious green mall, landscaped tidal basin and the white monuments to Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington. I was moved when I read Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, inscribed on the stone surface of his memorial. Should the people of this "new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal" not hear about the families. I know, and what they are suffering now?

Americans have heard with dull repetitiveness during the three years of the intifada, the Palestinian uprising, that all of Gaza, or the refugee camps on the West Bank, or Nablus were under curfew. So what do the words "forbidden to go outside" mean in reality?

By this present curfew, the Israeli occupying military government confined 1.7 million people against their will, beginning Jan.17. For a Palestinian, particularly a man, to walk out on the street could mean a fine of from US $500 to well over $ 1,000. In addition to the fine, he will be arrested for between three months and five years without trial. Reports have come in that, during the first two weeks of the curfew, seven young men were dealt with in this fashion in Beit Sahour and as many as 200 Palestinian youdis in Ramallah. Two young women who ventured out from their home in Manger Road were fined but not imprisoned.

The area now is officially a military war zone, which means that the Israeli army can treat its civilian population accordingly.

Fear is maintained by beatings and shooting. The area now is officially a military war zone, which means that the Israeli army can treat its civilian population accordingly. The soldiers can shoot to kill and often fire their weapons so that the people live in a total fog of uncertainty and dread. A family in the predominantly Christian village of Beit Sahour described how a young Israeli soldier knelt on one knee and fired five or six shots down an empty street. Around his head he wore a red scarf. "He's playing Rambo, yes he looks like Rambo! " said the 10-year-old Palestinian boy who peeped at him through the curtains of his bedroom window.

Night time is particularly dangerous for the indigenous population. Somebody may have moved outside a home in the valley below us in the dark one evening. Israeli soldiers fired at least six tear gas canisters into the valley, crowded with dwellings. The houses were enveloped in a large white cloud of gas. Within a very short time I had to leave the balcony of our house and rapidly move inside. From over a quarter mile away the now-invisible gases had polluted our air. With the threat of gas attacks from Iraq, the sick irony of it all had not escaped my mind.

Inside the homes of Palestinians presents another picture. Imagine a refugee camp, where there are frequently large families with six to ten children living in two concrete rooms 24 feet square. In the camps, just going to a window will attract a reprisal from the troops. There are over 350,000 human beings in these zoos in Gaza alone. Yesterday, in Gaza, the men were allowed out for the first time.

The physical and psychological stresses are enormous, even for the more fortunate families. Bethlehem had a two-hour break after four days of uninterrupted curfew the other day, and I mistakenly thought it applied to the neighboring town of Beit Jala as well. I arrived in a home there, to the amazement of the family, to find that the tension in the four-family house with many children was distressing. When some of the very small children assumed my arrival meant there was a break in the curfew, they tried to get out on the street, which was just through the front door. At the same moment, soldiers in jeeps were a few yards away and blasted a severe warning over their loudspeakers. The response inside the house betrayed the deep fears responsible parents have. Such screams only mothers make! In the turmoil of it all, one bewildered little fellow whispered: "I just want to go out in the sun and play! "

The Implications Become Apparent

As the extended curfew over an entire population continues, its implications gradually become more apparent. This is not just simply wholesale house arrest, but manipulation and control of a very large number of people. I realized, for example, that the two to three hours' break for Bethlehem every three days never coincided with the break for the next town of Beit Jala. Control included isolating one village and town from another. It is very successful. We know little about what is going on in the refugee camp down the road, and even less about what is happening in Gaza or Nablus. Cut or tapped telephones, and no newspapers or local radio complete the isolation.

The lack of mobility for an entire population to communicate, to gather or to visit others is a serious enough breach of human rights. Now, after nearly a month of the curfew, we are talking about survival. Although many people started with enough food, their supplies are running out. I witnessed the frantic rush for scarce food in the shops in Bethlehem. Fruit and vegetables, eggs and dairy products, have doubled in price. Mothers with babies in Gaza are apparently desperate for babies' milk. A tray of eggs that had cost seven shekels now costs 11 or 12.

To buy food you need money. Those people who are lucky enough to have jobs are paid daily. But now nobody can go to work! Furthermore, family incomes have already been severely reduced by the suffering and deprivations of three years of the intifada. Thousands of Palestinians lost over half the value of their savings, held in Jordanian dinars, when these fell in value. Many of the Palestinians who served as cheap labor on the Israeli building sites and factories have lost their jobs to immigrants from Russia, and thousands of others have returned penniless from the Gulf. From these factors alone, a 40 percent decline in the national income of the West Bank and Gaza has occurred.

Palestinians are just hoping to survive personally.

As if this were not enough damage, in the first two weeks of this curfew it is calculated that US $65 million worth of production has been lost in the West Bank alone. The agricultural sector is one of the most important for the Palestinians. For the livestock farmers there is a grave shortage of feed for the animals. Egg producers, if they can reach their hens, can only feed them barley, which over time will reduce the output of eggs by 90 percent. In the greenhouse industry, it is reported, the entire crop is lost, since there is no one to provide the irrigation and herbicides. Throughout the West Bank and Gaza, there are whole fields of rotting crops and severely underfed livestock. And food that might be made available from Israel is frequently diverted to the more lucrative military markets in the Gulf. Palestinians are just hoping to survive personally as they see their fragile economy collapsing.

Although medical treatment is becoming more accessible because the authorities are issuing permits to doctors and other medical help, the curfew still seriously affects the help that should be available. Just today, the director of an institution for the handicapped complained to me about the discrimination in the provision of gas masks. Most of the patients in his center were sent home because there are no gas masks for those under 15 years old. It was a Jewish Israeli lawyer, who had converted to Catholicism, who successfully won the case in the Israeli High Court that has resulted in some Palestinians receiving gas masks.

For Palestinian parents, after the constant interruptions to their children's educations during the intifada, the curfew is another serious blow. Schools in Israel reopened after the first Scud attacks, with the senior grades starting classes. One wonders, however, when the schools on the West Bank and Gaza will be allowed to function. Most of the universities were still closed before the Gulf war. Bethlehem University, which was open for one semester, will only be able to operate if there is freedom of movement throughout the West Bank and Gaza. One in ten of our students comes from Gaza.

How do people think at these times? The families and individuals I know are fearful. They are fearful of gas attacks, and most homes have makeshift safe rooms; fearful of the Israelis and the armed Jewish settlers that have occupied their land; and fearful that even if Israel does not directly drive them out from their homes into Jordan, some will be forced to leave because there is no future.* They know that Israel's leaders are intent on getting them out. The Palestinians know that such an intense curfew is not imposed on them merely for security reasons. Their words reveal their feelings: "We are drowning." "We ceased to exist in the eyes of the world." "We don't care any more. " "Who listens to us?" Nevertheless Arab Palestinian stoicism still manifests itself. They have tremendous capacities to survive.

A Hundred Years is Enough

Confreres of mine who have worked with the Palestinians for decades are desperately sad. They are distressed that, after 23 years, the Palestinian cause again appears to be brushed aside. They are frustrated by the mistakes made by Palestinian leadership outside the country, and the Western misinterpretation of the Arab point of view. What many of the indigenous ordinary people of the Mideast are saying is quite clear. A hundred years of European, Israeli and American interference in their affairs is enough.

My fellow missioners are appalled at the way the Israeli government blandly explains to the world that these inhumane things must be done in the name of security. And the world believes them. The recent arbitrary arrest of the moderate Palestinian academic, Prof. Sari Nusseibeh, is an example. And, more fundamentally, when you love a people and know the families—mothers, fathers, children—and you see what is happening, it is hard to accept.

We have Mass each evening. Our Jesuit chaplain leaves his cold apartment to say it for us. We are more than grateful. Our chapel is a prayerful place and in times of crisis the Eucharist reveals new meanings. It was during Mass the other evening that the sirens sounded, warning us of another missile attack threatening the coastal plain of Israel.

The friends I visited in Beit Jala told me about an Israeli who drives past their house most days to reach his home at the settlement on the top of the hill called Har Gilo. During the curfew he braved the protests of the Israeli soldiers and gave the Palestinian family much needed fresh milk, cheese and bread. Goodness overcame fear. Would that this message could spread throughout our troubled Middle Eastern world!

Brother Patrick White teaches at Bethlehem University in the West Bank. His book Let Us Be Free: A Narrative Before and During the Intifada is available from the AET Book Club.