West Bank Journal: Last Day in Palestine

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While I am training and visiting, back in the village of Biddu work has begun again, and the villagers and international and Israeli supporters have turned out to once again attempt to stop the bulldozers. They march out, are driven back with sound bombs and tear gas. Mohammed, one of our contacts and a village leader, is arrested. He's young and handsome and comes from a prominent village family, and I've grown deeply fond of him in part because he and his cousin Monsour have a wry, cynical humor and are a bit wild for Palestinians. I can see Mohammed, in another world, in Las Vegas in a silk shirt with a few too many buttons open and gold chains peeking out. While I am eating sweet bread, he is being beaten by soldiers in the hills near Biddu, batons striking his chest and arms and back and shoulders.

Our party in Sarda moves out from the hut of bread and troops next door, where a very old village house has been restored, with money donated from a Swedish organization, and made into a village center. 'This is my house,' Arish says with great pride. It is, indeed, her childhood home. We are shown over every inch of it, from the walled courtyard hung with old farm implements through the galleries and the meeting rooms for the women's club and the children's space to the offices of the mayor and the rooftop courtyards high above. The restoration is beautifully done and I can feel what life must have been like in an old, traditional house, when the courtyards were full of a vast, extended family and the women were gossiping on the roof. From the top courtyard, we could see over the old, inner heart of the village and out onto the fields beyond. Old stone houses have capers and wallflowers growing in the cracks of the walls, and on their roofs trellised grapevines jostle solar hot water heaters and satellite dishes. Arish shows me her old bedroom, a sweet, whitewashed room with a deep window and an arched ceiling. 'This is my house,' she says, again and again, laughing with a slight sense of incredulousness that this could once have been hers, that she slept in this room, that she had lived here.

While we are having our tour, in Biddu the soldiers move to a small house isolated on the hillside, preparing to destroy it. About eighteen of the internationals and Israeli peace activists advance toward the house. The soldiers have locked five Palestinians inside, and now they begin to fire tear gas and sound bombs and the rubber coated steel bullets that hurt like hell but generally only kill you if they hit you in the head or the eye. The activists are driven back, advance again, are driven back, advance again, six times in all. Then the soldiers begin firing live ammunition. For two hours, they keep up the barrage.

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