Extraction
Dearest reader - a short note before you read this week’s essay. Palestine is still reeling from a violent invasion of Jenin refugee camp in which the Israeli military killed nine Palestinians. Israel claims its troops entered the camp to arrest Islamic Jihad militants. During the invasion, Israeli forces also targeted Palestinian homes, shot tear gas canisters into a hospital, cut off electricity, internet and cell services and blocked ambulances from reaching wounded people.
This brings the number of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces to twenty-nine in 2023 alone. That’s more human beings lost than there have been days in the year.
While you are here to read stories of the past, stories of the present continue to unfold. Parallel to our memories of violence runs our reality of violence. It feels wrong to speak of one without recognising the other. Make no mistake: there is no such thing as “relative calm” in Palestine.
If you would like to follow events in Palestine, I can recommend:
Eye On Palestine on Instagram if you are interested in first-hand witness accounts.
The IMEU on Instagram if you are interested in easily digestible data.
Mariam Barghouti on Twitter if you are interested in on-the-ground journalism.
Noura Erekat on Twitter if you are interested in a human rights perspective.
Al-Shabaka if you are interested in long-form analysis.
With that said, I hope you enjoy this week’s essay.
I take one last look at the three small teddy bears, identical in all but colour, as I perch them on the pillow that had cradled my head every night for as long as I could recall. I had asked my mother whether I could put the bears in one of the two suitcases we were bringing with us, or maybe in my small backpack. The sides of her mouth had pulled down disapprovingly.
Essentials only.
At eleven years old, I trusted that the adults in my life knew better than I did what was essential and what wasn’t. I would come to learn that this was a mistake. Children are a lot more intuitive about life than their parents think, perhaps precisely because they are free from the conceptual shackles of experience.
I lined the teddy bears up, lightest to darkest brown, and told them I’d see them soon.
I wouldn’t.
I had been told that we were going on vacation.
We wouldn’t return for seven years.
My childhood bedroom remains imprinted in my memory until today, twenty years after I last set foot in it. My parents had bought us custom pink bedroom furniture a few years before the intifada began. This was an extraordinary thing considering we were living on worn-down sofas and plastic kitchen chairs in a small, damp-ridden flat. I didn’t realise this back then, but my parents lived by an unspoken moral code that whatever little means they had were reserved for their two children.
Our futures in particular were a matter of no expenses spared. We ate plain boiled spaghetti for dinner but attended one of Palestine’s most prestigious private schools, a French girl’s school run by Catholic nuns in the heart of Ramallah’s old city.
In the winter, we bathed in water that my mother heated in small batches on the gas stove to save on running boiler costs, but every few months we got to pick as many new books as we wanted from a Scholastic catalogue that, through a process that remains a mystery to me, my parents would manage to import from Britain to Palestine.
We were barely living month to month, but my parents never let us feel it. My father in particular tried to instil in us the same sense of pride and entitlement that had brought him so far in life; the notion that it is not only possible to overcome one’s circumstances, but that it is in fact one’s duty to do so.
I shared my bedroom with my sister. We did so with unbelievable ease. During the summer, our beds would be pushed apart in an attempt to keep us cool. The winters were my favourite time, though, as our beds would be pushed back together to help us stay warm. Back then, the main means of heating a room were gas heaters, which for obvious reasons couldn’t stay on at night. We would sleep wrapped up into one another underneath a plush blanket, and I would often wake to my younger sister’s entire body resting on top of mine.
I remember the enormous Barbie poster that adorned the wall above our beds, the wardrobe full of colourful clothes, and the bookshelves stacked with hundreds of English books, from thin Ladybird hardbacks to Harry Potter paperbacks. I even had my own cassette player and my dad owned a desktop computer, a device that impressed me immensely and on which I would play Solitaire whenever he wasn’t around. Life was abundantly good.
Life was abundantly good, minus the intifada. Although I don’t even know whether that’s a fair statement. My memories of my time in Palestine are full of violence, and yet I don’t remember feeling discontent. I felt fear, anger and sadness, but I never felt alone or confused about my place in the world. I was never unhappy.
Those feelings only came after we fled. The fear, anger and sadness remained, too; they just took on a different shape in the different kind of hostile environment that was post-9/11 Europe. But that’s a story for another time.
Nonetheless, the violence of the occupation and intifada formed the backdrop to a fundamentally happy Palestinian childhood. We Palestinians “teach life” not just in the sense that we know how to overcome violence with joy; we teach life in the sense that we refuse to be defined by what we must endure at the hands of others. Or at least this was the case back then, before things became really bleak.
The Second Intifada (2000-2004) saw the largest number of civilian deaths and the harshest restrictions on freedom of movement imposed by Israel on Palestinians since 1967.
We referred to these restrictions as siege or curfew; the Israeli military referred to them as “internal closure.” They were imposed through checkpoints and physical blockades that the army would put in place, such as crushed cars piled in the middle of roads or pits and trenches dug to prevent vehicles from using certain routes.
In some strategically located neighbourhoods such as ours, restrictions were used to contain Palestinian citizens in their homes, forming human shields between the Israeli military forces and Palestinian resistance fighters.
Starting in March 2002, in an Israeli military operation codenamed Defensive Shield, hundreds of thousands of residents of Ramallah, Nablus, Jenin, Tulkarem, Qalqiliya and Bethlehem spent months on end under curfew, locked in their homes with no access to the outside world. Sometimes, the curfew would be lifted to allow people to go out and purchase food, but these timeslots differed from week to week, and some weeks there would be no lifting of the curfew at all.
One time, the curfew was lifted for an hour, and my father and I hastily went out to buy bread. We drove around the city as long as we could but found nothing. The curfew had been lifted with such short notice that none of the bakeries had time to open, so we were forced to return home empty-handed.
Our experience of curfews was particularly terrifying since we had an Israeli tank and sniper unit stationed in the building directly across the road from us. The tank was a daunting presence, but it was the snipers that scared me the most. They spent their days looking out from the building’s highest windows, sometimes aiming their rifles at our home, sometimes firing a sharp singular shot into a nearby road.
At one point, the curfew lasted so long that Red Crescent ambulances operated by international volunteers had to deliver bread and milk to our building’s residents. Israeli soldiers watched in the background as we hesitantly opened our doors to the volunteers. But that’s a story for another time.
It can be tempting to think of critiques of events in Palestine as historical revisionism; conclusions that are easily drawn with hindsight but would have been impossible to predict at critical junctures.
The truth, however, is that there have always been sharp observers of the Palestinian question - individuals who tried to warn the world of the inevitable outcomes of foreign policies driven by inertia and a cowardly insistence on both-sidism. This is particularly true for the Oslo Accords, which were scrutinised by prominent Palestinian voices as early on as their negotiation stages.
During the first months of the intifada, international observers seemed to be in dismay. How could we have moved from the iconic Rabin-Arafat handshake to a Palestinian popular uprising against Israel in only six years?
Perhaps if the world had been paying more attention to Palestinian voices, it wouldn’t have been so taken aback. For example, in 1999, a year before the intifada began, Edward Said wrote critically of the system of segregation that had become entrenched by the Oslo Accords. He described the situation in the Palestinian Territories in a way that is chilling to read, knowing what was to come only a year after writing.
“In the West Bank, Jerusalem and Gaza, the situation is deeply unstable and exploitative. Protected by the army, Israeli settlers (almost 350,000 of them) live as extraterritorial, privileged people with rights that resident Palestinians do not have. (For example, West Bank Palestinians cannot go to Jerusalem and in 70 percent of the territory are still subject to Israeli military law, with their land available for confiscation.) Israel controls Palestinian water resources and security, as well as exits and entrances. Even the new Gaza airport is under Israeli security control. You don't need to be an expert to see that this is a prescription for extending, not limiting, conflict.
This much was already felt by Palestinians living in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem. Even before the start of the intifada, violence was ubiquitous, and Palestinian living space was shrinking at an alarming pace. We knew that we were on the cusp of something bad.
Life had gifted me with an enormous family: two grandparents, twelve aunts and uncles and too many cousins to keep track of. I was so close to one of my cousins, Sana’, that I considered her my sister. When I was eight, one of my other cousins gave birth to a baby daughter, making me an aunt of sorts.
I had aunts who were more like mothers and uncles whose embrace felt as protective as my own father’s. I was deeply, utterly loved. I had many friends, too, both in school and in my neighbourhood. The curfew cut us off from one another, which was exceptionally difficult.
I was lucky, though. My family lived in a big apartment complex and the neighbourhood children were my best friends. My best friend was Shatha: a tall, bespectacled girl with whom I shared a love for dogs, chocolate, and Aqua music. I also had my sister Shaden by my side.
Before the intifada, we would spend our summer evenings playing hide and seek outside with all the neighbourhood children. During the curfew, we had to resort to playing in the safe rooms of each other’s houses; the ones that faced away from the tank and snipers.
When my parents, sister and I got into a taxi with two suitcases to go on what I thought was a vacation, it were my best friend Shatha’s hands that waved me goodbye. Across the road, where Israeli soldiers had stood only months earlier, was empty space. The tank and the snipers had left, but we knew they would be back soon.
The taxi ride was bumpy. It was September 2002, and many of Ramallah’s streets had been turned into rubble by the bombs, tanks and bulldozers that had visited us in the previous two years of the intifada. Cars had to carefully navigate around piles of rock to make their way through the city, and we had to take more than one detour to find a way through. Many people resorted to switching vehicles, making their way on foot to the other side of the rubble and finding a different taxi on the other side to continue their journey.
My father insisted that our taxi driver find a way, though. He sat in the passenger seat. I sat in the back with my sister and my mother. Everyone was quiet.
I spent the taxi ride thinking of all the different foods I wanted to eat once we arrived in the Netherlands. If I had known that our departure from Palestine was permanent, I would have made more of an effort to imprint my hometown into my memory. I would have taken my three teddy bears. I would have spoken to my father more. If I had known that our departure was permanent, I would have never agreed to it as easily as I had.
We were making our way from the airportless West Bank into Israel, where Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion International Airport awaited. My mother is Dutch, and my sister and I hold dual Palestinian and Dutch citizenship. This was the reason we could leave when most Palestinians could not.
Our taxi eventually reached Qalandia checkpoint on the south-eastern outskirts of Ramallah, one of a handful of passageways out of the West Bank.
Wire fences and concrete blocks enclosed a mass of dark-haired heads while green-clad soldiers patrolled the outside, some wearing helmets, others taking their chances with their light hair reflecting the last of the summer’s rays.
The concrete road that this spectacle stood upon had disappeared underneath a layer of dust and sand, adorned with stray pieces of cardboard and flattened soda cans with labels long lost. And, of course, countless chunky rocks, most of which had left the bare hand or homemade sling of a young man, his heart throbbing in his throat with the unheard pain of three generations, only to land on the ground, feebly merging with the aesthetics of the same oppression it was meant to scream out against.
“Do you have your papers?” my father asked my mother. She pulled one Dutch passport and two Palestinian passports out of her handbag, its once soft brown leather dry and cracked with age. The two Palestinian passports had blue-white pieces of paper sticking out of them: exit permits for my sister and me, obtained after painstaking negotiations, bribes and red tape. Without those two pieces of paper, issued by the Israelis, my sister and I would have never made it out. I know this because we had tried a few weeks before and we had failed. But that, too, is a story for another time.
“Okay, okay,” my father said, more to himself than to anyone else. His passport had no blue-white paper inside it that day.
It wasn’t the first time we had left the country without him. Even though we needed permission to leave the country through the airport in Tel Aviv, we - unlike our father - did not need permission to enter Europe. A few words - our names and dates of birth - printed in our mother’s Dutch passport ensured us unlimited access to this foreign continent, as long as we could find our way out of Palestine.
Every few years, my mother would manage to take us to visit our Dutch grandparents over the summer holidays. I loved those visits. I still have no idea how my parents afforded them. We would eat strange and exciting candies and cheeses. We would go to city farms and pet wild boar, cycle to shops and playgrounds, and play with my grandfather’s dogs. Everything smelled like grass and rain. We would spend time in this foreign oasis and return home to our lives in Ramallah. This is the vacation I thought we were taking.
The next few minutes at the checkpoint went by very quickly. My father got out of the car and my mother followed suit. I can’t remember whether they hugged. I was more focused on the soldiers standing guard behind the square concrete blocks. My sister’s small hand was wrapped around my thumb. My father hugged my sister and I think he hugged me too. I don’t know why I can’t remember this hug. I wonder whether he said anything to me.
I do remember finding myself back in the taxi with my sister and my mother. The passenger seat was empty now and the taxi was moving forwards. The Israeli soldier glanced into the vehicle and checked our papers.
My mother looked straight ahead, wordless, her expression hard and cold. This was both unusual and not. My sister looked at me, her big brown eyes questioning.
I looked over my shoulder, through the back window. My father stood in the middle of the road. I remember noticing how thin he looked from afar, his thick black hair and large aviator glasses sitting in sharp contrast to his small shoulders. His jacket hung so loosely on his body. I waved at him and told my sister to do the same. She struggled to lift her small body high enough to see. My mother still looked ahead.
My father waved back at me in three slow motions. Then he stopped, forming a fist with his hand. He lingered there a moment before he opened his hand again. This time he didn’t wave. Instead, he flicked his fingers forward sharply. Once, twice, and once again.
Go, he seems to motion to us. Go. Just go.
I watched until his dark hair disappeared in the distance and all that remained were wire fences and concrete blocks enveloped in a cloud of dust.
We wouldn’t return for seven years.