Green Gold
Extreme violence and yet an aggressive insistence on normalcy - that’s how I would describe the first eighteen months of the Second Intifada, which began in September 2000. Mass protests started in Jerusalem but quickly spread throughout the West Bank and Gaza too, in a wave of solidarity and dedication to popular uprising reminiscent of the First Intifada (1987-1993). My parents seemed worried about what was happening, although they never said so openly. This, in turn, worried me.
In Ramallah, most of the protests took place on the outskirts of the city, along roads that led to Israeli military outposts or settlements near Beitunya (southwest), Qalandiya (southeast) and al-Bireh (northeast).
In al-Bireh, protests took place in the shadow of the City Inn Hotel; a high building that stood at the very end of a road that led to the Israeli settlement of Beit El. This settlement was used as a military outpost throughout the intifada, and it is one of the strategic points from which the Israeli army invaded Ramallah in March 2002. Throughout the 2000s and 2010s, it also housed some of the occupation regime’s administrative apparatus, such as its biometric card and permit application offices for Palestinians living in Ramallah and its environs. But that’s a story for another time.
My family lived in a two-bedroom flat on the ground floor of a seven-floor apartment building, 500 metres (around one-third of a mile) from the City Inn Hotel. Throughout the intifada, Palestinian protestors would clash with Israeli forces here every Friday, and sometimes on other days too, depending on the events of the week. Protestors, mainly young men, would gather and throw stones at Israeli forces. They were usually met with an armed response, with Israeli forces using rubber bullets, tear gas and live ammunition against them.
On protest days, the entire neighbourhood would be enveloped in the sound of bullets and ambulances, and in the overwhelming acidic smell of the tear gas canisters that Israeli forces used to disperse the Palestinian protests, which would seep into our homes. In the evening, when we went to bed, we would pull up our covers and still smell a faint trace of tear gas.
I don’t necessarily remember being scared, but I remember being on constant alert. My father was away from home more than usual, particularly on Fridays, since he worked as a physician in Ramallah’s government hospital, where all staff had started to jump in to assist the emergency department. My mother barely slept. Still, our routine continued as usual, as much as possible.
During the first month of the intifada, 141 Palestinians were killed and 5,984 were wounded, while 12 Israelis were killed and 65 were wounded.1 Additionally, 12 Palestinian citizens of Israel were killed while protesting in solidarity with the West Bank and Gaza.
According to Amnesty International, 80 per cent of Palestinians killed during the first month of the intifada were killed in demonstrations where the lives of Israeli security services were emphatically not in danger.
During the first month of the intifada, Israeli forces fired an astonishing 1.3 million bullets at Palestinians.2
Suicide or martyrdom attacks did not commence until the second month of the intifada; in the opening phase, it was an “unarmed civil uprising”, one which the Israeli army “wanted to be a more violent insurgency” to be able to justify using the full breadth of its military apparatus to respond to it.3
The months that ensued involved protests, attacks and retaliation. We could sense the slow but steady escalation of events, particularly Israel’s ramping up of its military response, often under the guise of responding to attacks by Palestinians. The khaki-coloured jeeps and uniforms of the Israeli military were becoming an increasingly frequent presence in our city.
Less than a year into the intifada, in May 2001, Israel used warplanes to target sites in the West Bank and Gaza for the first time since 1967. I turned ten years old that month, which felt like an apt marker of a new phase in life. The last time Israel had used warplanes on targets in the West Bank and Gaza was one week before my father’s eleventh birthday. But that’s a story for next time.
With the introduction of aerial bombardments, the war escalated to a new stage, perhaps one more easily recognisable to outsiders as war. Our eyes had to start scanning the skies as well as the streets for signs of an enemy approaching.
I remember thinking it seemed so absurd, warplanes crossing the skies above me, dropping their bombs on the city. We were such a small community, and the majority of us only had stones as weapons. It seemed not just disproportionate to face aerial bombardment - it seemed wasteful.
One of the bombardments that I remember most vividly was that of the Voice of Palestine radio and television headquarters, which were destroyed in December 2001. The headquarters consisted of a satellite tower and an office building. These were first targeted with missiles, after which the Israeli army approached the premises to detonate dynamite around the tower’s foundations and bulldoze what remained of the headquarters.
We were all home when this happened, even though it was a Thursday. Schools had become good at anticipating when to expect violence, and would often close pre-emptively. I didn’t necessarily mind this - my parents had enrolled my sister and me in a prestigious private school run by Catholic nuns, which was exactly as enjoyable as it sounds.
I was playing The Sims with my best friend Shatha and my sister Shaden when the first missile struck. The radio tower was in our neighbourhood, and it felt like the missile had landed right outside our building. Shatha fell backwards out of the desk chair. Shaden looked at me with big eyes. My father was sleeping after a gruelling shift in the hospital. My mother ran out of the kitchen and tried to wake my father as another explosion sounded.
The ground shook underneath us. We felt every drop of a bomb reverberate through our bones. Shatha began to run upstairs, but her parents were already making their way down. The residents of the building’s upper floors all began to gather in the hallway of the ground floor, where we all seemed to agree it was safest. One of our neighbours brought a box of halva and started handing the sweet sesame treat to the children. Another had brought blankets, under which some of the children snuggled up. Another neighbour opened the hallway windows, which seemed strange to me at the time, as it only made the sound of the bombardment louder. I now understand that he was trying to prevent the glass from breaking.
At one point, my friend Dennis asked me if I had any binoculars, and I was excited to say I did. I ran into my bedroom and retrieved a pair of bright pink Barbie-branded binoculars. Dennis frowned at me but took them anyway, walking up to the open window and looking through the pink gadget into the sky. After a few seconds, he handed them back to me, disappointed. “These are useless,” he said.
My father never joined us in the hallway; instead, he slept through the bombardment. He woke up a few hours later, and he didn’t believe us when we told him what had happened. It was only when he noticed an undetonated missile that had mistakenly landed at the end of our road that he believed an aerial bombardment had taken place nearby.
My father remains a very sound sleeper.
The missile remained at the end of our road for a day or so. I was never able to find out who removed it and how.
It might be hard to imagine, but amidst all of this, life had to go on. We went to school as much as we could. We visited family and friends, despite the dangers of driving along certain roads.
This wasn’t an unusual situation for Palestinians; throughout the decades, we have had to live and adapt to violent, precarious circumstances beyond our control. We had become accustomed to disruption, and we had become stubborn in the face of it.
A significant consequence of the intifada was that many Palestinians were cut off from medical infrastructures as a result of Israeli road closures. This affected rural communities in particular, as they were left without access to hospitals and other medical services, a majority of which were based in cities. To compensate for this, some organisations ran so-called mobile clinics, where doctors were dispatched from the big cities in which they normally worked and rotated between remote villages. Here, doctors often found themselves treating days-old injuries sustained during protests, including bullet wounds.
Though medical personnel are protected under international law, the doctors that travelled to Palestinian villages during the intifada did so at their own risk. Many of them travelled in their personal vehicles rather than clearly marked medical vehicles such as ambulances, simply because those vehicles were needed elsewhere. They were usually able to pass through checkpoints upon showing their medical registration pass.
My mother took on a job as a mobile doctor at an organisation called Abu Raya which operated throughout the West Bank. She had wanted to get back to work for a while, but that wasn’t an easy step for a woman like her in a place like Palestine. Her Arabic wasn’t fluent, and hospitals were overwhelmingly male and presented extremely challenging work environments, where family connections and gossip often took precedence over competency and amicability.
I’m not sure how the language barrier was negotiated when she started working for the mobile clinic unit. Perhaps they were facing such a mounting demand for doctors that language proficiency ceased to matter. Either way, my mother got the job, and she started spending more time away from home, travelling to villages such as Deir Qadis, Bil’in, Budrus, Kufr Ain and Abu Falah. None of these places was more than an hour from Ramallah, but the drive felt - and often took - longer.
It wasn’t long before a problem arose. The school that my sister and I attended was in the middle of the city, surrounded by countless residential and commercial buildings, some of which were targeted by Israel because they belonged to important political figures. “Targeted assassination” seems like such a precise practice, until you consider that the means of assassination was often a missile, that this missile would strike a multi-story building, and that this building stood in the middle of a crowded city. Our school began to close more frequently after the introduction of aerial bombardments in May 2001 to prevent its pupils from becoming “collateral damage”.
On school closure days, my mother began to drop my sister and me off at our grandparents’ house before heading to the villages. These were my favourite days, especially in winter, when my grandmother - Teta - would light the gas heater and toast bread for us, stuffing it with mortadella or cheese. She would spend her day pouring us cups of sweet mint tea. Teta would usually make us elaborate breakfast spreads and lunches, too, and she would never ask anything of us but that we eat as much as we physically could - that, to me, is true love.
Some days, however, my mother chose to take us with her - perhaps because she didn’t want to burden our grandparents too much, or because she wanted us to see more of our country than just the city. I loved these days.
I remember one day in particular in Budrus, a village that is located just before the 1949 armistice line.
The Oslo Agreements had designated 89 per cent of the village as Area C (under full Israeli control) - and 11 per cent as Area B (under shared Israeli and Palestinian Authority control). Because of regulations around infrastructure, public administration and movement, Area C communities such as Budrus often lack basic services as they find themselves disconnected from water and electricity networks and restricted in their access to basic and emergency healthcare. (There’s a great documentary on Budrus that you should watch if you haven’t already.)
The building that was used by the mobile clinic sat on an undesignated slab of land, the ground around it left to the whims of nature. It was early spring, and beds of a thorny tumbleweed called Akoub lined the inland northern roads along which the building sat.
This thistle, nicknamed Green Gold, is rumoured to have once formed Jesus’s crown. More commonly though, it is picked, its stem cut as low to the ground as possible before its thorns are carefully removed. It is then cooked into a yoghurty stew, mixed into an omelette, or fried with lemon juice and tahini. It can sell for a market price of up to 20 dollars a kilogram - that’s almost fourteen times the market price of tomatoes in Palestine. Some claim that Akoub can help treat diabetes and bronchitis. One scientific study showed that its consumption led to statistically significant cardiovascular benefits.
When cooked, Akoub tastes like asparagus or artichoke; soft and earthy with a hint of bitterness. It is one of many other edible plants I used to play amongst, like Syrian oregano, Greek sage, Persian cyclamen, fennel, high mallow, white micromeria (also known as qurniyya or ‘ashab al-shay), black calla, fenugreek, chamomile, sorrel and violet dandelions.
I knelt in front of a patch of thistles and plucked the tip of an Akoub stem. It looked like a dystopian flower, thorny petals sticking out from in between the soft daisy-like blossoms that formed its head. Little did I know that the plant would soon become classed as an endangered species by Israel. Many Palestinians see this classification as vapid; yet another way in which their indigenous customs are bureaucratised and restricted.
Protecting nature from the seemingly endless reaches of human consumption seems like an objectively good thing. But there is an undeniable injustice in honing in on such small aspects of human consumption instead of looking at the far more nefarious, industrialised forms of consumption that are disrupting nature. Such regulation of a relatively benign indigenous practice seems particularly unhinged when it is imposed by a colonial entity in an area that faces much more pressing environmental crises, such as mass water poverty (which, incidentally, is the direct result of Israeli policies).
I tested the thorns of the thistle as my sister watched. I guided her hand to its colourful flower, showing her the bits that were sharp and those that weren’t. A rusty noise announced my mother’s exit from the building. It was time to go home. We climbed into the car and braced ourselves for the journey ahead.
It was always an unpredictable drive back into the city, where green gold made way for military khaki, the landscape turning increasingly inanimate, tension mounting until we passed the checkpoint. We cruised into the city. Back to our home. To the sound of bullets. To the lingering sting of tear gas. But home nonetheless.
Looking back, these were still the good days.
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Catignani, Sergio (2008). "The Al-Aqsa Intifada". Israeli Counter-Insurgency and the Intifadas: Dilemmas of a Conventional Army. Routledge. pp. 104–106
Ahron Bregman (2014), Cursed Victory, New York, NY: Pegasus Books, p. 250.
Ahron Bregman (2014), Cursed Victory, New York, NY: Pegasus Books, p. 250.