Occupation Day: H2-uh-O

5 June 2001

June 5, 2001 in Birzeit is a brutally hot day; so evident by the myriad children running around with sticky red and yellow hands because their ice cream melted before they could even unwrap it. It’s the kind of day where you wake up stuck to your sheets from a nighttime of sweating, and all you want to do is stumble into the shower – even a cold shower – and feel clean. But today is Day 2 of the village water shortage. Reality hit me hard yesterday afternoon when, upon returning from a desert-hiking trip in Jordan, I attempted to wash and scrub and shampoo three days worth of sand off of my filthy body. In less than a minute, the spray from the nozzle was reduced to a dribble, and after a few moments it was nothing. Reveling in our talent for preparation, my flatmates and I could take a bit of comfort from the two dozen or so dusty water bottles camped beneath our kitchen table for such an emergency. And there’s always bottled water in the shops.

But around the village everyone is feeling the pinch of not having our water tanks filled on schedule, though no one worries that it will last long. Hit hardest by the shortage are the local bakeries, who haven’t invented a way to turn a loose pile of flour into pita without water. Last night at one of the local markets run by a friend’s family, I dared to ask the childish question of “why?” Why is there no water? Why is the IDF checkpoint outside the village allowing only female students to come to university, not male (such is the case today)? But on June 5, 2001 in Palestine, “why” is moot. We don’t ask why anymore, I was told. That’s the way it is (a saying for which there is one single Arabic word – “hayk”).

June 5, 1967 was probably a similarly hot day in Palestine, but the most notable shortage on that day was peace. That was the day that the Israeli Defense Force launched its invasion of Palestine and planted the flag of occupation. By late morning, the Israeli Air Force had crushed 90% of its Egyptian counterpart in the Sinai Peninsula before the latter could even get off the ground. The West Bank, including East Jerusalem and the Old City (previously under the control of a Jordanian government that did not break its defense pact with Egypt), was taken quickly by several Israeli armies, and only because ground-fighting persisted in parts of the Sinai and the Golan Heights was the conflict to become known as the Six Day War instead of the Two Day War.

A Palestinian professor of mine remembers that day well, since he was a teenager living in Nablus at the time. The version of events that he heard that day is a shadowy contrast to reality. Arab news radio, broadcast from nearby Arab capital cities, acknowledged the Israeli assault but assured its listeners that the tide was turning and the Egyptian army was marching towards Tel Aviv. Furthermore the forces of Jordan, Syria, and even Iraq were en route from the East to help complete the conquest. My professor and his friends, excited by the news, grabbed a couple of World War One-era rifles and simply began walking towards the border (what is now the Green Line), hoping to find some straggling remnants of the defeated Israeli Army to pick off. They traveled for hours, even crossing the border unmolested, and saw nothing. Giving up their quest to join the victories Arab armies, they returned home to news that the Iraq army had crossed the Jordan River and would pass through the area on the way to Israel. The only army that entered that day was the Israeli one, as they circled around and arrived in Nablus from the east, no doubt causing a stir of confusion.

My aged professor, who now after his many years of dedication to democratic liberation of and within Palestine bears the scars of prison time in both Israeli and Palestinian dissident cells, also no longer asks why when the Palestinian people are faced with such uncertainly and misinformation. How can we contemplate why when we’ve never known why? So in steps a horde of uppity “ajaanib” (foreigners) to do the asking. Full of conviction and persistence, we create our own “facts on the ground” and become warriors for Palestine like lemmings are warriors for the sea. In the past several weeks (and not always with my participation, mind you), internationals in the Ramallah area have organized banner-waving demonstrations through the city streets, set up press conferences at the sites of buildings destroyed by Israeli air strikes, begun a monitoring system of observing the behavior of IDF soldiers at the checkpoints, written countless articles and letters to their home countries, and even set up a tent outside the main security headquarters in Ramallah as a voluntary “human shield” against a possible Israeli assaults on the building. In each case, there is at worst a passive support from Palestinians, and at best we get results like we had in March when the IDF destroyed the roads linking Ramallah to its dependent villages.

But where is the water? I’m not trying to be cynical, because these and other efforts of the responsible “ajaanib” affect a lot of people around the world and work to dispel the myths about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But perhaps we won’t really understand the occupation until we stop asking why; until we stop thinking that justice will necessarily come. And each time we learn a lesson like this we make it that much easier for future “uppity ajaanib” to work for a peaceful and just solution.

Today is Occupation Day. All over the Palestinian territories there are demonstrations by internationals, students, refugees, and anyone convicted by the malignance of occupation. We do what we think is helpful and necessary, but peace must be harvested by those who make their permanent lives here; who will have to believe the peace long after the papers are signed and the “ajaanib” have gone home. As long as there is a single Palestinian girl with sticky fingers from melted ice cream to remind us, June 5, 1967 will remain a colossal Israeli blunder.