What Kind of Life?

“So this is life?” he said, gesturing at the cracks in the walls, at the light shining through the tin roof that covered his living room. He stormed into the kitchen, turned the faucet in the sink violently to left, to the right, to the left again.

“You see? No water.” He threw his arms in the air, exasperation dripping from all of his movements, from all of his words, from his very thoughts. He took two long strides and jerked open the refrigerator door. Several flies flew out, leaving only empty shelves in their wake.

“No food, you see?” He slammed the door shut, grabbed a pot off the stove. He opened the lid and with a large spoon scraped hardened instant spaghetti to the left, then back to the right.

“My daughter make for us last night. All we eat today.” He tossed the pot back on the burner and returned to the fridge, opening the freezer this time. He lifted a bag of frozen pita and dropped it. It thunked and echoed in the empty space.

“What kind of life is this??”

We had been talking with Abu for the last half hour. He spoke about the “disengagement,” about the surrounding twenty-seven-foot concrete walls, about living in an open air prison, how everyone had lost work. As he spoke, he inched forward in his seat, his arms flying in and out of the frame, his voice steadily increasing in volume. The grey hair that shot out near his temples and the crowfeet wrinkles around his eyes were the only signifiers that Abu was born in 1956.

“You see this?” he asked us, pointing vaguely into a dark bedroom with a single mattress on the ground. His outstretched finger made our eyes fall on a mass of tangled sheets and blankets covering what appeared to be a sweaty Palestinian boy. Only the crown of his head and the dark skin near the nape of his neck poked through.

“Sleeping all day, he is! Twenty-two! No work, no make money for family, no wife. He just lay here all day!” Abu huffed and pushed past me, walking out the back door. He turned the handle of a low faucet, beneath which was a small bucket filled with murky water. Nothing fell from the faucet to the bucket as he flipped the handle back and forth.

“What kind of life?”

I wondered why he was living life in this way, why he had no work, no money, no food, when no more than ten kilometers away, people were living lives of blissfully ignorant decadence. Was the concrete barrier that kept him from that dream really a measure of security, or was it yet another means to create the end that is a Jewish state?

I suspect the latter.

And security from what anyway? From archaic rockets and suicide bombers? This is not to downplay the pain these things have caused, but to segregate an entire people for the misguidance of a few? To “retaliate” by slowly but surely removing Palestinians from their homeland? Just another step in the “War on Terrorism,” I suppose.

And what is terrorism? According to the American Heritage Dictionary, terrorism is “The unlawful use or threatened use of force or violence by a person or an organized group against people or property with the intention of intimidating or coercing societies or governments, often for ideological or political reasons.”

In the West Bank, IDF (IOF, IAF) soldiers shoot bullets made of steel encased in rubber that carry enough force to, if they hit in the right place, pierce the brain and make people bleed from the eyes. They have fully automated tear gas guns that shoot red hot canisters of debilitating inhalants that cause every orifice on your face to run. This gas also causes vomiting, and if exposed long enough, throat closure. They shoot these at non-violent demonstrators. These same soldiers enter people’s houses in the middle of the night and arrest people suspected of collaborating against Israel; they arrest children suspected of joining groups that aren’t approved of, throw them in administrative detention—a prison in which Palestinians are not granted the right of a lawyer, where they are not given even the luxury of a reason for their arrest, much less a fair trial—for throwing stones.

In Gaza, F-16s approach speeds so high at so low an altitude that it creates a force loud enough to shatter glass and powerful enough to knock people off their feet and even break people’s legs. Tanks fire on groups of children playing marbles in the street, killing seven, eight, eighteen at a time under the guise that the children were involved in “suspicious activity.” Mothers have to watch as their children lose both arms and both legs, as they die, basket-cases in plastic-covered hospital cots, and there is nothing they can do to stop it. People live in constant fear that one day, they will be too close to a targeted assassination, that the anonymous unmanned Israeli drone buzzing high above their heads will hit them this time, and all they will have heard is that ominous

…buzzing.

Can you imagine hearing that noise? Knowing that somewhere, something is flying high enough that you cannot see it; but that it can watch your every move. Knowing that this thing is completely unmanned, run by a person a world away, on the other side of an impenetrable barrier, just staring at a screen. That buzzing would be the only sign that someone around you, or you, might soon be blown to smitherines.

I heard once that when people are blown up, the bomb squads call it “pink mist,” because that is all that is left of what was once a living, breathing person.

Of course people leave, run to refugee camps in the surrounding Middle East countries, hoping that one day they too will be granted the right of return. It is no wonder that there are some four or five million Palestinian refugees. How can you live somewhere in that sort of fear?

If fear inspired coercion defines terrorism…well, there you have it.