11:30pm in Ashraf's Taxi Office
Eleven thirty PM and the men in Ashraf’s tiny taxi office were up to their normal nightly rituals. Cohwe (coffee), cigarettes in plenty, and the usual half play, half deadly serious argumentative roundabout concerning the day’s profit that centers around how to most equitably distribute the money.
Brittany and I approached the taxi office; I peaked under the poster on the glass door commemorating the life of Mahmoud Darwish (quite possibly the greatest and certainly the most widely celebrated contemporary Palestinian poet to have penned word on page). The poster was hung in honor of who he was, what he wrote, and in remorse for what the world, most acutely, what Palestinians lost with his death. I peaked under the poster and saw the bright, smiling, wrinkled face of my friend Abbad. He saw me and his mouth opened into the kind of deep calming smile I came to characterize him with last summer. I opened the door and Abbad and I embraced after a year of separation. We kissed; left cheek, then right, and so on for a few seconds. I asked Abbad about his new wife and learned that a month previous to our arrival Abbad had become a father. He called his daughter Ragad—an Arabic name that means something like luxury or comfort or the good life.
Abbad offered me a cigarette and sent some young boys who were hanging around the taxi office off to bring us coffee. The conversation for the next minutes hovered around how life had been in the US, in Palestine, around me and Brittany’s recent marriage, how our families in the US, in Palestine, were and so on. We talked about Mahmoud Darwish and how deeply his loss is felt in the Arabic world. Soon, a man I had only known as an acquaintance last summer pointed up to a poster on the wall in the taxi office. The poster had four men on it, dressed in black, standing proudly with assault rifles in hand. I knew immediately that what I was looking at: It was a shahid poster, a martyr’s poster. The man who pointed at the poster grinned and explained to me in broken English that one of the men pictured was his brother and that it was his third brother to be martyred. Brittany and I expressed disbelief and sorrow for his loss…and he grinned. He grinned still as he took out his cell phone and turned on a video he had taken the night of the killing of his brother and the fellow martyrs. The footage was gruesome. The four men had been assaulted by Israeli occupation forces while driving together in a small car. The Israeli occupation special forces unit had entered the refugee camp were the assassination happened by using a Palestinian car that they had hijacked somewhere in the Beit Lehem area. In the video I could see that nearly every inch of the car had bullet holes in it. I assume that the Israelis put at least a few hundred if not a thousand rounds of fire into the car. All four men in the car died. The footage dragged on as the man I mentioned went to each passenger in the car and detailed their brutalized bodies while they still sat in the car. The footage had been set to tragically triumphant Arabic music. The music was in conflict with what was silently apparent in the scene: tragic hysteria. I could see medical personnel rushing to try and save the men, I saw a man pick up the lifeless and shredded arm of one of the martyrs and scream into the night as if cursing the god’s for his loss. I saw more blood and disfigured body parts that I cared to and I noticed tears in the eyes of my new friend in the taxi office. But still he grinned.
After the footage ended multiple men in the office pointed back at the poster and said akhto, his brother, his brother. The man who lost his brother grinned and we all went back to smoking, drinking coffee, and discussing recent life in Beit Lehem.
While life is made cheap in Beit Lehem by the ongoing brutalities of the occupation, the cost of fuel is up; they said this happens whenever a Republican is in American office. So it goes.
The cost of everything seems to be up in Beit Lehem even while the inestimable dignity of human seems to continue to plummet. Every single night last week there were Israeli incursions into Deheisheh refugee camp…where Britt and I are staying. In total, twenty five Palestinians were arrested just from Deheisheh camp, just last week. Israel recently released over a hundred Palestinian prisoners to appease Mahmoud Abbas (the corrupt Autocrat illegally heading the Palestinian Authority)…last week in Deheishe Israel replenished in its prisons by almost ¼…just from Dehiesheh camp. One man that Brittany and I spoke with yesterday put it this way: Each day people live, in this city, under this occupation, they lose a little hope. A little hope lost every day. I can feel the truth of those words in the air; hopelessness surrounds this city like a dark cloud and it is inexpressibly better here than in Gaza or the Palestinian refugee camps of Lebanon.
But then again, on Friday, tomorrow we will demonstrate. il-hamdiallah…praise be to God…il-hamdiallah. On the first holy day of the holy month of Ramadan we will articulate the poetic intifada (shaking off) of nonviolent resistance.
Brittany and I are glad to be back in Beit Lehem.
