Blog 13

Jehan

Jehan occupies the next desk along from mine in the office. You know when she is about because she laughs so much. From time to time we down tools and chat about this and that. Today we talked of growing up during the first Intifada and living through the second. We also spoke of fear. Throughout our chat Jehan’s eyes would frequently come close to tears, but not quite.

Here is a bit of what she said.

As a schoolgirl in the 80s she recalls being taught to draw the maps of Syria, Jordan and France. Never Palestine. Palestine did not exist. People who thought otherwise would often die for the belief. Jehan knew of many people killed for raising the Palestinian flag which is illegal (though apparently tolerated now).

There was a sense of solidarity during the first Intifada. It started at the grassroots level and communities looked out for each other. Part of the disillusionment with Oslo was that whilst the youth who inspired the Intifada struggled against the Occupation, the PLO negotiated a settlement far away from their base in Tunis. Those deciding the fate of Palestine and the refugees were not seen by many as being a representative voice sharing in the struggle, not least because they did not even ask the refugees what they thought.

Fear looms large in Palestinian life under the Occupation. It is not immediately noticeable but it is always there, just below the surface. It seems that everybody has experienced a moment when they expected to die. Jehan, who is in her late twenties, has experienced this three times. Three times during which she got to the point of letting go of her fear and calmly accepting that she was about to die violently. One of these experiences occurred at a checkpoint, the other two in her apartment which she shares with her twin sister in Ramallah. During the current Intifada (which started in September 2000 and is ongoing) 2002 was, so far, the bloodiest year. During the IDF occupation of the town, all water, electricity, gas and telephones were cut off for 10 days. There was a curfew. Residents were allowed out to get provisions for a couple of hours every second or third day. Jehan recalls the torment of not being able to look out of the window, because of snipers. She recalls the nights when helicopters would hover overhead firing their guns and missiles into her neighbourhood. The fear felt during the couple of seconds between hearing the launch of a missile and it hitting a target – moments from hell. The guilt she felt as she hoped the missile would strike a neighbour rather than her. She recalls the tracer bullets at night flashing through her bedroom window and destroying her things, as she lay on the kitchen floor. Then she remembers the feeling of simply letting go of her fear and the release she felt at accepting that this was her time to die.

During this period, Addameer was the only NGO prisoner organization that still provided services. The offices were raided by the IDF, the walls riddled with bullets and a computer taken – so Jehan and the others worked from home. This was the time of mass arrests of Palestinians by the IDF (15,000). Jehan recalls taking phone calls from worried family members seeking news of a loved one. At the end of a three minute phone call there would be 50 missed call messages. Sometimes the missing relative had not been arrested, but was in the local morgue and Jehan would have to tell the family that this was so.

These memories are not unique in Palestine. In one form or another they are shared by all. So when the IDF entered town two weeks ago, what for me was an experience, was to a Palestinian a psychologically traumatic event bringing back painful memories.

“Who will compensate me for my lost youth? Where are my happy memories from when I was twenty or twenty-five? No one can give those back to me.” Jehan Jarrar