w w w . h a a r e t z d a i l y . c o m
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Forbidden City

It's difficult to write about ordinary life in a place where life is
within an outstretched arm of electrified fences and roadblocks, and
where the local population languishes away in 40 percent unemployment
and an atmosphere of bitterness and boredom.

A portrait of Bethlehem.

By Yossi Klein

The spacious lobby of the Bethlehem Hotel was quiet last Thursday.
The reception clerk, who is also the owner of the hotel, turned off
the television set, which was constantly screening images of Uday and
Qusay. For a few more minutes he wandered about, bored, a small ring
of keys around his finger, and then switched off the light. Large
wooden camels that were grazing in the lobby disappeared in the dark,
along with huge copper vats and rows of armchairs. Silence descended
on the 210-room hotel. It was 9 P.M. and all the guests - three in
number: me, an Austrian tourist and an Italian journalist - were in
our rooms. The prospects of another guest turning up were slim.

It's very quiet in Bethlehem at night. Every shuffling of feet
kilometers away sounds like a gathering of Hamas outside my door;
every slamming of a door in Beit Sahur sounds like the end of the
hudna. There was no reason to worry, of course, because everything
was as it should be: The back of the chair was wedged beneath the
door handle, bolstered by a heavy armchair, and the blinds were
pulled down tightly. Things stayed quiet until the moment the hotel
shook, and with it all of Bethlehem, for all I know: I flushed the
toilet. The sound roared through the long corridors and reverberated
there like the noise of thousands of icebergs breaking up.

At a distance of a 10-minute ride from the hotel in a yellow cab
(fare: NIS 1.50), the Oudeh family, who live in the Deheisheh refugee
camp, began its Friday activities. Raja Oudeh, the father of five
daughters of whom the eldest is 13, is a thin man in his mid-30s. He
wears fashionable khaki trousers that end close to his ankles and
rimless eyeglasses that are mounted on a large nose. He has a black
mustache and his hair style is almost up to date. Raja Oudeh works
for an organization funded by American and European groups, whose aim
is to disseminate democratic ideas in Palestinian society. It's easy
enough to speak in praise of democracy, but you need an audience, and
Oudeh doesn't have a permit that would enable him to move around the
West Bank freely. Democracy, it seems, will have to wait for another
disseminator.

Raja Oudeh hates Fridays. It's a day that goes by very slowly, and
the seven members of the family are simmering slowly next to one
another: They are condemned to spend their weekly day of rest in the
cramped quarters of their three not-especially-large rooms, "because
that's what people do here on Friday." Oudeh and his wife, who works
in the Palestinian Authority's Education Ministry, get up at 9 A.M on
a day like this. By then, the girls, who are quiet and polite, are
surfing on the Internet (in the Oudeh household, they are allowed no
more than two or three hours a week) or watching television. For
lunch there is a festive meal. Last Friday they had musakhan -
chicken in rice seasoned with pine nuts - and a pastry that recalled
mallawah. After lunch, Raja's brother and his family dropped in for
coffee, as did some other relatives, and they had coffee with them,
too. Saturated with coffee and worn out, they don't get to bed before
1 A.M.

The Oudeh home is a pleasant haven from dirty, depressing,
nondescript Deheisheh. Well-tended potted plants accompany the
visitor to the house, an embroidered work of a charming castle and a
blue lake hangs in the living room, while in the adjacent room there
is a spic-and-span computer, waiting to take the users to more
congenial climes. The refugee camp looks exactly like the image of a
refugee camp: houses that are actually cubes placed on one another's
roofs at odd angles; children cavorting in narrow alleys, because
school is out. A boy of two or three sits on the steps of a house,
fishing with a fork for an interesting looking cork that floats down
a tributary of sewage. The fisherman attracts the attention of other
kids his age. They squat on their haunches and watch him with deep
concentration. A somewhat older boy, perhaps five, is indifferently
kicking a tennis ball against the wall.

These children, says Dr. Ghassan Andoni, are the leaders of the next
intifada.

Overdose of routine

Dr. Ghassan Andoni is the director of the Palestinian Center for
Rapprochement between People (PCR). Gray-haired, articulate and
cordial, he teaches physics at Bir Zeit University. On this late
afternoon he is sitting behind a desk in his office in the village of
Beit Sahur, the window blinds casting increasingly thick shadows on
him until, toward the end of the conversation, they swallow him up
completely. Before the meeting he was described to me as a salient
peace activist, but it turns out that his activity has changed
direction.

He is simply fed up. It might have been thought that the hudna would
at least be a positive sign from his point of view, if not a full
quid pro quo for 14 years of activity. But Andoni has had it up to
here. He has had it with the Israeli partners in the peace movement
and he has had it with the force-wielding Palestinian leadership. The
one group is frustrated; the other, violent. Today's leaders are 20
and tomorrow's leaders are now 10 - our leaders, he says, never grow
up. He would like to break the cycle in which inexperienced leaders
replace those who have just acquired some experience, and create a
responsible, mature leadership.

He views the intifada - the one now going on and the others that will
follow - as an instrument to shape and improve the Palestinian
society. He considers this process more important than the outcome.
He finds it difficult to believe in any sort of imminent "peace." The
Israelis are vengeful, he says, and we - we may be forgiving, but we
are also bitter. It's hard to see how a combination of vengefulness
and bitterness will produce positive results. He, of course, "very
much wants peace," but in the meantime his task is to prepare the
society that is not yet ripe for it. How? Andoni believes it is
imperative for a popular resistance movement to arise, as in 1987,
when the first intifada erupted. At that time, mature intellectuals,
such as Hanan Ashrawi, led the struggle. He is also ready to bestow
roles upon ordinary pursuers of peace from both sides: The
Palestinians have to fight the occupation and the Israelis have to
demonstrate against it. He recommends that we stop looking for the
Palestinian equivalent of Peace Now.

Because the purpose of my visit to Bethlehem and its surroundings was
to describe the day-to-day life of the local residents, I ask Andoni,
who is by now all but obscured by the evening shadows, to tell me
about his daily routine. For example: How is life managed without
credit cards? Without ATMs? How do you get along without checks? I
try to lure him into a conversation about the immense amount of time
that is wasted - in banks, at checkpoints, in lines to get permits.
He is silent for a moment and then leans toward me from out of the
dark: You want routine? he asks. Fine, here's some routine.

He then leans back and describes in great detail, at length, almost
with pleasure, the four-hour journey he makes every morning from his
home in Beit Sahur to Bir Zeit University, which takes from 6 A.M.
until 10 A.M., and which in better days is a 35-minute drive. He
talks about the checkpoints, the humiliations, about climbing the
hills on bypass routes and about the four taxis he takes along the
way.

Missing hour

The routine here is dictated by the existing checkpoints and by the
threatening security fence. It's possible that everything is planned
and expected, but even so you have to be amazed at how quickly the
checkpoints became a sophisticated tool that effectively generates
insult and hatred even in a Palestinian who is indifferent to the
national struggle. The checkpoints fuel the hatred of the kids who
are tomorrow's leaders and cultivate the hatred of their parents.
That hatred seems likely to remain long after their political dreams
are realized. The protest that some residents of Bethlehem amuse
themselves with against the wasted time in their lives is the
distinction that they make between their clock and the one used in
Israel. They don't recognize Israeli summer time: In Bethlehem it is
one hour earlier.

That missing hour doesn't really separate them from the world around
them. It's hard to separate between life in the town and the shell
around it: the checkpoints and the thickening cement walls of the
separation fence. The residents of Bethlehem feel a strong sense of
suffocation that is becoming ever more acute. Raja Oudeh keeps trying
to cram ever more girls into his 20-year-old Fiat 127 and go for an
outing to get some air. But where can they go? Five minutes this way,
five minutes that way, until they encounter a fence or a checkpoint.
Shopping in the produce market has become an aspiration for fresh
air. The car is not ideal for family outings but is definitely
comfortable for shopping in the market. Once a week, Raja drives up
the hill to the big market in the center of town.

The big market in Bethlehem is surely the world center of cartons
from Israel. Village women in embroidered dresses sell their goods in
cartons from Ein Yahav Farms, Tnuva and Israeli Fruits. Inside are
shiny grape leaves, dusty grapes and purplish squash. A delicate
scent of za'atar hangs in the air. The current hit: kids' shirts with
thin blue vertical stripes for NIS 10. There are no signs; the prices
are shouted out in booming voices. There are more men than women in
the market. Why is this? Because of the checkpoints: try spending two
hours to get through three checkpoints while you carry five or six
kilos of fruits and vegetables.

On the way to the market you can buy kidra for the family: In a hole
in the wall, not far from the market, near a fiery oven of pitas,
stand large copper pots. You give the perspiring, mustachioed kidra
man a bit of chicken, rice, hummus and seasonings and then, three
hours later, in return for NIS 30, you get the dish he has made for
you in the meantime. In the supermarket on Pope Paul VI Street, you
can get all kinds of crackers made by Osem, or cakes manufactured by
Elite, and hummus made by Ahla. The refrigerator, too, is crammed
with Israeli goods, though you can also find labaneh from Ramallah.

Down the street, on the way to Manger Square, are jewelry stores with
empty display windows. Manger Square itself looks like a construction
site of a bankrupt contractor who left his creditors a few tools and
mounds of earth fenced in with boards. The cafes that once ringed the
square are gone.

Raja Oudeh from Deheisheh told me that he wanted to eat out at a
restaurant one evening with his wife but couldn't find one. What
about Taboun in Deheisheh, a restaurant where a couple can have a
reasonable meal for NIS 40 between them? You don't go to a restaurant
just to eat, he says. In the whole of Bethlehem there is not one
restaurant in which you can both eat and socialize.

World of concrete and cement

The streets leading to Manger Square are decorated with peeling
posters of shaheeds (martyrs). The streets are dusty, but free of
garbage. Here and there you can see someone cleaning the street with
a broom. He won't get paid for July, nor was he paid for June. In the
anteroom of the mayor's office, inside a thick cloud of cigarette
smoke, a few men are lazing about. They are municipal employees who
are very busy in conversations about nothing. The municipality is the
town's largest employer, with 6,000 personnel. The walls of the
office of the mayor, Hanna Nasser, are wood-paneled and decorated
with large colorful photos of the mayor with Yasser Arafat and Pope
John Paul II. Nasser, who has been in office for the past six years,
resembles a leaner version of Israel's first president, Chaim
Weizmann, including the goatee and the bald pate. He has a house that
looks like a large fortress just a few minutes away by car. He is not
harassed at the checkpoints, but he bears the burden for the collapse
of tourism and the municipality's severe financial plight.

The distress is so great that even the three busloads of tourists
that arrived the day before we met brought him great happiness. The
town, which derives most of its revenues from tourism, is immersed in
dire poverty. Seventeen hotels have shut down and there is no money
for salaries because the municipality is unsuccessful at collecting
taxes from a population in which 40 percent of the providers are
unemployed. The budget of the municipality, which provides services
for 28,000 people, is NIS 15 million a year, and even that small
amount is almost impossible to raise. (By comparison, the annual
budget for the Israeli town of Or Akiva, which also has 28,000
residents, is NIS 140 million.)

Nasser knows that things are tough in Israel, too. He has friends on
Herzl Street in South Tel Aviv - merchants, who admitted to him that
they don't have money for food. He draws a connection between the
economic situation and the concrete walls that are gnawing away at
his land and choking the town. Visit Rachel's Tomb, he urges me.

Rachel's Tomb, or, according to its more appropriate name, "Rachel's
Tomb Compound," is a 10-minute drive from Manger Square. The price of
a ride in a rattling yellow cab, in which the only source of air
conditioning is the hot wind outside, is NIS 10. On the way there are
a few checkpoints of the Palestinian police. A checkpoint can
sometimes be a barrel placed in the middle of the road, watched
carefully by three or four cops. They sit, smoking, in the shade of
an adjacent house in old armchairs that lean on the wall of the house
at a comfortable angle. They don't bother anyone, someone tells me.
They earn NIS 1,000 a month, which is enough to buy a small
television set and a little food. They live with their parents and
live to eat.

Rachel's Tomb Compound is a point of encounter between the Israeli
and Palestinian presence. Years ago there was a busy commercial area
here. Today there are closed iron shutters painted turquoise, peeling
signs of a garage, a few kebab joints and faded red signs that once
read "Coca-Cola." There are piles of garbage and plenty of concrete.
The contribution of concrete to the Israeli way of life deserves a
separate article, because it's more powerful than any landscape,
certainly than any memory. The famous picture of Rachel's Tomb, the
stone square with the stone dome in the shadow of the large tree -
the image that once appeared on postage stamps and the Israeli
version of Monopoly - today seems like some sort of foggy delusion.
Ask an 18-year-old soldier what he knows about Rachel's Tomb and he
will talk about concrete walls, guard towers and a tattered blue and
white flag.

Aesthetics, if we can judge by the tenements around Jerusalem, has
always lagged behind the passion to build. The cast concrete in the
separation fence next to the Emmanuel Monastery creates a more up-to-
date aesthetic. The time has passed of the round hills with the olive
trees and the herds of sheep that were painted by Reuven Rubin. The
hills have given way to gray walls, solid and strong, that may have a
charm of their own. The olive trees have become gray from the dust of
the bulldozers and the roundness of the hills has been cleaved by
roads. Neither barren nostalgia nor sentimentality will stop anyone
on the way to conquer the hill. The Har Homa project, for example -
the new neighborhood in the south of Jerusalem - looks from here like
a huge fist that was punched into the hill, turning it into a soft
omelet, and now rises above it proudly, cast in stone and concrete.

Preparation for life

Nasser Laham is a contrary type, one of those people who likes to
turn every argument on its head. Whether a person of his character
should be made the head of the editorial board of the local
television station in Bethlehem is another matter. There are places
in which this kind of job requires obedience and attentive readiness
to do the will of politicians, but Laham, up to a certain point, is
not like that. An important lesson that he is now in the process of
learning is that television editing is not necessarily connected to
journalism. The thing is, though, that Laham sees himself as a
journalist.

Just now, for example, he is arguing with officials of the
Palestinian Authority about the right to interview masked individuals
who are against the hudna. The PA officials are afraid the Israelis
will label such programs "incitement" of the kind that the
Palestinians have undertaken to prevent. Laham counters by invoking
freedom of _expression, but the officials shrug off his democratic
pretensions and intimate that he had better watch his step. He
protests the desire of the leaders to keep information to themselves
and not share it with everyone. He is in favor of the release of the
prisoners - all of them! Well, naturally. But what about all the
Palestinian prisoners in Damascus, he wants to know - why isn't
anyone talking about them?

Nasser Laham is head of the news desk at the Bethlehem television
station. The station has 28 employees, broadcasts 24 hours a day and
takes pride in its "Hebrew press report," which Laham himself edits
and presents. For the program, he translates items from the print and
electronic media in Israel six times a week. He claims to have a
million viewers.

"I show everything," he says, meaning that not all the items he
chooses are flattering to the Palestinians. He is 37 and describes
himself as an "expert on the Israeli society." He adds: "We know a
lot more about you [the Israelis] than you know about us." The
station's revenues come from commercials. There are two competing
stations. How do they all survive? "There's a war," he points
out. "We make a living. There are shaheeds, there are commercials."

Laham's home is behind a small concrete wall in Deheisheh. The living
room is crammed with heavy furniture of a mustard-yellow color. On
the wall is a map of the Land of Israel, or, if you will, a map of
Palestine, without borders, unpartitioned. Laham is a passionate
speaker, but not one black, coiffed hair on his head moves as he
draws huge circles in the air with his hand, which holds a cigarette
between finger and thumb. The map? he asks. The map, eh? He gets up
and gives it a disparaging slap with the backs of his fingers. "It
looks really big, but put on the globe and you will see what a small,
crappy point it is and how much unnecessary blood has been shed over
it."

He can say such things: The six years he spent in an Israeli prison
as a student leader at Bir Zeit University are for him a certificate
that protects him at all times from a charge of disloyalty to the
Palestinian cause. His fellow inmates in prison are the present
Palestinian leadership. He likes to rattle off the names of the VIPs
he was inside with, of whom Marwan Barghouti and Jibril Rajoub are
only two.

His time in prison enabled Nasser Laham to undergo a process that Dr.
Adnoni hopes will be experienced by the entire Palestinian society:
training and preparation for life in an independent society. He also
learned Hebrew in prison and turned his knowledge into an economic
lever. His knowledge of Hebrew now provides his main source of
income. In the name of journalistic freedom, but mainly because of
his character, he constantly tests the limits of what's permitted and
what's forbidden. For example, two and a half years ago he published
a paperback book. On the cover is a photograph of Yasser Arafat. He
translates the title for me: "The Whole Truth About Yasser Arafat."

I ask to look through the book. The pages are blank. Every last page
is completely white. He gets up to describe the moment when he
presented the book for Arafat's perusal. Here is Arafat taking the
book, expressionless, here he is leafing through it slowly, those
present watching with bated breath. An oppressive silence. Arafat
puts down the book. He doesn't like it. Someone whispers to Laham
that in other times he wouldn't have got off so easily.

You are a journalist, I say to him, so why shouldn't you write the
whole truth about Yasser Arafat? Life and family are more important
than the journalistic truth, he says. Laham checks the limits but is
careful not to cross them. He has good things to say about Arafat,
whom he describes as something of a kindly grandfather who always has
candies in his pocket. There is corruption, and plenty of it, but
what does that have to do with Arafat? If Arafat wanted, Laham says,
pointing a cautionary finger, he could put a stop to all the
terrorism in two minutes! Two minutes! But what do the Israelis do?
Humiliate him.

The humiliation of the Palestinians is the seed of future bad times.
Laham's 13-year-old daughter, Beirut, who is present during the
conversation, eyes me suspiciously. She has a clear opinion of the
Israelis, which took shape during the intifada. Laham relates that
when Israelis came to his house for a meeting, his daughter advised
him not to eat the sweets they brought for fear they might be
poisoned. Her Hebrew is concise and in line with the spirit of the
time. Her lexicon includes "ugly jerk," "stupid jerk" and "idiot
jerk." A child like her, who saw her father beaten by soldiers, will
apparently find it difficult to refer to them by other names.

Not everything is black

Despite the map on the wall, Beirut knows that the center of the
world is far from here. A year ago, an Irish charitable organization
flew her and some of her friends from Deheisheh to Ireland. The green
fields there were a real eye-opener: Yes, she would like to live in a
place like that. The idea of escaping to other places, or at least
dreams of escaping, are shared by Jews and Arabs, whether they are
the builders of the wall or are the ones imprisoned by it. Beirut
misses Ireland, but Adnoni, the peace activist who rediscovered his
national ardor, prefers the alleys of Beit Sahur to the palaces of
Geneva.

Raja Oudeh would be ready to pay a lot for soccer with Karl-Heinz
Rummenigge in Munich, and Nasser Laham likes New York and even Riyadh
and Sanaa - but Tel Aviv? What is there for him there? And besides,
the humiliation he went through at the airport cools his traveling
passion. Humiliation is now the most clear-cut attitude of Israelis
toward Palestinians. Humiliation by means of concrete walls and by
soldiers at checkpoints. Israelis are afraid of death, Palestinians
of humiliation. The fears are different, but the hatred that replaces
them is common to both attitudes.

A description of the everyday life of the Palestinians in Bethlehem
presents them as people whose needs, like ours, are larger than "a
few pitas and olives," as some have tried to attribute to them. Such
a description will also help assuage the conscience of the writer.
Not everything is black here, he says, trying to reassure himself,
there is also other life here. It's hard to write about ordinary life
in a place where life is within an outstretched arm of electrified
fences. It is impossible to make a distinction between day-to-day
life in the town and the roadblocks and walls around it. It is
possible to take in every iota of the local ways and present it as
the center of life. It is possible to write about the kidra, and one
has to write about the new cultural center, a building of marble and
stone, a kind of cinematheque that will screen good movies; it's
important to mention the pleasant breeze that blows here in the
evening, and there is also a swimming pool.

The total contrast to the checkpoints and walls in Bethlehem is the
swimming pool. This is the hallucinatory shining ship that suddenly
sets sail for the center of a remote village in a Fellini film. It's
not just a pool, it's an actual country club, called the Olive Tree
Club. By the pool is a large lawn, tables stand under colorful
parasols and service is by bored waiters wearing white jackets. There
aren't many people here - the price is almost the same as for the
pools in Tel Aviv: NIS 30 for an adult, NIS 20 for a child. Three
hunks volunteer to model a few manly poses for the camera. They are
from the village of Fajr, near the urban settlement of Efrat, and
they measure the trip in terms of time (an hour and a half) and
checkpoints (only three).

The pool itself is blue and shaded. A green Carlsberg Beer flag flies
over it, the lap of the water is gentle and relaxing, and boys and
girls, the leaders of tomorrow's intifada, zoom contentedly down the
slide. Splash.