NADER
Until the age of nineteen, I lived in the West Bank of Palestine in the city of Beit Jala, near Bethlehem. My family is Christian. Before 1948, Christians comprised about 20 percent of the population; now they are 1 percent. My father was a prosperous businessman in the export-import trade. We were nonpolitical and not very involved in the conflict in Israel—although, in truth, all Palestinians are political because of what happened when Israel was created.
In 2004, after the Second Intifada, the situation became unbearable. The straw that broke the camel’s back was at my great-grandmother’s funeral. The whole family gathered at my uncle’s house for the wake, including my four younger siblings and many cousins and their children. We were drinking coffee and talking when, all of a sudden, we heard shooting. The walls of our house were stone and very thick, but they started to shake. We realized that we were being bombed by the Israeli army.
We were terrified, knowing that the house was under siege. I thought I was in a Hollywood action movie. Cars belonging to the mourners on the street were in flames; several people, including my uncle, were shot, luckily not fatally. We had no idea why we were being targeted. The bombing went on for forty-five minutes, until my uncle called a friend of his who worked at the UN. This friend called the Israeli authorities, and they finally ended the siege. The only explanation we ever received was that they “made a mistake.” It was the “wrong house.”
When I was seventeen, I went on a school trip to Jordan. We were all telling stories, and I tried to tell the story about this attack on our house during my great-grandmother’s wake. I was told I should not talk about politics.
But this bombing was not the only such incident, and certainly we were not the only people in Beit Jala affected. There were incidents every day. A neighbor of ours was shot and killed when he went to his roof to get something he left there. Children don’t watch cartoons in Palestine because, every day, everyone watches the news, surveying how many are killed, how many wounded, what is the latest incident.
Finally, my family decided that it was simply not tenable to stay. We left Palestine in 2004 for Honduras, where we have family. There were and still are Palestinian-Christian communities in Honduras and Chile that started during the Ottoman Empire, when the Turks were persecuting Christian Palestinians. Although the Hondurans call us “Turkos,” we were actually running from the Turks.
I spent the summer of 2019 in Palestine. Here, when I look out the bathroom window of my family home, I see settlers and guards with their guns pointing at my house. They are watching us constantly. My village is surrounded by settlements, while we are more and more confined to ghettos. Isn’t this confinement what the Germans did?
The settlers control the water. Palestinians are not allowed to drill a well, and water distribution is grossly unequal. The settlers get twenty-three times the amount of water we get. Yet we have to pay Israel exorbitant amounts for our paltry supply, while we watch settlers swim in their pools. Israel has built a tunnel to connect the settlers to Jerusalem and is now building another. Palestinians are not allowed to use this tunnel to go to Jerusalem, even though it’s on Palestinian land. It is only for the settlers.
This summer, we watched a small outpost start on a beautiful hill called Gush Etzion. It’s the last place of refuge for Palestinians in the area and a UNESCO heritage site. Once you see a few trailers and machines in an area, you know it is a land confiscation and a potential new settlement. But the Israeli authorities simply lie and say that land must be confiscated in the name of security. Palestinians have no say and are not compensated for what is theirs. The land is simply taken.
In this case, the Israeli paper Haaretz reported that settlers have been illegally building structures there. The Jewish National Fund is reportedly involved in this theft, saying that the Palestinians stole their own land and that the Israelis are “taking it back.” In fact, a Palestinian family was just evicted prior to this theft. The Israelis destroyed their restaurant and their home. A few days after this eviction, the construction of buildings started.
We know what this means. Little by little, they make our lives utterly miserable. We are surrounded by settlements on all sides and watched constantly. It doesn’t seem to matter that settlements are deemed “illegal.” They do whatever they want.