Michael A. O’Neill

Author: Michael

  • There goes the sun

    A fog has descended over Palestine.

    When I left the university this evening after helping Nigel
    prepare his recent
    diary entries    , the sun had fled, and a dense mist had
    settled, obscuring the nearby hilltops.

    Bloody Middle-Eastern weather. In college, a professor of
    mine–Rashid Khalidi–kept talking about some malady that affects
    westerners in winter. I forget what it was called, but it had to do
    with short days and dry weather. The Khalidi’s are a famous Jerusalem
    family (Rashid’s branch of the al-Khalidi’s moved to Beirut prior to
    W.W.I.) and I think it would have been fair if Rashid had talked about
    the bloody awful weather here during the winter.

    (more…)

  • Feeling Hurt

    I have been exchanging some rather heated e-mail messages with a member
    of my family. (E-mail is really the best way for us to communicated,
    since
    my apartment has no phone, and to make a collect call on a pay phone
    via
    AT&T, I have to go all the way to Jerusalem.)

    This family member was concerned–perhaps overly–about my
    attending
    a few clashes between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian youths in
    Bethlehem
    and Ramallah. But there was more than that. It seems that some of our
    family’s
    Jewish friends have made the conclusion that, because I support
    Palestinian
    rights, I am a somehow neo-Nazi.

    Perhaps I should quote the closing e-mail in our
    correspondence:

    "It’s very difficult to find any friends here who
    just let
    me be proud of you. Most of them suggest that I’m nuts that I can even
    sleep at night… Jewish friends’ first reaction is some comment like
    ‘Does
    he hate Jews?’"

    It’s hard for me not to respond angrily to those accusations. I want to
    be childish. I want to get angry and sarcastic and give my long list of
    Jewish acquaintances and friends and say that you better warn them
    because,
    really, I’m an anti-semite and I’m plotting their demise. But I have to
    get used to answering calmly, rationally, because for the rest of my
    life,
    some will slander me because I studied Arabic and spent time in
    Palestine,
    Jordan, Syria…

    It is an interesting conclusion, that I am an anti-Semite, but
    it is
    a fallacy that reveals a certain shallowness of thought, a certain
    level
    of naivete that exists in the political attitudes of my fellow
    Americans,
    Jewish or otherwise. The problem exists on several levels, and is
    intimately
    tied to the way we view history and to our understanding of the
    Israeli-Palestinian
    conflict. The two basic assumptions, though, are 1) all Palestinians
    (and
    Arabs) are terrorists, and 2) it is a sine qua non
    that supporters
    of Palestinian aspirations must hate Israelis since, well, the two are
    enemies, right?

    (more…)

  • Clash at Ma’alufiyeh

    Nigel accused me of being a bleeding heart, knee-jerk liberal.
    Perhaps I am, perhaps not. It still doesn’t change the fact that my
    back hurts.

    "Why did I try to carry that kid?" [Photo right, resting my
    back] That is the question which I keep asking (and to which Nigel gave
    the above answer). The kid–maybe 15 or 16–was almost throwing up, but
    he clearly had the presence of mind to roll over on his side. Perhaps I
    should have taken that as a sign that he just needed a few minutes to
    recover. But he was writhing there on the ground, and the scent of gas
    in the room was palpable.

    So I yelled upstairs to the shabab (men between 14 and 44) to
    come down, to help me, there is an injured kid. Finally, one of them
    came down, informed me that the kid didn’t need an ambulance, but that
    we should try and get him upstairs and closer to some fresh air. So I
    grabbed his legs, the other fellow grabbed his shirt, and we carried
    him up this narrow, unfinished staircase. The kid was a bit on the
    chubby side and I strained my back so bad that I couldn’t walk right
    for hours.

    I keep telling myself, no, Michael, you were being a nice guy,
    you were genuinely worried, but part of me wonders whether I just
    wanted to carry an injured Palestinian youth like I’d seen on TV (you
    know, Americans, too much TV, imitating TV, that kinda thing). Just for
    the full "Palestinian Experience."

    Yesterday was definitely a part of the "Palestinian
    experience." The day before, Birzeit University student leaders had
    decided to head down to the nearest Israeli checkpoint between Ramallah
    and Jerusalem and throw stones at Israeli soldiers. Of course the
    decision was made to leave at 9:00 a.m.–an unreasonably early hour for
    college students in any country–so they really meant 10 a.m., and by
    1:30 p.m., most of the University was still chatting and laughing on
    the quads, soaking in the warm spring sun.

    With weather like that, I reasoned that they wouldn’t want to
    ruin the day with tear gas and ambulances. I’m not a very good judge of
    resolve, though, and the decision to leave was made and carried out
    while I was shaving back home. It was catch up ball then. I missed them
    by no more than ten minutes, grabbed a cab to Ramallah, thinking the
    protest would take place at the Surda bypass road like the first
    Ramallah area protest I went to. But not a creature was stirring at the
    interesection, not one lonely shab, so I took the
    cab the rest of the way to Ramallah, and grabbed another one to
    Jerusalem. The trip wasn’t that interesting, so I won’t prolong it. The
    PNA was redirecting traffic, so our cabbie took back roads that met up
    with the Jerusalem road near the airport–a mile or two further south
    than I wanted to be. I got out right in front of two Israeli army
    jeeps, greeted the soldiers with a "How ya dowin," crossed the street,
    and grabbed another cab back north. A minute later, I was there.

    (more…)

  • A trip to see Jabal Abu Ghanim

    Several times in the past week, I had resolved to go to Jabal Abu Ghenim, simply
    to see with my own eyes what will soon become Har Homa. Most of those abortive trips
    were planned to coincide with Peace Now protests advertised in the paper, but for
    various reasons, something else always came up. So I just decided to go, just to see–just
    to spend five or ten minutes taking pictures.

    (more…)

  • Two stories

    If you’ve visited this page before, you may
    notice that I changed all the names and removed the passport photos.
    I’ve decided from now on to substitute new names everywhere. Basically,
    Israel and the PNA monitor these sites to acquire information about
    who’s doing what. Neither of these two gentlemen are doing anything to
    attract the ire of the authorities, but I may write later about someone
    else who is. So just to protect all of my friends, I’m going to always
    use fake names and avoid passport-like photos.

    Ghassan

    Yesterday morning I got a ride to Bethlehem with a fellow
    named Ghassan–he had moved to San Fransisco when he was 13, but
    returned two years ago to get his identity card renewed, and never
    left. He’s got a job setting up computer networks, and studies at Bir
    Zeit at the same time. And he bought a car, a French one (a model which
    Israelis buy, not Palestinians). When we reached the Ramallah
    checkpoint, he calmly removed a Kuffiyah–the name for the black and
    white headscarves that Arafat always wears–tied around his rear view
    mirror, and another rolled up on his dashboard (he replaced them after
    passing the Bethlehem checkpoint). When I asked him about it, he said
    "That’s the way things are here."

    Ghassan also had a bit of a story which might justify this
    rather strange ritual. He’s got yellow  plates and on October 30, 1996,
    he and a friend, Muhammad (actually, his name isn’t Muhammad. I’m
    really not sure what his name is, but let’s just pretend, shall we?)
    were driving through a Palestinian village near Ramallah after sunset.

    I should explain the license plates. As far as I know, there
    are four: yellow, green, blue, and white. Yellow is Israeli, blue is
    West Bank, green is PNA issued West Bank, and white includes official
    PNA vehicles and–I think–UN vehicles. Actually, that’s wrong. Let’s
    try it again. The white ones with green letters are issued by the PNA
    for residents of self-rule areas. The green ones with the white
    letters–I think with Hebrew letters–are Israeli issued, self-rule
    territory residency plates for taxis. The green ones with black letters
    are also Israeli issue, self-rule territory residency plates for
    non-taxis. Blue plates are the same, but for non-self-rule territory.
    The white ones with the red letters are Palestinian Authority, but just
    military, I think. The white ones with black letters are UN, but if a
    car has white plates with pink letters, it means it was probably
    stolen. Forget it. I was just informed that the letters on the plates
    say more than the color. Just click here
    for a better explanation.

    To continue…
    Suddenly, Ghassan heard a loud crash, and as he ducked behind the
    wheel, he noticed that Muhammad was slumped over, bleeding profusely
    from several large gashes on his head. An instant later, another
    fist-sized rock crashed through the windshield. If Ghassan hadn’t
    already ducked his head, he would have been knocked unconscious, and
    considering the steep hills in the West Bank, a fatal crash would have
    followed.

    Perhaps the only thing that saved Muhammad’s life was the
    rapid response of a few Israeli soldiers. After escaping the
    Palestinian village, the closest inhabitated area was an Israeli
    settlement. Ghassan just drove up to the gate and screamed for help,
    and an Israeli soldier immediately summoned an ambulance. Two weeks and
    almost thirty stitches later, Muhammad was released from the hospital.

    George

    For the rest of the trip in Bethlehem, we were joined by a
    21-year-old Birzeit student named George. Of course he didn’t have
    Jordanian citizenship (or any other citizenship for that matter), so he
    needed permission from Israel to leave the West Bank (the quickest
    route to Bethlehem or Hebron is through Jerusalem). Needless to say,
    his permission had expired on the 12th. We only learned of George’s
    dilemma after we had left the West Bank and entered Israel proper. I
    wasn’t sure what to think. I mean, the crossing to Ramallah was a joke:
    I hadn’t seen a serious inspection of a car since arriving. But George
    insisted that the Bethlehem crossing was close to Erez in Gaza when it
    came to security.

    So what would happen? Should I try to interfere if they
    harassed him? George himself had told us two weeks earlier that a
    foreigner causing a row would only make it worse on the Palestinians
    with her/him. George tried to be pretty calm about the whole thing. He
    said that the worse that could happen was that he would be turned back
    at the border; that he’d have to go home via a road dramatically called
    Wadi Nar (literally, Valley of Fire, but some insist
    that, in this case, it means Valley of Hell). He admitted, however,
    that he could be detained for several hours, and God only knows, even
    jailed. George had all sorts of plans. He was going to argue that his
    permission was still valid, and then look stunned when he discovered it
    was the 13th, and not the 12th. He was going to say that he was our
    tour guide (which was true), that he was a student (which often
    resonated with the young Israeli soldiers)…

    We took a cab to the checkpoint, but it had green plates and
    couldn’t carry us any farther. Either we walked across, or we waited
    for a Ford van with yellow plates. We left the decision to George. He
    wasn’t necessarily happy with that, but while arguing about whose
    decision it was, a Ford van pulled up, so we took it.

    We needn’t have worried, after all. An Israeli soldier noticed
    me in the front seat (goatee, glasses, pale skin–clearly a stupid
    American tourist), but still opened the back. What he saw first was a
    blond British woman (deliberately placed) with four other foreigners,
    and then George crammed into the back corner. George’s pale skin,
    shortly cropped hair (quite the fashion in the States) and vaguely
    Mediterranean features just blended in with our
    Greco-Danish-German-Swiss-American-British group. After studying us for
    a minute, the soldier shut the door and waved us on.

    The only mistake we may have made was that our reaction
    was–at least for Americans–phony. A typical American like myself
    would have said, "Can I help you?" or something slightly condescending,
    almost offended to be interfered with by some soldier. No, we were
    totally silent, like we were hiding something.