April/May 1992, Page 30, 96

Bethlehem Bulletin

After Winter's Despair, The Poppies Return

By Brother Patrick White

She sat in the chair, clearly distressed. At 17, she had just left high school. "I've never talked like this to anyone," she said. "I have always thought through my problems by myself." She could hardly bring her eyes to meet mine as she tilted her head so that her ample black hair covered most of her face. I felt she was beyond weeping.

"I've picked myself up so many times but now I feel empty; everything seems hopeless." She paused reflectively, struggling to articulate her tortured thoughts. "I see no reason for living and I want to die."

I had known Ibtisam for several years. As a young Palestinian teenager she had seemed aptly named. Ibtisam means "smiling" in Arabic. She was a most intelligent and sensitive young person, with qualities of leadership and initiative.

I had understood her to be very independent, articulate and self-assured, but I was not surprised that, as with so many other apparently joyful young people in the West Bank and Gaza, the reality had become something else. After four years of the intifada, the Gulf war and a whole lifetime of Israeli military occupation, they are now close to despair.

Listening, I began to understand why this young woman, who was fully involved politically, who had organized festive gatherings celebrating her national culture, and who was one of the leading lights in her peer group, now appeared ready to give up hope.

"There is no love left," she almost whispered. "You cannot trust people anymore. There is no unity or togetherness as at the beginning of the intifada." The disaster, as she now perceived it, was not the presence of the Israelis but an underlying cancer in her own society. "My friends and family are divided in different political factions. Hate and anger have replaced the affection and warm relationships we had. There is nothing beautiful anymore."

She held between her fingers one of the brilliant red poppies just coming into bloom in the desert after the winter cold and snow. I remarked on its beauty. "Tomorrow it will be dead," she replied.

Many of the characteristic smiles on the young Palestinian countenances I know, particularly those in the university, bravely disguise the deep distress of their whole society. Life strains and the social fabric disintegrates under the pressures of unemployment, an economy in ruins, a people divided about the role of the peace talks and the obvious Israeli intent to plunder their Palestinian patrimony. The dissolution of Palestinian society from within is actively manipulated and encouraged from without.

The unprecedented pace of Jewish settlement development seems irreversible, with 60 percent of West Bank lands now confiscated. The young feel that those things in the occupation that should be changed have not been changed, in spite of all the sacrifices Palestinians have made.

Amongst the younger children, who are also highly politicized, there is anger and frustration. There is nowhere to go, nowhere to play and, cramped into the confining space of their rooms in refugee camps, they suffer without adequate heating in the intense cold of one of the most severe winters in living memory. Some of the more fortunate Palestinian families who are able to travel only discover how intolerable are the stresses from which their children suffer when they leave their country. One young couple took their two children, one four years old, the other six, neither of whom had ever really left Bethlehem, for a vacation in Italy. The father described their wonder when he took the children to a park on the day after their arrival, although it was quite an ordinary park in an ordinary Italian town: Green grass and trees, a lake with ducks, freedom to run around and ride a bicycle, no soldiers, no confinement under curfew within the walls of their home.

"All I Can Do Is Travel Around My House!"

This sense of loss is experienced deeply by Palestinian adolescents and young adults. One generally quiet and unassuming Palestinian girl, who was due to go to the university, was surprisingly angry. She had met a young student from England who was visiting Ramallah. Of the same age and with similar personalities, they continue to correspond. The Palestinian girl showed me a letter the English girl had recently mailed her from Tibet. "Look at her, she is travelling around the world and all I can do is travel around my house!"

So many young Palestinians I know are intelligent and eager for education and careers. "If I went abroad I would have a chance to be educated," one explains. "Here I have no certificate, I will only wash floors!"

"We want to be Israelis!" said a group of young people I talk to in Feres Street each day. They laughed as they said this, hollow laughter. "It's only because we are so desperate that we say this!"

I asked them what they missed most. "I want my childhood back," said one. Another said, "I missed being 14, 15, 16. I've done nothing during that period, nothing at all."

Members of one family said they yearn for their former family outings to Jericho, Jaffa, Tiberius and across to Jordan. Others said they longed to go shopping in some big stores. Many teenagers used to go to East Jerusalem to shop but had not done so for over a year. There are no dances, hardly any clubs or sports facilities, no social life. "We play on the roads when there are no soldiers around, we do not have football pitches or parks," they explain.

Attitudes vary. In one home the father came back from work to find his wife upset. Apparently when the five young children heard of the murder of four Israeli women in Jerusalem they danced and clapped. The father told me in a troubled way: "The ideas from the streets control my house!" But there were other reactions to the same incident. A teenage girl said it was wrong to kill civilians.

Attitudes toward obedience also vary, and signal a further breakdown of authority within the home. I asked a boy of 13 whether he went out at night during the curfew. "Sometimes. It's more dangerous than breaking the curfew during the day. The soldiers will shoot you. They hide in the fields."

Another member of the same family said: "There are terrible rows between my mother and father about my brother's adventures. It's awful in the house when we are all shouting at each other."

These are traumatic times for young Palestinians. To understand how widespread the youthful frustrations are, it is well to remember that half of the Palestinian population is under the age of 25. The pressures under which they live are enormous. I will always remember hearing about a baby who lay on the floor in front of the television during the Gulf war. On the television program an air-raid siren sounded. When the child's parents looked down the baby had disappeared. They found it had crawled into its sealed cot, which was designed to protect infants from chemical and gas attacks. How impressionable are the very young!

The severe winter this year brought additional hardships to everyone. Three heavy snowstorms covered the hill country. Nevertheless, redeeming incidents did occur. Good-natured snow fights between soldiers and Palestinian youngsters took place spontaneously. I saw young Israeli soldiers take a pounding from snowballs in a sporting manner without threatening to resort to their lethal weapons. Nature sometimes reminds us of our common humanity. Jews, Arabs, young people the world over, have the same dreams, the same fears, the same frustrations. They are searching for happiness, for peace, for meaning.

During the last blizzard Palestinian children from Beit Jala built a sizable snowman above the walled terraces overlooking the road that winds up the hillside above the town. Here the Israeli military jeeps whine in low-gear as they ascend the incline to their military post near the summit, and the cars with Israeli license plates hasten to the security of the Har Gilo Jewish settlement. On the snowman overlooking the road, written in bold colorful letters for all to see in the dazzling winter sun, was: "Peace! Shalom!"

The snows have melted now and so has the snowman. Yesterday I noticed on the same hill terraces the bright red poppies of spring. I hoped Ibtisam had seen them.

Brother Patrick White is on the teaching staff at Bethlehem University, a Catholic institution in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

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