7Za’atar is the name of both a spice similar to thyme that grows wild in Palestine and a blend of spices. Za’atar is a staple of local cooking in Palestine and much of the Middle East.
8 Taybeh is a neighboring Christian village of 1,500 people about one mile away from Kafr Malek. It’s locally famous for a brewery that makes Palestine’s only beer.
9 In Palestine, saying someone is “active” is shorthand for saying the person is involved in resisting the Israeli occupation. It can mean anything from organizing, to going to protests, to throwing stones, to more militant activity.
10 Fatah, PFLP, and Hamas are political parties within Palestine. For more information, see the Glossary, page 304.
11 An exit exam for high school. For more on the tawjihi exams, see the Glossary, page 304.
12 Al-Quds Open University is a mixed on-site and distance-learning university system with campuses in the West Bank, Gaza, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. There is also a separate university system in the West Bank called Al-Quds University, which isn’t affiliated with Al-Quds Open University.
13Dabka is a traditional Palestinian dance.
14 For more on the Red Cross and Red Crescent, see the Glossary, page 304.
15 Eid Al-Fitr is a major feast that marks the end of the month of Ramadan.
16 Birzeit University is one of the most prestigious universities in Palestine. It’s located just outside Ramallah, not far from Kafr Malek.
GHASSAN ANDONI IN BEIT SAHOUR, WEST BANK
GHASSAN ANDONI
Physics professor, 58
Born in Beit Sahour, West Bank
Interviewed in Beit Sahour, West Bank
Despite his slight frame, Ghasssan Andoni has a strong presence, and commands attention whenever he speaks. Ghassan is a physics professor and activist. He lives in the community of Beit Sahour, which is nestled in the hills just east of Bethlehem and one of the few mostly Christian communities in Palestine. In total, Christians make up around 2 percent of the total population of the West Bank. Legend has it that the residents of Beit Sahour are descended from the shepherds who visited Jesus on the night of his birth; Sahouris jokingly claim that it was their notorious talent for gossip that spread the story of Jesus so widely. We visit Ghassan often during the spring and summer of 2014 at the modest but cheerful apartment where he lives with his wife and twenty-four-year-old son. The family has decorated the apartment in purple and white, and Ghassan has used his metalworking skills to build a small elevator to take groceries from the first floor to the third.
Ghassan’s life has taken him from a refugee camp in Jordan, to universities in Iraq and England, to a war in Lebanon. Even when home in Beit Sahour, he has been extremely active. He played a key role in the community’s campaign of civil disobedience during the First Intifada, and he helped found the International Solidarity Movement, an organization that brought thousands of international volunteers to Palestine during the Second Intifada. His activism led to his nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006. These days he lives a relatively quiet life, commuting to and from Birzeit University where he teaches. Still, he has no doubts he will become active again when the time is right.
DO I BELONG HERE OR DO I BELONG THERE?
My family has been in Beit Sahour for many generations, as far back as we know.1 I was born here in 1956. I have two sisters and three brothers, and I’m the oldest male. I grew up in the home that my father built in the early 1950s. He was a teacher then. My mother worked in the home. When I was a child, if I looked out at the hills from my home, there was nothing there except trees and fields. I grew up in a fairly closed community. It’s a society where if you run into someone in the street, that person is probably a cousin or an aunt or uncle. On the one hand, this made me feel very safe growing up. But on the other hand, I’ve always spent a lot of my time here on social obligations. Every week there are weddings, baptisms, and graduations. Since my family is connected to thousands of others here, we’re expected to be there when others are celebrating or when they’re sad. All of these gatherings can be exhausting.
In 1962, at the age of six, I left Beit Sahour. My father got a job as an accountant in Amman, Jordan, and so he bought a house there and we all went to live with him. In Amman, the paradox was that my family had a home that was on the border between a middle-class neighborhood and the very poor Al-Hussein refugee camp.2 So my home was at the border of two ways of life, and I was always wondering, Do I belong here or do I belong there?
At that time, conditions in the refugee camp were very bad. The houses were made of thin iron sheets with asbestos covering the outsides. There was sewage in the street, which was really just a narrow dirt path. Many of my friends were from the camp, so I spent real time in those slums. Of course, my family wasn’t comfortable with that. In Beit Sahour, I can’t remember having a fight with anyone. But in Jordan, I had to be ready every time I walked to the shop. I’d always meet a couple of people who wanted to bother me. I didn’t like beating people up, but I also fought when I had to. I learned that it was not the size, it was not the muscles, it was the daring heart that won. I learned not to think of the consequences, just jump into a fight. Every time I came home, I had a new scar somewhere.
Three or four of our neighbors were Christian families. That’s why my father bought our home where he did. But my father was very secular, so he didn’t put me in a private Christian school. I was the only Christian kid in the government schools that I went to. The schools were not obliged to provide me with a Christian religion teacher, but I had the right to go out and play during religion class. But it’s boring to play by yourself. So I asked to sit and listen in religion class.
I wanted to know more, so I started to read and memorize the Quran. Our religion teacher wanted to justify his own ideas by taking a verse from the Quran and throwing it in our faces. I started arguing with him and quoting my own memorized verses. He got annoyed and asked me to just go outside to play. I was much younger than others in my class, because I was accepted into second grade in Jordan at the age of six. I did well in school, but in fourth grade I was still a little kid, and there were people sitting beside me who were fourteen years old because they had failed classes. One of them, a Bedouin, was actually married.3 He was fifteen years old I think. I had to learn to stand up for myself.
I spent my summer vacations in Beit Sahour. In the camps, it was a struggle all the time, but in Beit Sahour, I felt safe and comfortable. I had lots of fun with cousins. It was like a respite for many years.
In 1967 when I was eleven, I traveled to Beit Sahour to visit my grandmother and aunt. It was an easy trip then, because there were no checkpoints at the time. My father could just put me on a bus. One day during my visit that year, I walked down the street to buy some coffee for my aunt. While I was walking back, the Israelis started shelling the village—it was the start of the Six-Day War.4 There were no buildings where I was walking, so I had to jump into a field and cover myself until it was safe to move. I was probably crying. I remember maybe twelve or fifteen bombs exploding nearby. When I got back to my relatives’ house, I learned that one of my neighbors had been killed.
I saw the soldiers coming into Beit Sahour with their weapons. Everybody was scared. Some people were saying the Israelis would kill us, we should leave, and others were saying we should stay. But it was over in a week. I still remember an injured bird that had been trapped in my relatives’ house after the bombing ended. I caught it and cared for it while I was waiting to go home. After a couple of weeks, the Red Cross arranged a bus ride for me and others back to Jordan. I tried to take the bird with me back home. I held it in my hands on the trip back, but it died on the way.
A CIVIL WAR IS SOMETHING THAT YOU SHOULDN’T LIVE THROUGH
Struggle was the norm when I was young. I never lived a peaceful life. But the problem is, I started liking it. It started thrilling me. It was like someone throwing you into the sea and you have to find your way to the shore and you have to struggle hard, hard, hard. When I returned to Jordan, I continued hanging out with my friends in the refugee camp for the next few years. Things in the camp were changing, starting in 1970. When I was around fourteen, I started seeing weapons in the streets of the camp, and I started seeing banners of liberation organizations. I was seeing the birth of the Palestinian revolution. The environment changed dramatically. I saw people smiling, talking. I saw a sense of pride. When the guns appeared, everybody found himself. Suddenly, the kids stopped fighting each other. We started mostly playing with toy guns. Slowly the phenomenon spread all over, and I started seeing people with real guns and wearing the traditional keffiyeh.5
I started learning. I took every opportunity to go to the various offices of different organizations and just sit and listen to people talking about refugees and the origins of the camps. Then the friction started between the PLO and the King’s Army.6 The line was drawn with Jordanians and Palestinians against each other, and Palestinians started getting fired from their jobs, including my father. Then we had gunfire in the streets, gunfire and bombs every single day. I went to school in the morning and then when the fighting started, the school would discharge us and we students would make our way back home, sometimes hiding and sometimes crawling to avoid fire.
Soon, there was destruction everywhere. It seemed like every single home in the neighborhood was hit by bombs and gunfire. It was even worse in the camps. One bomb would destroy four of those shacks. Our home got hit by shells as well, five or six times. It had holes in it, but it didn’t fall down. But we lost our water tanks, and then we had to hunt for water, and that was risky. I think it was the Iraqi army that eventually started bringing water tanks on trucks. But they brought the water to a place very far from our home. We had to take a container, go to the distribution site, get the water, and then make our way home.
In the final days of September 1970, we suffered a severe bombardment. We were hiding in the basement and the ceiling started coming down on us. So we had to run and seek shelter in our neighbors’ cellar. The cellar was actually a small rocky cave and protected, so there were about ten or twelve families from the neighborhood stuck in that place. It was summertime, so it was hot, and it was dark. We spent two nights there. Nobody slept. When the Jordanian army came, we were all in that cellar. A civil war is something that you shouldn’t live through. I mean a war, okay, but a civil war, I don’t think anyone should experience it.
After the PLO was defeated and the Jordanian army reoccupied Amman, all the men were asked to gather in a certain square. All of us were taken, everyone from the age of thirteen until the age of eighty. I was still fourteen, and that was my first experience of detention. They took us to a desert detention center in Jordan. I stayed there for fourteen days. It was ugly—really, really ugly—the way they treated us. We were rarely fed. I saw so many scenes of beatings and torture. I remember the guards examined our shoulders for marks that might be left from carrying a rifle. Anyone with a mark was taken, and we didn’t see him again. After fourteen days they just started releasing us gradually, starting with elderly people and then very young people, and then I was released together with my father and we went back to our home.
When I came home, I cried. Everything that we owned in Jordan was destroyed. Our home was almost totally destroyed and our car was destroyed. We were a shattered family, and we thought we didn’t have a future in Jordan. It reminded me of 1967. It was my second experience of being invaded and having someone take over.
A group from the Beit Sahour municipality managed to come to Jordan and give some assistance to the Beit Sahour families that had been living in Amman. My uncle was part of that assistance group. Seeing my uncle and getting some help was the first nice thing that had happened in a long time. My father asked him to try to get us a permit to go and visit Beit Sahour. And he did. It was probably three months after our detention that we came back to Beit Sahour. We were very lucky, because my family had property in Beit Sahour registered in our name, so we were able to get residency IDs to live in the West Bank. Otherwise we might have spent our lives in Jordan.
“IT’S LIKE A TINY TERRORIST”
I came back to Beit Sahour in 1970, when I was in the tenth grade. Beit Sahour as a community hadn’t changed much since the occupation began in 1967. In fact, the occupation worked to strengthen the community. When you live under rules that don’t represent you, you keep your traditions as a safeguard. If you have a problem, you solve it internally instead of going to court, because you don’t trust the authorities. So, in a way, occupation actually strengthened some of the tribal aspects of our society—not just in Beit Sahour, but all of Palestine.
My father bought a knitting machine to manufacture clothes in our house. My parents would travel to Tel Aviv to sell the clothes they assembled. After some time, my dad opened a clothing shop. I think it was tiring for him and my mother. They didn’t have any weekends, because they were always in Tel Aviv buying fabric or selling clothes. Meanwhile, I registered for school in the village. That was a period when I was studying, but I was also politically active. I started inciting demonstrations against the occupation with a few others, going to gatherings, and talking politics. And the violence inside me from spending so much time in the refugee camp was still there, so I caused trouble in school. The teachers liked me because I was smart and got good grades, but at the same time they were very annoyed by the way I treated them. My friends and I played a lot of tricks on our teachers to make fun of them. A few times I locked the headmaster in his office so that he wouldn’t disrupt our demonstrations.
In 1972, my tawjihi exam year, I was arrested.7 The Israelis crashed their way into my home just after midnight and asked for me. My mother opened my room, and they looked at me. I was tiny. I was sixteen at that time, but I looked like I was fourteen, so the arresting officers didn’t believe they had the right guy. One of them said, “What’s that? It’s like a tiny terrorist.”
So I was taken and interrogated, and I spent four months in prison. I was the little kid there, and it was hard. I was a minor and I was put in jail with adults. The interrogators would beat me until I fainted. But in jail my world became much bigger. I met people from different places, from villages, from refugee camps, from cities, people with different accents, people with different cultures. Everybody took care of me. I was the little Christian. I liked the other prisoners very much, and I left prison feeling that I needed to do something for them.
