11 For more on the tunnel economy in Gaza, see Appendix IV, page 321.
SILWAN, EAST JERUSALEM
AHMAD AL-QARAEEN
Shop owner, 43
Born in Silwan, East Jerusalem
Interviewed in Silwan, East Jerusalem
After the Arab-Israeli War in 1948, Israel took possession of Jerusalem’s mostly Jewish western half, while Jordan administered the mostly Arab eastern half, which included the Old City of Jerusalem, the hill that houses the Temple Mount (the holiest site in Judaism, where the Second Temple was located), and the Al-Aqsa Mosque (one of the holiest sites in Islam, where, according to the Quran, the Prophet Mohammed was miraculously conveyed from Mecca to pass along the word of Allah). In 1967, during the Six-Day War, Israel took possession of East Jerusalem along with the rest of the West Bank. In 1980, Israel declared the whole of Jerusalem the undivided capital of Israel, while the Palestine Liberation Organization, led by Yasser Arafat, maintained that the city was the capital of Palestine.
The East Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan has over 30,000 residents and sits in the shadow of the Temple Mount and Al-Aqsa Mosque to its north. Numerous archaeological excavations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have provided evidence that Silwan was the original Bronze Age site of the city that would become Jerusalem. Though the majority of the population is still Arab, since the 1980s, hundreds of Jewish settler families have moved into the area, and the tension between settlers and Arabs often boils over into violence.
The first time we walk through Silwan in 2012, a playground and a community center have just been demolished by the Jerusalem police and Israel’s National Parks Authority. A few dozen frustrated children play in the rubble where the playground was. Some are chucking onions at each other, and onion skin floats through the air like snow. The community center was razed to make room for a new visitor center for the City of David National Park, a massive archaeological museum and dig site that is privately operated by Elad, an East Jerusalem settler organization.
We then visit the nearby Wadi Hilweh Information Center and inquire about people who might be willing to share their stories. There, we meet Ahmad Al-Qaraeen, who is showing a video about Silwan’s troubles to a group of tourists.
Ahmad is ruggedly handsome, with light eyes and a scruffy voice. He begins telling us the story of why he walks with a cane, and we sit with him for a couple of hours before making a date to come back. Over the course of half a dozen meetings, Ahmad tells us of his sense of connection to the neighborhood and the problems he has struggled to overcome since being shot twice outside his home by a settler in 2009.
ALL OF MY DREAMS START FROM HERE
I was born here in Silwan in 1971. All my family was born here—my father, my father’s father’s father’s father, as far back as I know. Silwan, it’s part of my life. I am part of Silwan. All of my dreams start from here. I’ve only left Silwan one or two times in my life. My neighborhood, my friends, everything here is made for me.
I was working in the streets here by the time I was six, seven years old. I’ve learned everything from these streets. So much of the community was supported by tourism when I was young. My parents and neighbors worked in coffee shops, restaurants, and as guides. When I was a child, I sold souvenirs, cold drinks, and ice cream to tourists. I learned English before I even started school. I spent a lot of time at the Silwan pool.1 I’d sell things to tourists in the parking lot there, and I’d help give little tours when I was twelve or so, just showing people around and talking about the history of the place. I knew it well—I could walk from end to end in the dark at night, without a flashlight.
For me, things began to change at the time of the First Intifada in 1987, when I was seventeen.2 My school was closed during the fighting. It was closed for more than a year, and I never went back. Instead, I started to work. I got a job working in a factory shaping metal. I did that for two years. One day I asked my boss, “What is the metal from this order going to build?” He said, “It’s for the Israeli tanks and airplanes.” I had no idea we were doing that, and so I quit.
Around 1991, after the whole world started to talk about peace and the end of the Intifada, things really started to change in my neighborhood. Jewish settlers were moving in. There were police everywhere then, and private security as well to protect the new settlers.3
One day a group of settlers approached my father and tried to get him to sell our house. They said, “Put whatever figure you want on this check, and that’s what we’ll buy it for.” But my father wouldn’t sell—he helped build the house himself when he was just a teenager in the 1940s. Settlers tried the same with other houses in my neighborhood, and they got maybe a few houses that way. In other cases, they’d try to forge papers that were supposed to show that the house had already been sold generations ago, way back in the 1930s. And the more settlers moved in, the more things changed. Suddenly, there were private security guards with big guns at the Silwan pool, and they’d charge visitors money. When my neighbors and I would try to go there, they’d say, “Palestinians aren’t allowed.”
During this time, I worked installing carpeting. And after that I started to work for a furniture company, assembling furniture, and then I became a truck driver. Around 1998, when I was twenty-seven, I got married. My wife’s father is my father’s cousin, so she was my second cousin. She was seventeen at the time, and after she finished school, I helped her pay for university for six years. We had two sons a year apart, Ali and Wadee, in 1998 and 1999. Around this time I also bought a truck for myself, and I started my own business as a mover. I worked for Palestinians, for Jewish people, for everyone. In a month I was making 7,000 or 8,000 shekels—enough for my family.4 For many years, life was good.
YOU SENSE THE SMOKE INSIDE YOU
My story, it’s one of thousands of similar stories. I don’t like to talk about it, but I have to talk about it. I want people to know what happened to me.
It was September 11, 2009, maybe five-thirty, six in the evening—it was a little before sunset. It was Ramadan, and I was dozing at home, waiting for the sun to go down so that my family could break fast for the day.5 Suddenly, I heard some people shouting outside, so I went to see what it was about. In the street, dozens of people were shouting at a few private Israeli security guards and a couple of settlers. I asked someone, “Why are you shouting?” And he said, “These two settlers were hitting children in the street, and we’re demanding that the security guards get these settlers out of here.” I don’t think anyone wanted trouble though, since it was Ramadan. It wasn’t time for fighting.
My own children were out on the streets at the time, and they were only nine and ten, so I was worried about them. I began to look for them to get them into the house. I also kept my eye on the settlers. They were young, maybe in their early twenties, and dressed in street clothes. They were shouting and pushing at a group of children in the street. Suddenly, I saw one of the settlers put an M-16 in the air. Then he pointed his gun, and I saw that he was aiming at a child. And then I realized the child was my son Ali. At the same time, I saw my son Wadee getting hit by the other settler. I was horrified, and realized my neighbors were shouting about my own sons being attacked by the settlers.
I moved toward the settler with the gun and demanded, “Why are you doing this?” He turned to me and said that he could do what he liked. He started to walk away, and I said, “Wait, I want to talk to you. I know you can do this, but why?” He said, “No, you will not touch me.” I said, “I want to talk to you—if we do something wrong to you, you can call your security guys. You can call the policeman to come to help you. But I will not allow you to touch my son.” As I spoke, the settler was backing away and looking at me and my son, and suddenly, he stumbled backward onto the ground. The other settler yelled, “You have to shoot.” So the settler who had stumbled stood up and fired. The people in the crowd started shouting, and I fell down.
I felt like someone had stabbed me with a knife. When you get shot, you sense the smoke inside you. I felt it, and I smelled it in my body. I could taste the bullet in my blood. I saw my right leg was bleeding, and it was twisted beneath me. The bullet was in the thigh.
The people in the crowd asked me where I’d been hit. I said, “I don’t know exactly, don’t touch me.” My two sons ran to my side and asked why it had happened. I was sitting on the ground. I couldn’t feel my leg. I started to ask for an ambulance.
I heard the people shouting, and then I heard another shot. The man who shot me had shot another boy in the crowd who was on a bicycle. The boy was about fifteen. Then the man came back and he shot me a second time, this time in the left knee. Why, I don’t know. Even the Israeli security guards asked him, “Why are you shooting?” But after that, the shooter and his friend just ran away.
Some people in the crowd called for the ambulance to come and help me. I was bleeding on the street for five minutes. A neighbor brought over some towels, and she packed them on my leg, while a man tied them with a belt to try to stop the blood. They told me, “Someone with a car wants to take you to the hospital.” We didn’t think an ambulance was going to come any time soon.
They took me and put me in the car. I saw that the boy from the bicycle was already in the car. The man and woman lifted me up under my arms. I felt as though my leg had stayed behind in the street. I told them, “Wait, wait!” I couldn’t move my muscles, so I had to lift my leg by the pants and put it in the car. I still couldn’t feel it. It was not mine. After that I sat in the car, bleeding. The blood soaked my T-shirt, my shoes, everything in the car.
Then we took off, but on the way to the hospital, the car was stopped twice by Israeli police, and the driver was almost arrested. It was a Friday, and he was probably the only Muslim driving that day, since it’s prohibited on Fridays during Ramadan. Once the police realized the situation, they let us go, but they followed us to the hospital.
At the hospital, while the doctor was checking me, a policeman came. He told the doctor, “You have to leave now. You can check on the boy who came in with him, but I want to ask this man some questions.” So he interrogated me about the incident, even as I was bleeding.
After I was questioned, my wife showed up. She said that my family, my cousins, they thought that I had died. They were already discussing the funeral.
The doctors got me ready for surgery, and then I was on the operating table for five hours. I later learned that they’d told my wife, “Maybe he has a chance, maybe not.” I’d lost eight units of blood and I was very weak.
Later, my sons showed up at the hospital. They looked so sad, and they just said, “We’re sorry.” I asked them why, and I learned that they’d been interrogated by the police. The police had told them that they provoked the fight with the settlers, and that they were responsible for me getting shot. I told them, “No, no, no, don’t think about that. It’s not your fault.” But even now, they believe that if they hadn’t gone out in the streets, I wouldn’t have been shot. They still feel guilty.
The police wanted to charge me with assaulting a soldier. The settler who’d shot me was in the Israeli military, but he hadn’t been wearing his uniform that day. But luckily, someone in the crowd had taken photos of everything that happened, so it was easy to prove that I hadn’t physically attacked the settler in any way.
MY SONS NEED MORE FROM ME
Three months after the operation, I went to get a checkup, and my leg still wasn’t healing. They performed another surgery to clean out fragments and repair the bone. I stayed at home in a wheelchair for eight months after the shooting. Then I started walking again with a walker. After the first year at home, I started to have more pain, and it turns out I needed even more surgeries. Eventually, I replaced the walker with a cane.
All of this has changed my life. As a truck driver, part of my job was to move furniture. Also, I would help my family, help out around the neighborhood, play soccer—I can’t do any of those things anymore. I have had five surgeries so far. I have two more scheduled. And I have pain whenever I try to do anything physical, even something simple, like helping my son fix his bike. I just can’t do it.
For my older son, Ali, the disaster has changed everything in his life. After he was attacked and he saw me get shot, he started to feel like his father couldn’t protect him. And when he saw that his father couldn’t protect him, he wanted to protect himself. Now, if someone starts picking on him or says something nasty, my son fights with him. These last two years, I’ve had him in three different schools because of his fighting. Before the shooting, he didn’t have any problems in school. Both boys are fighting in school, with other children and with the teachers. And they get angry at the settlers. My sons, they need more from me. As their father, I cannot help them.
One day at home, my sons came to me and said, “Dad, we saw the settler who shot you.” I told them, “No, no, he’s in jail.” I was lying to them. I’d learned that he only spent a day in jail before he was released. They said, “No, we remember him, we saw him.” The truth is that the guy who shot me was taken by the police, but he was only questioned for a couple of hours and stayed in jail for twenty-four hours. They picked him up that night. It was Friday when he shot me. Friday night there’s no court, and Saturday during the day there’s no court, so Saturday evening he went to court and he said that he was defending himself. That was it. They closed the file.
