We thank all the men and women who generously and patiently shared their experiences with us, including those whom we were unable to include in this book. We also thank all the frontline human rights defenders working to promote and protect the rights and dignity of all men and women throughout Israel and Palestine. Without the cooperation of these human rights advocates, this book would not be possible.
Finally, we thank our community of educators and students who inspire our education program. With each Voice of Witness book, we create a common core–aligned curriculum that connects high school students and educators with the stories and issues presented in the book. Our education program also provides curriculum support, training, and site visits to educators in schools and invested communities.
Visit the Voice of Witness website for free lesson plans, additional interview material, and to find out how you can be part of our work: voiceofwitness.org.
mimi lok
Executive Director
& Executive Editor
Voice of Witness
MAP OF THE WEST BANK AND GAZA
ISRAELI MILITARY ROADBLOCK, WEST BANK
IBTISAM ILZGHAYYER
Director of cultural center, 54
Born in Battir, West Bank
Interviewed in Bethlehem, West Bank
During our dozen or more meetings with Ibtisam Ilzghayyer in her office, her black hair is either pulled back into a slick ponytail or falls to her shoulders in tight curls. She speaks with us in English, and she has a distinct accent influenced by her time studying at Newcastle University in northern England. When she stands, she adjusts a clamp on a knee brace in order to walk. This is due to a childhood bout with polio, which she contracted when she was two years old.
Ibtisam is the director of the Ghirass Cultural Center, which she helped found in 1994. Ghirass, which means “young trees” in Arabic, serves more than a thousand youth annually in the Bethlehem region through enrichment programs in reading, traditional Palestinian arts, and more. The center also provides literacy programs for women—generally mothers who are learning to read so that they can take a more active role in their children’s education.
The walls of Ibtisam’s office are decorated with awards and framed drawings by children who have passed through the center. Throughout her day, children stop by to share their successes—an improved test score or a list of books read during the month. Ibtisam takes time with each one to congratulate and encourage them, and to laugh with them. She spends most of her time at the center—she works five or six days a week, though she can often be found at the center on her days off as well. When she isn’t at the center, she is likely to be at home with her elderly mother, tending a large garden of fruit trees, flowers, and vegetables.
ALL MY LIFE I HAVE LIVED UNDER OCCUPATION
I was born in 1960, in Battir.1 Life in the village was simple. Most of my neighbors were farmers, and when I was a child, people from Battir would all travel into Jerusalem to sell produce in the markets there. My parents had some land that they farmed, and my father was also a chef. When I was very young, he worked at a hotel in Amman, Jordan, and we’d see him on the weekends.2 Then, after 1967, he began working as a chef at the American Colony Hotel in Jerusalem.3
My mother stayed home and raised me and my siblings—there were nine of us. We didn’t have TVs, and there were no computers of course, and no plastic toys to keep us distracted. I think we were lucky to not have those things. Instead, we used nature. We’d play in the fields, climb trees, make toys ourselves out of sticks and stones. It seemed then like there weren’t divisions then between neighbors, despite religion or other differences. We were all part of one culture in many ways. I remember my mother coloring eggs every Easter. It was something that had been passed down for generations—it wasn’t a Christian thing or a Muslim thing, it was a Palestinian thing to mark Easter that way.
I must have joined in all the games when I was very young, but then I developed a disability as an infant. When I was two and a half years old, my mother was carrying me past a clinic in town one day. A clinic nurse stopped us and told my mother she should come in, that she should get me the vaccine for polio. So I was given a vaccine. That night I had a fever, and I couldn’t move my right arm and left leg. Over the next few years, I was able to regain function of my limbs, but my left leg grew in shorter than my right. At age four, I started wearing a brace to help me walk. It was just bad luck that we walked past that clinic.
I had to get used to people treating me differently because of my disability. Even people’s facial expressions when meeting me were different—they didn’t react to me as if I were a normal child. When I was at school, I was excluded from physical education activities, and some field trips that required a lot of walking. That was really difficult.
I also had learning disabilities. My teacher beat me once in fourth grade because I was nearly failing all subjects. Education was important to my parents, so they were unhappy that I was struggling. My father had only gone through fourth grade, so he could read and write. My mother had never been to school. But they wanted more for their kids. Especially me. Because I had a disability, they wanted me to do well in school so that I’d be independent when I grew up, and not need to rely on anyone.
Then in the fifth grade, I succeeded on an exam, and the feeling was very strange. The teacher handed back the paper and said the work was “excellent.” I couldn’t believe I’d done anything that would make her say that. I couldn’t believe that it was my paper that was excellent. I thought she’d made a mistake. I think that’s common for children who aren’t used to success—they don’t realize it’s their effort that leads to excellence. They think it’s by accident. But I tasted success just that one time, and I realized I loved it. I just had to convince myself it wasn’t a mistake! Then I continued to try hard at school, and I started to realize my potential.
In 1977, I was accepted into a boarding school in Jerusalem. It was actually right next to the American Colony Hotel, so I could see my father sometimes. I’d also go home on holidays. It was still relatively easy to travel into and out of Jerusalem then.
I did well enough in high school that I got accepted into the University of Jordan in Amman.4 I started there in the fall of 1979, and I studied economics. I loved university, and I wasn’t lonely. Other than college students who became friends, I had a lot of family living and working in Amman. But I still felt homesick sometimes, and I started to understand what made Palestine feel special. In my last year at university, the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish came to read at a theater on campus.5 I got tickets to go, but when I arrived, the theater was absolutely packed. And the streets outside were full. There were so many Palestinians in Jordan, and we all wanted to hear this poet remind us what it meant to be Palestinian.
IT RAISED A LOT OF EMOTIONS FOR ME
I returned home in 1984, and I had one of the hardest years of my life. I had just spent many years working extremely hard to make something of myself, to become independent from my parents—economically, emotionally, socially—so that I wouldn’t be a burden to them. Then I returned to Palestine and found I couldn’t get a job. Because of my economics degree, I wanted to work in a bank, but there weren’t any jobs in that field available, and I couldn’t find any other sort of work. So I lived with my parents for a year and they supported me. I was very depressed during that time.
Then one day in 1985, I read a classified ad put up by the BASR.6 They were offering to train workers in a field called community-based rehabilitation, which was about helping people with disabilities overcome them by working with the family—the whole community, really—to integrate the disabled into daily life. At first, I wanted nothing to do with that sort of work. I had an economics degree, and I had spent my whole life trying to get away from any limitations imposed by my own disability. I simply didn’t want to think about disabilities. But I desperately wanted a job, so I applied.
I trained with the BASR for a year. It was hard. I worked with children who had hearing issues, blindness, mental health issues. The work brought up a lot of emotions for me, and it took some time to become comfortable around the children. But I kept receiving praise from my supervisors, and they made me feel like I was useful.
In 1986, I began working in some of the refugee camps in Bethlehem as well, and that helped open my eyes. I got to see some of the real trauma that was happening in the community. That same year, BASR opened a community center for people with mental health disabilities, and I helped to run it. It was a very busy time for me.
Then the following year, in 1987, the First Intifada began.7 I remember it started just after I got my driver’s license. I bought an old used car on November 30 of that year, and I was really proud of myself. I was starting to feel quite independent. Then I set out to drive to work for the first time on December 6, and I ended up driving through streets littered with stones and burning tires. It was the first day of the Intifada, and I couldn’t make it to work that day—there was too much happening in the streets. So I spent the day listening to the news with my family.
THINKERS BEFORE FIGHTERS
The idea of starting a community center came to me in 1990. It was the middle of the First Intifada, and the streets were dangerous places to play for children. Aside from the threat of getting caught in fighting, children were sometimes targeted by soldiers. Sometimes children threw stones at soldiers, but other times soldiers would find children simply playing traditional games with stones. Many children, even young children, were arrested by soldiers who saw them playing these games. So the idea of the center started as a way to give children a safe place to play.
Also, at that time many schools were frequently closed by military order, so children had to stay at home for long stretches of time. Sometimes the Israeli military would even use schools as checkpoints to control the area. The school in Battir was used as a military camp. These realities came together to make us want to start the center.
The BASR was able to establish the Ghirass Cultural Center in Bethlehem in late 1993, early 1994. In the West Bank at that time, the school curriculum was Jordanian. In Gaza, it was Egyptian.8 So when I went to school, I studied a Jordanian curriculum. We never studied anything about Palestine or its history. We never saw a Palestinian map. We studied the history of Jordan, of China, of Germany, of England—I remember learning about all the families who ruled England—but nothing connected to our history, nothing connected to our geography, nothing connected to our culture.
When we started the center, we wanted to educate children about Palestinian culture, Palestinian music, Palestinian poetry. We have famous poets like Mahmoud Darwish, but it was forbidden for us to read from them or read other Palestinian writers. If the Israelis caught us with a book from certain Palestinian writers, we might end up in jail. We couldn’t have Palestinian flags, political symbols, anything considered propaganda for a Palestinian state—everything could get us into trouble. My family, like most in the West Bank, had a hiding spot at home. For us, it was at the back of the cupboard. When we heard there were going to be raids on houses, we’d quickly hide our forbidden books of poetry or flags or whatever behind a false wall at the back of that cupboard.
With these restrictions in mind, one of our first goals at the center was to provide a sense of Palestinian culture to children. We wanted the center to be inclusive, so we didn’t allow any religious symbols or symbols of any specific political parties in the center. We had children from Christian communities and Muslim, urban and rural, from refugee camps and from relatively well-off neighborhoods. I also continued to work with children who had disabilities, but we integrated them with other kids in the classroom, whether they were blind or hearing impaired or had learning disabilities. They were all integrated.
After working this way in the cultural center, I even began to forget my own disability completely. I had other things to worry about or work on. One day, I saw myself in a reflection in a window while in the street, and I remembered I didn’t walk as other people do—I had simply forgotten for a time that I had any disability at all. And I was happy for myself! Overcoming my own disability was no longer my focus.
