A Minor Injury

My Balata neighbours worried about the changing weather pattern. For two winters they had seen no snow, normally a foot deep on the high ground around Nablus, and the seasonal rains had been scant. Then abruptly, in February, unnatural warmth brought lizards out of hibernation a month early and butterflies that shouldn’t appear before mid-March fluttered by and the bees acted strangely – a major concern. Honey is a reliable earner for families whose fresh fruits and vegetables are so often spoiled on the way to market by sadistic restrictions at checkpoints.

On the night of 17–18 February heavy rain delighted everyone – and undid me. Walking home next afternoon, via a short cut through an olive grove on a steep slope, I heard shrill, terrified screams. Some way below the path two boys, aged nine or ten, were frenziedly beating a third with heavy sticks – an extreme case of a sadly usual Balata phenomenon. Shouting angrily, I rushed downhill – there was no one else around – then slipped on the red-brown mud. By grabbing an olive branch I avoided falling flat but my legs splayed awkwardly and my left hip went funny-peculiar. Stumbling on, I continued to shout ‘Stop it!’ (as though they could understand English!) yet they didn’t register my presence until I seized their sticks, one in each hand, and made as if to strike them. For a moment we stood in confrontation, both boys staring at me with an almost intimidating animosity. I played an old trick – crossing my eyes – which in disparate situations on three continents has served to cow potentially troublesome children. Here too it worked. Racing away, the pair shouted ‘Fuck you!’ over their shoulders: that much English they had learned from the IDF. Meanwhile their victim lay face down in the mud, his hands over his head, still sobbing in hoarse gasps and bleeding from a deep cut on his brow. As I helped him to his feet more blood could be seen oozing from his mouth. I tried to comfort him but he seemed terrified of me and went staggering away down the slope.

Slowly I limped home, each step more painful than the last. Later, getting to the loo involved an agonising journey and for three days I had to lie immobile on my bed, being fussed over by friends which made me feel ungratefully irritated. When ill or injured I much prefer to be left alone – like a cat. My own diagnosis was a pulled thigh muscle or groin tendon, for which time would provide the only cure. But my visitors became increasingly agitated, muttering about a fractured or displaced hip and other dismal possibilities. On the fourth day two of them conspired to hire a taxi, kidnap me and present me at the Hamas clinic for an x-ray.

This impressive modern building, well-equipped and efficiently staffed, is attached to a new mosque in the city centre, one of whose imams had just been imprisoned by the PA police. The Nablus government hospitals, run by the PA since 1995, are notably less impressive. I could see at a glance that my fellow-patients were not the sort one expects to meet in a ‘private clinic’. This enterprise is one of Hamas’ non-profit-making contributions to the public welfare, probably funded by oily money but one doesn’t refer to that.

In the x-ray cubicle an elderly male radiographer briefly left me alone while fetching plates. Automatically I removed my boots, jacket and trousers and lay ready on the couch. Returning, the poor man yelped like a trodden-on puppy, then retreated, slamming the door and shouting ‘Get covered!’

In due course a tall doctor with a silver goatee beard studied the x-ray and made no diagnosis but prescribed ointment and ten capsules. He advised that after a few days I could resume walking – slowly, over short distances – without hindering the healing process. My all-in bill came to €14. In the clinic pharmacy medications cost one-third the prices charged in Nablus’s free-market pharmacies.

Back on my bed, reluctantly relaxing, I reflected that this minor injury was a small price to pay for having possibly saved a child’s life. To my visitors – bearing bowls of soup and plates of salad – I merely explained that I had slipped on the muddy slope. It would have been unkind to report that grim scene of juvenile violence. No doubt there was a back-story and the less said the better.

That evening, long after sunset, there was a brief gun-battle nearby. Twenty-seven men were arrested, six wounded – a commonplace incident, ignored by the media.

When Leila arrived, laden with desperately needed books, she told me of a Nablus collaborator who had persuaded a sixteen-year-old mentally handicapped dwarf to wear a mock suicide belt and approach Huwwara. There a European journalist, on his way back to Ramallah, witnessed the ‘terrorist’ being caught and was expected to write about Palestinians trying to use child suicide bombers – with photos to ‘prove’ it. Later an IDF jeep dumped the dwarf halfway down the Jordan Valley, far from his home. Said Leila, ‘That should help you understand why collaborators are executed.’

For non-Arabic speakers, disentangling Palestinian families can be quite a challenge, especially when polygamy, cousin marriages and overlapping generations converge. Typical were the consanguineous convolutions discussed by Amira and Maha, English-speaking widowed sisters who every day brought me sustenance. Both were in their mid-thirties and held strong views about male selfishness. Amira had two sons, Maha two daughters; their al-Aqsa Brigade husbands had died together in 2003. They were the youngest of a family of ten, plus numerous half-siblings; their father had enjoyed three wives simultaneously. In 2007 their adored mother’s death increased their vulnerability as widows. She had protected them from Basem, a bullying eldest brother (eldest by which wife?) who appropriated most of the meagre wages they earned by spooling wool for a kasbah carpet-weaver. Basem’s first wife had prudently left him before bearing a child. She was soon remarried, to a cousin of one of Basem’s maternal uncles – a man of her own choice. For this she was much admired and no doubt envied by Amira and Maha. Basem’s second and third wives bore him fourteen children, some of whom were married to some of the nine children of a half-sister (but whose half-sister?) living in a Jordan refugee camp. Another brother, trapped in Gaza since 2007, had ‘six of each’ by three (consecutive) wives, two of whom died in childbirth.

Repeatedly women assured me that Palestinians enjoy bearing and rearing all the children Allah sends and of many this is obviously true, difficult though it may be for twenty-first-century Western women to believe. Equally obviously, there are numerous exceptions, for various reasons. Strangely some of my friends became quite huffy when I referred to this. Th’aer’s daughter Habsa was an example, very unwillingly carrying her third baby, suffering night and day from misnamed ‘morning’ sickness and fearful of death. During her last accouchement doctors had twice summoned the family to her bedside to say farewell. Home in Ireland, I was relieved to hear that she had been safely delivered of a third son. And Leila, in collusion with a humane doctor, had covertly talked her into tube-tying.

Another visitor, Ryn, from Askar refugee camp a few miles away, brought me four new-laid eggs and asked if I would like to meet her one-eyed nephew who was waiting outside, holding a shouted conversation with my neighbours on the third-floor balcony. Ahmed was a small, slight twenty-five-year-old; he wore a Dayan-style eye-patch and a wide smile showing broken teeth. He had been lucky to survive the rioting that followed the assassinations, in Askar, of two Hamas leaders, Faiz al-Sadar and Hamis Abu Salam, by a unit of naval commandos. Unlike his aunt, he spoke no English but was eager to communicate with the Irish granny – though disappointed to hear that I had never met Bobby Sands.

That Askar incursion took place on 9 August 2003 when the IDF were under orders to goad Palestinians into breaking a three-month ceasefire announced on 29 June. On 12 August two maverick suicide-bombers from Askar (cousins of Ahmed) killed two Israelis though at that date all Palestinian organisations were under orders to keep the ceasefire. On 14 August the IDF killed Mohammad Sidr, an Islamic Jihad leader in Hebron; assassinations are a favourite ‘stone on the line’ when Israelis wish to derail Palestinian moves towards a just peace (as distinct from ‘peace’ on Zionist terms). Sidr’s death provoked a Hebron suicide-bomber to blow up a Jerusalem bus on 19 August, killing 20 Israelis, 6 of them children, and seriously wounding more than 100. End of ceasefire. Two days later five Israeli missiles eliminated Ismail Abu Shanab in Gaza City. Abu Shanab was among Hamas’ most thoughtful and widely respected leaders, therefore detested and feared by Sharon. He had been hoping to negotiate a fifteen-year hudna (truce); his followers were encouraged to believe that by the end of that calm period a permanent peace might be within reach.

I thought I knew my visitor well enough to ask how she felt about her two suicide-bomber nephews. And about the Hebron suicide-bomber’s victims – six children and fourteen defenceless civilians. Ryn’s usually expressive face went stony as she looked down at her suddenly clenched fists and said, ‘They weren’t always civilians.’ Ahmed, sensing the drop in temperature, looked anxiously from me to his aunt. A moment later she continued – ‘You know how many children they’ve killed? Hundreds! Not by accident …’