Violence

Walking through the Nablus Casbah, or Old City, was an eerie undertaking in late 2006.  The reasons for this are too complex to flesh out in a photoblog, but suffice it to say that here, in the West Bank’s largest city, six years of the second Palestinian intifada and Israel’s response—on top of four decades of abusive military occupation—had left the city tense and broken.  The years of violence made the air heavy, and the ingredients for the next storm—a shooting, a kidnapping, or a lethal military raid—could be felt on one’s skin.  One local man bemoaned that Israel had imprisoned or killed all the “clean” fighters.  Now there was no real resistance, he said, and those gun-carrying Palestinians you did see during the day were more about showing off for girls than anything.  When Israeli solders entered town, they always melted away.

This photograph, taken in the heart of the old city, shows a memorial to recent “martyrs,” including men who had been involved in terrorist operations against Israel.  An armed man initially refused my request to take a picture but then agreed, so long as he was not included in the frame.  For numerous reasons I didn’t like this memorial.  For one, the multi-dimensional humanity of the dead had, to me, been obscured by a one-dimensional glorification.

But even more I didn’t like it because it said nothing about peace, and when you are visiting a city like Nablus you yearn for things that give hope for peace, which includes (to say the least) an amount of moderation in the celebration of death, killing, and brutality.  This memorial was part of a spiral, whirling around with its counterparts on the Israeli side, driving deep into the gut of one who walks streets in both Israel and Palestine.  The acceptance and even extolling of violence plagues both communities.  The Israeli writer David Grossman, for example, recounts in his book The Yellow Wind the following conversation with a fellow Israeli in the late 1980s:

Once, when I was on reserve duty, there was a terrorist attack in the Old City in Jerusalem, near the Rockefeller Museum, and we set up a detainment area for Arab suspects in the police headquarters.  We picked up all the Arabs we caught.  We brought entire truckloads.  How I beat them that night!  There was another reservist, a young guy, with me, and I saw that every Arab he catches, he bites hard on the ear.  Actually takes a piece.  I ask him why he did it, and he answered me: “So that I’ll know them next time we meet.”

And in the Israeli paper Ha’aretz earlier this year there was an article that included this paragraph:

Dead babies, mothers weeping on their children's graves, a gun aimed at a child and bombed-out mosques—these are a few examples of the images Israel Defense Forces soldiers design these days to print on shirts they order to mark the end of training, or of field duty. The slogans accompanying the drawings are not exactly anemic either: A T-shirt for infantry snipers bears the inscription "Better use Durex," next to a picture of a dead Palestinian baby, with his weeping mother and a teddy bear beside him. A sharpshooter's T-shirt from the Givati Brigade's Shaked battalion shows a pregnant Palestinian woman with a bull's-eye superimposed on her belly, with the slogan, in English, "1 shot, 2 kills." A "graduation" shirt for those who have completed another snipers course depicts a Palestinian baby, who grows into a combative boy and then an armed adult, with the inscription, "No matter how it begins, we'll put an end to it."

If interested in the multi-dimensional, check out the film Paradise Now, which was released in 2005 and is actually set in Nablus.  Click here to see the Paradise Now trailer.

Among the many sacred sites in Jerusalem’s Old City is the Holy Sepulchre, best known as the traditional burial place of Jesus.  Here you can find pilgrims weeping, candles burning, history hovering.  And occasionally, particularly around Easter, you can even find monks and other Christians engaged in fistfights with rival factions.

Whatever one’s faith, all can agree that Jesus’ life and death shaped and continues to shape a lot of what goes on in the world, not least in the realm of literature.  One of my favorite examples is found in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, in which a visitor from outer space looks at the story of Jesus' execution and makes an observation about human nature and violence: 

The visitor from outer space made a serious study of Christianity, to learn, if he could, why Christians found it so easy to be cruel. He concluded that at least part of the trouble was slipshod storytelling in the New Testament. He supposed that the intent of the Gospels was to teach people, among other things, to be merciful, even to the lowest of the low.

But the Gospels actually taught this:

Before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn't well connected. So it goes.

The flaw in the Christ stories, said the visitor from outer space, was that Christ, who didn't look like much, was actually the Son of the Most Powerful Being of the Universe. Readers understood that, so, when they came to the crucifixion, they naturally thought, and Rosewater read out loud again:

Oh, boy -- they sure picked the wrong guy to lynch that time!

And then that thought had a brother: "There are right people to lynch." Who? People not well connected. So it goes.

The visitor from outer space made a gift to Earth of a new Gospel. In it, Jesus really was a nobody, and a pain in the neck to a lot of people with better connections than he had. He still got to say all the lovely and puzzling things he said in the other Gospels.

So the people amused themselves one day by nailing him to a cross and planting the cross in the ground. There couldn't possibly be any repercussions, the lynchers thought. The reader would have to think that, too, since the new Gospel hammered home again and again what a nobody Jesus was.

And then, just before the nobody died, the heavens opened up, and there was thunder and lightning. The voice of God came crashing down. He told the people that he was adopting the bum as his son, giving him the full powers and privileges of The Son of the Creator of the Universe throughout all eternity. God said this: From this moment on, He will punish horribly anybody who torments a bum who has no connections!

Their numbers have been small in recent years, and understandably so.  Not only does peace feel remote, but they sometimes get cursed at, spat at, or shown a variety of crude hand gestures. They are routinely called naïve and accused of being unpatriotic.  A few have even experienced the sting of rubber bullets and tear gas.

I’m describing Israelis who actively oppose their government’s actions and policies in Gaza and the West Bank.  These people were upset long before rockets began falling on Israel.  To them, it was and is no less upsetting when Palestinians are dispossessed of their land in villages like Bil’in and Ni’lin.  To them, condemnation is called for not only when Hamas perpetrates violence against Israel; it is also necessary when Israeli soldiers stage mock executions or beat civilians at checkpoints, or when Israel’s own extremist settlers terrorize and even murder Palestinians.   (And so on.)

Most of us only get indignant and angry when wrong is done to us, not when we are doing wrong to another.  People like the woman in this photo, however, are an exception.  She was one of maybe 100 Israelis demonstrating at Israel’s border with Gaza in November 2006, angry at both the blockade and Israel’s firing of missiles into the Strip.   Given the degree to which she was going against the grain of her society by simply standing with such a sign at the Gaza border, I suspect she would have resonated with the words of Oscar Romero, Archbishop of San Salvador from 1977 to 1980.  For Romero, violence wasn’t just that which caused physical harm; it was also a government’s twisting of societal structures and law so that the powerless were kept down and oppressed. He said:

I will not tire of declaring that if we really want an effective end to violence we must remove the violence that lies at the root of all violence: structural violence, social injustice, exclusion of citizens from the management of the country, repression. All this is what constitutes the primal cause, from which the rest flows naturally."

Romero was assassinated while celebrating Mass in 1980, the day after preaching a sermon in which he called upon Salvadoran soldiers to stop participating in government repression.

I received an email this morning from a Venezuelan friend who had been celebrating New Year’s Eve at a nice hotel in Panama City, Panama.  She wrote, “The dinner was great, a lot lot lot lot of food it was, but at the moment I ate my food I just can´t stop thinking about the 400 people killed in Palestina, and how it was the new year for that families. The party was awful…I just can´t imagine that the rest of the world were celebrating yesterday while a lot of moms, dads, and sons were crying about their lost in Palestina.”

She writes about a tension with which many of us are familiar.  How does one celebrate while knowing that at the same moment someone else is mourning, or living in absolute fear?

There is no space here to delve into that question.  But like her, the events in Gaza and Israel have been on my mind in recent days.  Of all the places I’ve traveled, none were as difficult as Gaza.  I thought it an often claustrophobic strip of land (at least in the cities and refugee camps) that had taken not only the lives of Gazans but also amazing (and controversial) people like Rachel Corrie—and where one afternoon, in my desire for a photograph, I had feared it might take mine as well.  I had never been to a place where even for a mere 72 hours it was so hard to stay sane.  Unless you’ve been there, you simply have no idea what it means to live in Gaza, to live in a cage.

The photograph above was taken in the West Bank town of Ramallah in late 2006.  The Palestinian boy was part of a protest against Palestinian-on-Palestinian violence, which the day before had left three Palestinian children dead in Gaza City.  Some eyes on this Earth take in an incredible amount of suffering.  They take it in, even while many of us celebrate.

Ba Chuc, a Vietnamese community in the Mekong Delta, sits just across the border from Cambodia.  In April 1978, Khmer Rouge soldiers entered the village and massacred 3,157 men, women, and children—almost the entire population.  Today the skulls of the victims are on display in this outdoor memorial.

Statistics, when referring to numbers of dead, fall flat in their attempts to convey the humanity of what has been lost.  This is because emotions are connected to people, not numbers.  Try, for example, to process this excerpt from Chris Hedges’ book War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning (2002):

Look just at the 1990s: 2 million dead in Afghanistan; 1.5 million dead in the Sudan; some 800,000 butchered in ninety days in Rwanda; a half-million dead in Angola; a quarter of a million dead in Bosnia; 200,000 dead in Guatemala; 150,000 dead in Liberia; a quarter of a million dead in Burundi; 75,000 dead in Algeria; and untold tens of thousands lost in the border conflict between Ethiopia and Eritrea,....

In Ba Chuc, I spent a good amount of time before these skulls, imagining the life that had once animated the now hollow bones.  I heard the laughter, the conversations, the sneezes, the crying...and then the sudden ending of it all.  The victims in this photo were almost all females in their late teens—girls in the process of becoming women—and more than a few of them died only after being horrifically raped (an adjacent room offered the most nauseating pictures of sexual violence I had ever seen).  And in looking into these skulls, I felt neither the sterility of statistics nor a mere twinge of sadness; I felt a palpable, riveting absence.