a land without a people

Where were they, the Palestinians?

In front of the school, there were no children. In the roads, there were no gel-haired youth. I had read that most women in the Middle East stay indoors for a plethora of reasons, so the absence of women on the street didn’t feel uncanny.

Still, I was wondering, where were they, these people who have famously high birthrates? Have they been so effectively scattered that none have remained?

We had seen red-roofed settlements on our way here. We’d seen Israeli Arabic-Hebrew roadsigns. We’d yielded to let cars of bearded yarmulke-wearing settlers drive past. We’d paused at the wave of an awfully young Israeli soldier at a checkpoint.

Israelis were here. Illegally here, but here all the same.  So where in the world were the Palestinians?

Beit Haneena was our first Arab-majority stop, and it sure made me stop.

The village felt uninhabited, forlorn, eerie. The metal doors on most of the storefronts were jammed shut. It was quiet –uncomfortably so, and so dark at night that there were no shadows.

This village, like countless others, I was told, had become so suffocated that the majority of its population lived elsewhere — in the US and Europe. As many as 90% of Beit Haneena’s residents annually commute from the global village to their little own.

Sure, I was disappointed in Beit Haneena but, in a way,  I was looking for a giant in elf’s shoes.

Beit Haneena is and has long been an agrarian village. Sure, in her blossoming days, she had a bigger wardrobe and more admirers, but notwithstanding her stunted growth, I suspect she fares well next to other crippled villages.

Plus, we had arrived ‘al-asriyah, in the late afternoon, at a time when dinner aromas regularly seduce families indoors. That evening, a score of N’s family and friends were assembled around a tray of ma’loubeh and, the next morning, I was comforted to see schoolchildren snickering and gossiping and running around in starched-and-pressed teal uniforms in the yard.

Still, nothing quieted my worry quite like visiting Ramallah the next day. Yes, I told myself, the Ramallah of Mourid and Mustafa Barghouti. The Ramallah of Al Jazeera. The Ramallah.

In what I perceived to be the city center was a rotunda. High on pedestals, half a dozen lions oversaw the streets radiating out. But, I reflected, if lions are still the noble, dignified creatures they were once reputed to be, they weren’t standing at the rotunda.

The lions were alive, of flesh and blood. When they had stepped off those pedestals, they’d left stone figures in their wake. Among these people wrapped in demure coats, with well-groomed manes were lions with spirits untamed.  Though they’d been caged, forbidden from roaming the pride lands of their fathers, made to jump through flaming hoops and whipped right and left, they remained dignified.

That unwillingness to settle, that sense of our own intrinsic value, that awareness of our humanity — that is what enables us to endure oppressive regimes and, ultimately, to overthrow them.