I suppose that today the source of my meditations stems from the fact that it is my birthday. A birthday spent under military curfew, listening to gunfire, and rationing food and water. A birthday in Palestine.

As the news of another suicide bomber filled the air waves, I felt a growing sense of rage at the reporters who claimed that this attack shattered a period of "relative calm". While Israelis may have been going about their daily lives, enjoying the High Holy Days of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza have continued to suffer the most brutal and unjust form of occupation. Since the beginning of the new school year in late August, thousands of Palestinian students have been forced to spend more days at home under curfew than studying in their classrooms. In Nablus, one of the most besieged cities in the West Bank, which has been under curfew for over 80 days, students have not been allowed to attend school for even a day. Not one day.

The economic, social, and political stranglehold over Ramallah continues to deepen every day. With the majority of economic activity suspended due to the extended curfews, poverty continues to rise unabated. Curfews mean that no one can go to work, to school, to the doctor, to visit family or friends--unless, of course, they take the chance and break curfew--something that many people, myself included, frequently attempt. What other choice do we have? The choice is between remaining caged in our homes like dangerous animals or trying to carry on with life as best as we can. We chose life.

But to choose life in Palestine comes with risks, often life-threatening ones. On Tuesday, I was in Jerusalem and going back home to Ramallah when I got a phone call informing me that shooting had broken out in the centre of town--Al Manara--and also near my house in Al Bireh. After crossing the hateful Qualadiya checkpoint, I got into a taxi for the ride up to Ramallah, which by now was under military curfew. Instead of taking an alternative route, the driver decided to head up the main road, passing Al Amaari refugee camp. As we neared the camp an Israeli tank appeared on the horizon. Quickly the driver turned down another road that would take us part way around the camp. As we emerged back onto the main road we found ourselves caught between three tanks. The driver quickly stepped on the accelerator in an attempt to get out of the area. Just as we drove behind one of the tanks, the vans engine died. And at that moment, one of the tanks started to reverse right into us. All the while, soldiers where shooting live ammunition at young children who where throwing stones. For a moment, it seemed like the scene out of one of those old black and white movies--the kind where the car gets stuck on the railroad tracks just as the train is rapidly approaching. But this was no movie--it was very real. By some miracle, the driver got the van's engine started again just as the tank was inches from hitting us. We quickly sped off, looking back at the mayhem that the soldiers with their American-made tanks and machine guns were causing in the refugee camp.

Relating this story to a friend later in the evening, the response was "Well, I suppose that's a typical day in Palestine. At least you are alive!" Indeed I am. Alive to celebrate my anniversary with life in Palestine.

Celebrating one's anniversary with life against the backdrop of death would, I suppose, make anyone stop to contemplate such a paradox. But then life seems to be filled with such contradictions these days. While the regime of George Bush & Co. screams about the crimes committed by Saddam Hussein, a much more dangerous man is on the loose in the Middle East: Ariel Sharon. A man who authorized the murder of over 800 Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon. A man who has encouraged the massacre of Palestinians throughout the West Bank and Gaza since his ascent to power last year. A man who possesses nuclear weapons and who would not think twice about using them. A man who has laid out plans for the violent expulsion of all Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza. Why isn't the world on a crusade to stop this man before all traces of Palestine and the Palestinian people are erased? Or does the world only go after dictators who don't support American economic interests?

Life takes on a whole new meaning in Palestine. What many people take for granted--the right to work, the right to an education, the right to food, clean water and medical care--often becomes a matter of daily survival here. What many people consider the basics of life have become the essence of life in Palestine.

And so it has become a day of being grateful for those basics of life. Of sharing in the struggles, the hopes and the fears with my Palestinian family and friends.

Of celebrating what we still have and not all that we have lost. Of celebrating my anniversary with life in a country that continues to defy death.

Life in Palestine

Lucy Mair, writing from Jerusalem

12 February 2003

How do I describe what life is like here - of the sadness in the eyes of my colleagues, of the exhaustion that results when every daily action requires an extraordinary effort, when perseverance is no longer enough and futility and despair fight for a place on the proud faces carrying bags and babies and the burden of poverty through checkpoints, over dirt piles, past soldiers and tanks and the bombed-out shells of buildings. On rainy days the muddy water swells around the feet, slowing passage. The soldiers stand in shelters and never seem to get wet under their helmets and uniforms and weapons, protected by arrogance and hatred and a state and an army and the world's superpower. They pull people out of the battered Ford Transit vehicles that always seem to drive too fast to make up for lost time, jostling the school children and old men and mothers who ride in them, if they can afford the 3 shekel fare and if they are not males between the ages of 18 and 35 and if they have permission to enter Jerusalem and if there is no curfew or closure. The soldiers line them up, face to the wall, make them sit in the dirt, or stand in the rain or the scorching sun for minutes or hours while they chat on their mobile to friends, joke with their friends, eat, smoke, laugh, abuse, with words and with actions.

How do I explain that when the wind blows it does not bring respite from the heat, but rather fills the mouth and the nose with grit, ripe with the smell of sewage and garbage and exhaust fumes. An Israeli woman asks "Why don't they clean up their streets?" "Why do they live like animals?" And the children play in the refuse that can never be collected in villages and towns and cities which remain for hours and days and weeks and months under crippling curfews. Curfews which are enforced with a shoot-to-kill policy. Curfews which are not lifted during school hours. Curfews which prevent pregnant women from giving birth in hospitals, which stop ambulances in their tracks, which forced a Bethlehem family to live with the decaying corpse of their family member for days.

How can I express the feeling of death that lurks around every corner - of the children shot on their way home from school, of the old woman killed while sitting on her porch, of the people in Gaza killed in their homes when the bomb was dropped on their apartment building, of the refugees killed in their homes in Jenin when the tanks and the bulldozers ate up their camp, razing houses on top of their inhabitants, of people killed in taxis and on sidewalks when the Israelis carry out "preventive pinpointed killings".

How do I tell the story of refugees made homeless for the 3rd or 4th time, of the woman who throws up her hands, in the middle of her house, with the gaping holes from the bulldozers in the wall, and the windows shot out by snipers, and the rooms filled with the debris of a family's life, and begs me to tell the people of the US to please make it stop, this terrible nightmare. And wipes away my tears which I am ashamed to shed, and hugs me and gives me some of the precious drinking water that is so hard to come by in Rafah these days since the wells have been destroyed. And the people next door who invite us in for coffee, while sewage washes past the steps of their battered home which is sure to be demolished, standing as it is on the front line of Rafah, empty land where the next row of houses once stood. And the farmers chased from their olive trees by armed settlers and the people in Hebron who live with sandbags blocking their windows because the settlers have shot the glass out so many times, and my colleague who only sees his 4 adoring children, once a week, because the closures make the distance between his home and his work, just 30 KM apart, a 4 hour journey.

How can I show the faces behind the statistics - 70% unemployment, 75% poverty, 13% malnutrition in children under five. The number of dead, and injured, and blinded, and handicapped, in wheelchairs, and hospital beds and orphaned and homeless. The children that play funeral in the schoolyard, or ambulance stopped at the checkpoint, or soldier abusing passers-by. The number of school days missed and the number of schools invaded and closed and the number of teachers who can't get to work and the number of students who can't afford to return to university. And the number of people in administrative detention, held without charge, without trial, without lawyers, without family visits, in tents without adequate food and water and sanitation and protection from the elements. And the number of trees uprooted, and dunums of land raised and kilometers of bypass roads built and wells destroyed. And of the courage and the dignity and the determination and the family who rebuild their house again and again, each time it is demolished. And of the fear and the loss and the humiliation and the despair that has robbed even the living of their lives.