Grandmothers' Stories

Today we had lunch with the Grandmother of the family I am living with.  She lives just below us.  After lunch she told me a part of her story.  Her and her husband had three children, all boys, together.  He was a doctor.  One of only two in their area.  During the periods of conflict, including the 1967 war, her husband was imprisoned several times by Israel.  The charge was that as one of only two doctors in their area that he was providing medical care to wounded soldiers.  Would we expect a doctor not to treat the wounded?  While he was in prison he was tortured with electric shock and burned with cigarettes.  Their oldest son died during one of these times of imprisonment and his wife had to bear this loss alone without her husband.  He was seven years old.  The husband died at the young age of 60 which, wrong or right, the grandmother blames on the stress of imprisonment and torture.

As she finished her story she tried to communicate to me that she accepts the way her life has unfolded but that doesn't diminish the pain it has been filled with, including the current pain at the situation in which her grandchildren are being raised and in which her old friends are coming to the end of their life, not in peace.

One interesting thing about this storytelling session was that when she first spoke she said, "The Jews came and arrested my husband."  Her son corrected her and said, "Mom, don't say Jew.  They are Israelis."  I have noticed this a lot in conversations with people.  The word Israeli is always used.  Not Jew.  Perhaps this is a generational change since the grandmother initially used a religious rather than national descriptor before her son corrected her.  I see this as a recognition that their struggle is against a state and religion is not an accurate or meaningful description of the system they are struggling against.  

In other news - I attended a screening of a new film produced by the Palestinian human rights organization - Al Haq.  You can watch the trailer here.  It tells one woman's story (and she was in the audience), of the ethnic cleansing of the three Latrun villages of Beit Nouba, Imwas, and Yalo in the West Bank.  This was carried out during the 1967 war.  It was quite a horrific story of forced migration.  The woman left her disabled mother behind in their house, expecting to return to her in a few days when the army let them back in.  After living in open fields for a few days with no food to feed their children, her and her husband returned to check on her mother and harvest some food from their fields.  They found her mother's body in a field, her husband was shot and killed in front of her for returning, and she was driven off the land by the Israeli army in a truck full of other women who had returned to their homes to gather more supplies.  The villages were then completely destroyed.  Every building.  And today an Israeli-only camp called "Canada Park" has been created with funds from the Canadian Jewish Community.  There has been an attempt to erase the history of the land.  Israeli school children who visit the park are told that the remnants of foundations of old churches, mosques, and homes are from some ancient village - not Palestinians.  The refugees from these three villages remain extremely active in protesting their expulsion from their land and their denial of return.  They are afraid that their land will be permanently ceded to Israel in the event of a political agreement between the Israeli and Palestinian governments.  The film also showed the work of Israeli organizations that are trying to educate Israeli youth about the truth of Canada Park.