Kristen Ess - Bending slightly forward Um Iyad shakes her blue hijab from a roll of razor wire. Her face meets a machine gun as the Palestinian flag flying from her right hand lists. Um Iyad is trying to walk just meters from her cement block home, from one part of Umm Salamuna to another.

“It’s forbidden to move outside my door? What is this?!”

She shouts at a dozen Israeli soldiers and symbolically spits to the side. “That is on your barbed wire.”

Every week the woman, short at about five feet, demonstrates against the confiscation of Palestinian land and the imposition of the Wall. Efrat Settlement, eating territory from Hebron to Bethlehem, lies just beyond. “From the first moment that the settlement arrived 16 years ago we had trouble. And just last week the settlers were attacking. I can’t travel that way at night if I’m returning from visiting my son in prison. I get back at 8 o’clock and the settlers surely make trouble,” Um Iyad says on Friday, the sun unseasonably warm for December.

Next to her, facing a row of Israeli soldiers with clubs, machine guns and cameras “for the files” as one captain told an organizer, is Santa Claus. His red pants are also caught in the razor wire. “We are here to demonstrate against the Wall and the settlements, in protest of Israeli policy. Our goal is to help the farmers reach their land. If we are unable to do that, our goal becomes to raise attention to the closures of the roads and the confiscation of the land. I am sorry to say that the Israeli soldiers prevented me, as Santa Claus, from moving freely through Bethlehem for Christmas.”

Um Iyad is among hundreds of residents of the southern Bethlehem villages who have participated for years in the weekly demonstrations. Although the subject matter remains the same, the venue shifts slightly over time as the settlement encroaches further and the Wall route becomes more pronounced. “I have to demonstrate, what else should I be doing? If I weren’t always out here I’d just be in there watching.” She points to her house on a nearby hill spotted with green.

In a curling hat, full beard blazing, Santa tosses flavored cough drops to the little kids at the demonstration. As young as four years old, the children were some of the loudest while chanting, “The Wall must Fall,” a call for revolution, and the pro-Palestinian unity “One Nationalism.” A 15 year old boy shouts, “It’s my Land,” from a bike several years too small for him. “I’m here for the demonstration. I’m protesting the Wall, all of us are here to try to get rid of the Wall that is taking the land a step at a time and is getting closer.”

A nine year boy holds a poster on a stick of Yasser Arafat. The picture is twice the size of his upper body. “This is the martyr Abu Ammar,” he says before seconds later joining his neighbors in chanting for the late president. Mazen Al Azzeh of the Committee against the Wall takes to on a pile of white dusted stones and shouts, “We are protesting the racist Zionist movement. It is a movement that steals, that steals our children’s dreams and steals our land.”

Popular Committee against the Wall organizer Mohammad Briggia is amidst the crowd of 100. “Jesus was Palestinian and we are proud of this. This Christmas we are here to represent what is happening in Palestine from Apartheid to all the faces of occupation.” With a roll of razor wire between him and the soldiers, Briggia says, “This is our land and we want to go to our land. Why are you putting these barriers in front of us?”

Of the 15 or so journalists present with cameras, still and television, most were pushed and violated in some way. Santa says that it was mostly likely their presence and his that kept the Israeli soldiers as relatively well-behaved as they were. “It would be embarrassing for them to get really violent with Santa Claus and so many little children.” He points out, however, that several of the children were injured: “The Israeli soldiers can choose to respond to nonviolence violently or peacefully.” A Bethlehem governorate official holds his hand in a fist around a small bloody cloth. He laughs when asked about it. “This is a very minor injury. The army pushed a roll of wire into the people.”

“Even with the suffering the message to the world is Merry Christmas,” said Santa Claus. “The Israeli military must realize that it cannot suppress a movement for justice. The soldiers have to change. They have to become agents of peace instead of war and occupation.”

Placed into a pose for the cameras alongside Santa in front of razor wire and soldiers, Um Iyad says to no one in particular, “I don’t need photos like this. I need nationalism.”

Her only son has spent four years in Israeli prison. He was sentenced in a military court to 27 years. “How can I go visit him? He’s in Ramon Prison which is almost in Egypt. You see that the road is being closed from here, you know where the Wall is. It’s entirely closing us in. And Beit Fijar is closed and you can go around from Al Aroub and to Beit Ummar. And the other route is so expensive. And I need to bring him clothes and things and cigarettes.”

Iyad smokes Nobles, a young neighbor notes.

“But he can’t really smoke now anyway. He got too sick and he’s dizzy. He was just taken from Ramon Prison to Ramle Prison Hospital and then back to Ramon. His wife and daughters are with her family in Amman now. They can’t stay here. The situation is too hard.” Um Iyad counts on her fingers and her eyes come flashing out of the dull haze of sadness. “Yaffa, Haifa and Bisan. Those are their names.” Iyad’s three girls were four, three, and less than two years old when he was imprisoned.

“Yaffa, Haifa and Bisan,” Um Iyad is happy with her granddaughters, named after lost Palestinian cities. Of her son she says, “He is Abu Yaffa.”

Um Iyad continues, now walking over a dirt road. “I don’t know what to do except push for my national rights. My husband was killed, my son is in prison. We are surrounded by soldiers and the Wall, the settlements.” She points out where the Israeli bulldozers came from Etzion and destroyed Iyad’s house.

Down the road in Taqua’ Village, a military jeep menaces the town. Israeli settlers use the road that streams through the center of the Palestinian land. During a two-day curfew last month a 15 year old boy was killed. The school, tall on a hilltop, is pocked with bullet holes.

Ahmed, also 15, is as omnipresent at the weekly nonviolent demonstrations as is Um Iyad. His eyes are soft and kind, springing with life at every glance. He is Um Iyad’s neighbor. “My brothers were all in prison, all three of them. Our lives are really hard. To try to go to Bethlehem we are held for three hours at the checkpoint. It’s forbidden to get to work, it’s a hard situation.” What does the future hold for Ahmed, for Um Iyad, under an Israeli occupation that dismisses the United Nations and international law, and that remains unaccountable to humanitarian standards? “We will keep fighting,” Um Iyad says. “What else can we do?”

Comments (0)