Hizma, Qalandiya

The years gone by and the hurled Molotov cocktails and the burning tires rolled towards the ‘pillbox’ (army post) next to which appears Yasser Arafat’s portrait have eroded the graffiti on the Qalandiya wall and darkened the leader’s face to near invisibility.

So a few days ago, young men and women came along and perpetuated once more the face of the Palestinian people’s father.

Older, more worried, but perhaps he will last longer here.

**

“Now they’re not doing anything, but at night, every night they throw a lot of teargas inside the village” answered a Hizma resident to my question: “What are they (the soldiers) doing here?”

So I asked Or, the commander, who answered: “Inspections”.

As we know, inspections is a code word for activity that is done in order to sow fear in human beings. A sort of terrorism.

And I asked about the nightly teargas, Or said that “on a daily basis, stones are thrown from this village at the thoroughfares. So we carry out inspections.”

• No equation holds those whose lands have been confiscated, and a wall has separated them from East Jerusalem – the former hub of their lives – and their livelihood has been impacted “on a daily basis”, and they in their desperation throw stones at the cars of the settlers who enjoy all the cream of the land that has been robbed from its inhabitants – and those armed men who invade their village nightly and harass them and arrest them and fill with teargas their very own public and private space.