THE HANDSTAND

FEBRUARY 2003


Humor Under Occupation

PalestineChronicle.com

Thursday, January 23 2003 @ 12:02 AM GMT.
By Ghassan Abdallah


WEST BANK - Since the Israeli re-invasion of Palestinian cities last
April-2002 has left most of the population confined to their homes, no cases
of sunstroke were reported in the Occupied Territories despite the hot Middle
Eastern summer.

With drivers hardly ever able to reach even fourth gear thanks to
checkpoints, car accidents are way down. We also save on petrol.

Sharon is losing the demographic war with the Palestinians. What do you
expect people locked-up in their homes to do, especially when the power is
out and no TV?

Outsiders think the Israeli Merkava tank is a formidable machine. But we hear
that Israeli soldiers don’t like it. It has small openings so they cannot
steal whole computers from Palestinian homes and offices. That is why there
are so many reports of them opening up PCs and taking out only motherboards
and hard disks.

At the Surda checkpoint, on the road from Ramallah to Birzeit University and
other villages, Israeli bulldozers are always busy digging up the asphalt and
piling mounds of earth and cement blocks. Every day we find the distance to
walk becomes longer. But there are positive aspects to it. The exercise it
takes to go across is making us fit, we are using this chance to enjoy nature
and the change of seasons, and using the opportunity to meet friends and
colleagues, help the elderly and sick across, exchange the latest news and
jokes, sympathizing with those arrested by Israeli soldiers and often made to
sit on the ground tied up and waiting for ‘processing’, and putting our
remaining energy hating the occupation even more.

In spite of the terrible hardship, you still won’t find people sleeping on
pavements like in New York or London. There are still a lot of family and
neighborhood safety nets. So we guess we still have a long way ! to go before
we become an advanced society.

Ramallah is located between Tireh and Al-Bireh. Our own Tora Bora.

The other day I found, at a friends of ours, a lovely big dog with long white
hair. They named her Jessie. When asked where they got her from, they said
she ran away from Psagot, the Israeli colony (or settlement) built on a
confiscated hill overlooking Ramallah and Al-Bireh. The settlement has
multiple barbed wire fences, watch towers, an electrified perimeter, constant
guards and search lights at night. The buses traveling out, often with very
few passengers, have bullet proof glass and metal, with armored cars in front
and behind for protection. Do you blame Jessie for running away from such a
life?

Confined to their houses, Palestinian children around Psagot are excelling in
a new/old hobby: flying kites. They are becoming very good at it, flying
kites and directing them high above the Israeli settlement with pictures of
Arafat or the Palestinian flag.

The demonstrations that were taking place at night—which involved people
banging on pots and pans to challenge the curfews—were quite an event. The
practice was picked up from Argentina. The kids loved it, banging on anything
that makes a noise outside, venting their anger at the Israeli soldiers and
trying to scare the evil axe away.

In the West Bank, we always felt that the people in Gaza have a worse
existence, taking a heavier toll of casualties, with a far higher percentage
of people living below the poverty line. But, the other day, a French lady
diplomat said to us, after visiting Gaza, that people there now feel more
sorry for the people in the West Bank, because we have curfews and they
don’t.

In Ramallah, we now have no police, no prisons, no security services, no
courts, no! traffic lights or fines, etc. Yet there seems to be very little
crime according to friends and neighbors. This is primarily because there’s
not much left to steal, not that there’s anyone left to compile crime
statistics, anyway!

Old people, especially women, are more popular again. They have so much to
contribute now. Under curfew and closures, with no access to hospitals,
delivery of new babies is being done at home, without doctors. The skills of
old women are needed again as midwives. They are also digging up the old
recipes of how to make things at home: marmalade, pickles, preserving fruits
and vegetables, etc. They also help in keeping the young children happy with
old time stories. But my favorite is the following. The Israeli Occupation
forces announced recently that any car going round with men only could be
stopped and searched. A good friend of mine found an opportunity to make some
money. He is offering to rent his mother in law.

Palestinians are the highest exporters of international news per capita. Yet
we don’t get any returns from such exports, not even intellectual copyright
royalties. (MIFTAH.org)

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Sarah, the church gossip and self-appointed supervisor of the church's morals, kept sticking her nose into other people's business.  Several residents were unappreciative of her activities but feared her enough to maintain their silence.She made a mistake, however, when she accused Harvey, a new member, of being an alcoholic after she saw his pickup truck parked in front of the town's only bar one afternoon.  She commented to Harvey and others that everyone seeing it there would know that he was an alcoholic. Harvey, a man of few words, stared at her for a moment and just walked away.
He said nothing.  Later that evening, he quietly parked his pickup in front of Sarah's house---

AND HE LEFT IT THERE ALL NIGHT.