Palestinian mothers speak about surviving the siege of Nablus
by Arlene Eisen, San Francisco Bay View
January 12, 2005

Nablus, West Bank, Palestine - At first, there is nothing in Hannah Jawan’s appearance, a self-composed mother of three teenage sons and an eight-year-old daughter, that hints at the ordeal she and her children have survived. But then, as she talks, you notice that she often smiles modestly — but only with her mouth. Her dark wide eyes seem almost fixed in terror on the image of that day in March 2002, when 200 Israeli Occupying Forces (IOF) surrounded and invaded her home, in Balata Village on the outskirts of Nablus.

Although it is nearly three years later, she tells the story of that day in detail — as if it happened yesterday. Only her 15-year-old son, Abdullah, was home when the Israeli soldiers invaded the courtyard and demanded he unlock the door to the room where he was cowering.

Abdullah, like all Palestinian children, knew that Israeli soldiers might kill or wound him without warning or reason. The Palestine Red Crescent Society reports that between March 2002 and December 2004, the IOF has killed 298 and injured 1,596 Palestinians in Nablus alone.

Abdullah was paralyzed with fear. He urinated on himself, but did not open the door. The soldiers blasted their way into the room.

By then, with soldiers blocking her entry, Hannah was standing outside yelling to her son. When she heard the explosion, she was sure her son was dead. But she could not go to him.

In fact, he was not hurt by the explosion. But when the soldiers entered the room, they rammed a rifle butt into his stomach and demanded to know if he was a member of Fateh or Hamas and if he was hiding weapons in the house. Abdullah could not stand for three days.

Meanwhile, from 3 p.m. to 11 p.m., the soldiers ransacked Hannah’s home, breaking windows, furniture, walls and appliances, while they forced her to stand outside. She didn’t know that Abdullah was alive.

“I felt like I would lose my mind. For hours, I didn’t know what happened to my child. I could see nothing. There was no electricity. Just the sound of them destroying my home. Then, suddenly, it was quiet. I thought the soldiers might have left through the back of the house. But I wasn’t sure. There were rockets on the ground. I saw a woman die when one exploded in front of her. I called my son’s name.”

Hannah fights back tears as she finishes her story. “’Mama, I’m here,’ Abdullah whispered as he crawled to me. The other children thought their brother was dead. We all went to my father’s house, since our house was no longer suitable for living. During that time, they damaged a lot of houses. For six weeks, 35 of us lived in one house while we repaired the others.”

But, nearly three years later, the emotional wreckage of the invasion lingers. For months, even her 18-year-old would cling to her if she left the room to cook or get water. Hannah herself would “go crazy if one of her kids left her for more than a few minutes.” She still insists on sitting facing the window or door to be sure she is the first to see approaching soldiers.

Today, Hannah says with some wonder and pride, “This is the “first time I’ve told the story of that day without crying.” She nods in the direction of Nadia, the program coordinator at the Palestinian Counseling Center. “Without Nadia, me and my family could not have faced and overcome this horror.”

Palestinian Counseling Center and Self Empowerment

Nadia is also from Nablus and began to work with the Palestinian Counseling Center (PCC) as a volunteer when it first opened an office in Nablus in 2001 — just a few months before Israel occupied Nablus and began the encirclement and siege against the city that continues to this day.

For nearly three years, the 205,000 people who reside in Nablus and its immediate environs have been subject to the daily trauma of death, injury, home demolition and invasion, closure of schools and hospitals, strangulation of their economy and the routine humiliation and arbitrary closure of checkpoints that connect them to family, friends, work, school, hospital and market.

For them, therapy for “post-traumatic stress” makes little sense. The “stress” is on-going. For therapy to be relevant, it must put people in touch with their own inner strength and resilience. Therefore, the PCC’s mission is to “promote their well-being through social, psychological and mental empowerment.”

The PCC was founded in 1983 in Jerusalem by community activists, psychologists and educators and, in the last 20 years, has spread to 12 cities and towns in the West Bank. All its services and activities are free.

Specifically, in the context of Nablus and the invasions of Balata Camp and other refugee camps, the PCC has linked individual counseling and support groups to a project of community organizing. Yes, Hannah, her children and many others who have endured similar or worse trauma, attend individual counseling sessions and group therapy sessions where they learn they are not alone. At the same time, she and her children can now take advantage of a more supportive social environment created by the PCC Women’s Community Organizing Project.

In 2002, Nadia met regularly with a group of 21 women from Balata Village. They ranged in age from 25 to 50; most were mothers of many children. Two in the group were teachers.

Before planning a leadership training course for them, she spent weeks questioning them about their needs. With the understanding she gained from this preparation, Nadia implemented a 45-hour training program that gave the women practice in how to speak in public in the village, how to make people respect them, how to approach officials for the things they need, how to build trust among themselves, how to plan strategically and to solve problems as they came up.

After a month, they decided to start their campaign to open a women’s center in Balata village — a place where women could get information on how to help their children who had been traumatized by the occupation.

Nadia explains, “The women were not interested in ‘resilience training.’ They wanted to know how to help their kids who were wetting their beds and afraid to go to school because of the brutality of the Israeli occupying forces.

“At the Women’s Center, we teach each other how to talk to each other and to our kids about the most painful things. This talk takes away some of the pain and power that the occupation has over our lives.

“On many levels, the Israeli occupation makes it impossible for parents to control their lives enough to protect their children. Curfews, checkpoints, roadblocks, the apartheid wall are all designed to isolate people, make them feel powerless.

“As of 2003, Israeli F16s and Apache gunships, tanks and hummers that have continued to attack Nablus destroyed 200 factories, 300 homes and left 186,000 municipal records in ashes. Israeli soldiers drive their armored vehicles through the streets of Nablus with loudspeakers yelling in Arabic, “We are stronger than you. You are weak. You are alone, and no one is going to help you.

“The Women’s Center is building a social and emotional bridge to overcome that isolation and powerlessness.”

Nadia’s own pain was evident when she reported, “Our kids spend all their time inside houses, since it is not safe outside. Women too suffer inside when their kids are inside, frustrated and angry all the time. My own son, who is 16, told me, ‘Mama, I feel I am not a human being. We only eat and sleep and study.’”

Last summer, the PCC organized a summer camp for more than 100 kids. For 15 days, the kids participated in art, sports, human rights education sessions and some field trips to a local swimming pool.

“After weeks of negotiation with the Israeli authorities, they were able to organize one field trip past the Hawara Checkpoint that controls all southbound movement out of Nablus. It took three and a half hours to get past the checkpoint, but 350 kids were able to attend a musical performance in Ramallah. They sang the whole way home — including the hours they had to wait at the checkpoint to return to their village.”

I asked Nadia about how parents can teach children their rights and, at the same time, prevent them from taking futile, even fatal, risks by challenging soldiers. “The kids are always asking, ‘Why do they treat us so bad?’ So we teach them about the land, why Israel wants our land and how they design the occupation to be so cruel to make us give up our land.

“But there’s a lot more work to do on this. At first, the Israelis still occupied our minds. The Palestine Authority (PA) controls the school curriculum, but when Israel puts pressure on the PA, the PA often gives in.

“Our human rights education — both formal and informal — teaches the children that they have the right to live, to learn, to eat, to play and to express themselves. If soldiers mistreat them, it is not their fault.

“We also teach kids to make petitions to the Palestine Authority and how to organize conferences,” Nadia adds. “But we can’t just teach kids about their rights. We must teach the parents and teachers too.

"I try to teach my kids, to be strong is better than to be weak. When you are strong, Israeli soldiers respect you more — when they know you know your rights ….

“Unfortunately, not all repression comes from Israeli soldiers. I also teach my daughter that she has the right to speak up to her teacher, to question her math teacher when she does not understand.”

The women of the Balata Village Women’s Center, encouraged by their initial successes, have plans to set up a library, a women’s health center, a children’s garden — even a swimming pool. But Hannah still struggles to be hopeful about the future.

“We used to plan,” she recalls. “My husband and I thought the kids would be engineers, attorneys. Now, planning is impossible. I don’t want my kids to be fighters. My oldest son wants to be a peace educator. When he tells people about what happened to his family and sees they support us, he feels happy. He wants to speak out more. One day he laughs; 100 days he cries.”

Despite Israel’s declared commitment not to interfere in free elections in Palestine, Nablus remains under siege. On all roads leading to and from Nablus, Israeli soldiers at checkpoints prevent anyone who is not from Nablus from entering and anyone without authorization from leaving.

Since I recorded these interviews in late November, Israeli soldiers have assassinated six more residents of Nablus and destroyed many more homes and shops. People remain under curfew. Prior to Sunday’s election, campaign rallies were banned.