Wounded in Hebron

In Hebron a schoolgirl dreamt once of being a dancer. She doesn't know her dreams now. She is not alone. Graham Usher reports from Hebron
Sawsan Abu Turki is a 14-year-old girl from Abu Sneineh, a neighbourhood of 40,000 people in the "Palestinian" part of Hebron. On 6 September, as she did every morning, she packed her books and lunch-box to go to school. "But she never went to school," says her mother, Fatma.
She went instead to get a knife. She then approached the nearest Israeli army checkpoint and tried to stab a soldier. "I don't know where she got the knife," says her mother.
We are listening to Fatma on 6 October, the second day of the Israeli army's reoccupation of Abu Sneineh. During the previous 24 hours around 30 Israeli tanks and armoured cars had invaded the hillside, killed six Palestinians, wounded 50, closed down 10 Palestinian schools and evicted 22 Palestinian families from their homes.
Over the following week six more Palestinians were shot dead, seven more Palestinian homes were commandeered and three of the schools converted into military outposts to house the tanks. On 15 October the army withdrew, under duress from the Americans and with a vow from the Palestinian Authority to prevent all Palestinian shooting from the hillside. So far the vow has been kept.
Sawsan was not in Abu Sneineh at the time of the invasion. She was spending her fifth day in an isolation cell in Ramle prison in Israel.
She had been arrested after the stabbing. She confessed to the attack in a statement written in Hebrew, "a language she does not understand," notes her social worker Riad Arar.
Together with all other Palestinian female political detainees in Ramle, she had been placed in isolation after guards had violently broken a prisoner hunger strike on 1 October. For two nights she had slept chained to her bed.
Her lawyer describes a "drastic deterioration" in her mental health. For example, she is no longer sure of her identity. Asked her name by the guards, she looks at tags tied to her handcuffs. "Wounded," she replies. She is due to be sentenced any day now.
"I don't know what she'll get," says Arar. "In any normal country governed by international law Sawsan shouldn't be in jail at all. She is under 18, legally a minor and not responsible for her actions. In her case it's even worse as she has a history of psychological problems. But we don't live in a normal country. We live under a military occupation that currently holds 160 Palestinian children in its jails."
Why did she stab the soldier? For the Israelis the answers are simple. Sawsan is one of thousands of Palestinian children cynically used by their leaders to take on the army and die to generate international sympathy for the national cause. Or they have become so indoctrinated by the Islamists of Hamas and Islamic Jihad that they seek to become "martyrs." Or Palestinian and Arab families in general are "culturally" undisciplined and allow their children to run amok.
Fatma and Arar posit more fundamental causes. The "violence" of Palestinian children is explained by the violence of the Israeli occupation, they concur.
Sawsan has lived all her life in a city partitioned by Israeli soldiers, there to secure by military might the political presence of 400 or so Jewish settlers, who roam freely and are armed to the teeth amid a native Palestinian population of 120,000. In 1998, she had lost her best friend to the bullets of the occupation. In July this year she became a victim herself.
She had gone to a local hospital to help an older sister have a child. Tired after the night's labour she decided to skip the long Palestinian route to her home and use instead the shorter way across Israeli controlled Hebron. She passed two army checkpoints without problems but was stopped at the third.
According to Palestinian eyewitnesses, an altercation ensued and the soldiers beat her, one landing a particularly hefty blow to her head. She spent the next three days in hospital, suffering from concussion. When she regained consciousness, her eyes would not focus properly.
"This frightened her a lot," recalls her mother. "She thought she would be permanently blind. 'I can't see my fingers,' she would say, over and over."
The assault manifested itself in other ways, too. She became alternately depressed and aggressive to other members of her family. She refused to participate in family events like weddings. There were other, more ominous symptoms. "On the days before the stabbing she bought her sisters paints and her brothers clothes," recalls Fatma. 'This is to remember me when I'm dead,' she told them."
Did she intend to kill the soldier? Arar smiles. "Look, armed only with a knife she goes up to a soldier at a checkpoint with a machine gun, in a flak jacket and guarded by others. What do you think?" I think it is more a case of suicide than murder.
We return to Abu Sneineh and try to reach Al-Nahda primary school for boys. It is now a closed military zone, fenced off by flattened lampposts and policed by a vast Merkava tank, whose gun barrel veers lazily towards you. Beside us are children, a handful of the 10,000 Palestinian pupils in Abu Sneineh for whom school is again out.
Those near the tank clutch stones, dart down alley-ways, crouch behind walls, and swing on a wild behavioural pendulum between defiance and fear. But most sit under curfew in their homes. Like Sawsan, they are depressed by the captivity, aggressive to their families, terrified by the shake and blast of the constant shelling. The only escape is sleep troubled by dreams. What do they dream?
"Last year, before the Intifada, they dreamt of being doctors, lawyers and nurses," says Arar. "Now they dream of being soldiers, fighters and martyrs. Both are dreams of leaving. But there's a difference." There is.
I ask her mother what were her daughter's dreams, before she decided it was time to end them. What did she dream when her name was Sawsan and not "Wounded"? What did she dream 1,000 years ago, when she was a 14- year-old schoolgirl?
"She dreamt of being a dancer."
Recommend this page
© Copyright Al-Ahram Weekly. All rights reserved
Send a letter to the Editor