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CounterPunch
January
20, 2003
Swept Clean
by ANNIE C. HIGGINS
The idea of Sharon with broom in hand is comical
enough, but the suggestion that he sweep the rooms of the Islamic
Center that his soldiers left in shambles made me laugh. My friend,
who conducts Qur'anic study sessions, always manages to find
humor in the midst of the bleakest conditions. Her laughter itself
is a resistance against the gravity of oppression. The Center's
rooms have chairs, a cabinet with copies of the Qur'an, and floors
full of dust. The Army appropriated the computers that had been
donated for the advancement of the Refugee Camp community. Still
the ladies come to learn, to consider new ideas, compare interpretations,
and especially to address issues relating to martyrdom, remarriage
of young widows, visiting graves, handling grief, ! and pondering
heaven. I take my turn with an infant who is energetically doing
calisthenics on my lap, and I comment on his strength. "That's
because he is from the Camp," beams his mother, articulating
the resiliency of Camp identity.
At home, the Qur'an teacher laughs as
a sock attacks us when a coil of wire it is caught in springs
out of reach. "Sharon doesn't want us to go visiting on
the holiday/eid; he just wants us to work at home." Later,
neighbors chide me for not visiting during the three-day holiday
of Eid al-Fitr, but how could I abandon my friend whose house
was raided as soldiers searched for a "wanted" family
member? Instead of holiday baking, we face oil in the salt and
sugar, and the pantry's many treasures mixed with pots, pans,
lamps and implements. The kitchen is picture-perfect compared
with the bedrooms knee deep in clothes, clothespins, dismembered
notebook pages, shoes, jewelry, framed pictures, manicure sets,
and artificial flowers all swirled together in hea! ps. We concentrate
on the kitchen, with her daughter Maryam expelling us to do the
final clean sweep, swooshing plenty of water with a fan-shaped
hand-held broom.
Sweeping is part of the rhythm of home
life. After a meal you gather the fragments of bread, just as
Jesus' disciples did following the post-sermon meal on the hillside,
and then you sweep up the crumbs. Dry sweeping, wet sweeping,
inside sweeping, outside sweeping seem almost like reflexes,
and assure a constant orderliness in the home and on the street.
The Israeli soldiers are acquainted with the manners and methods
of the people whose lands they occupy. The incredible messes
they so frequently produce, for no security reason, seem to be
a physical and spiritual attack on hearth and home.
But sometimes they too fall into the
rhythm of local order and orderliness. A family in Jenin city
tells that when soldiers left a building they had been occupying,
they disposed of their garbage and then swept all of the apartments
in the building. During that period, one of the homeowners had
passed by an alley after the evening/maghrib call to prayer,
and saw an Ethiopian soldier in uniform clearing the ground to
pray. He confided to the local Jenin resident, "Shhh, I
am Muslim. Don't tell."
One day on an ambulance mission, we yield
as a house-toppling Caterpillar bulldozer passes through the
Saha area near the Camp's entrance. It is escorted by a tank
in front, and an armored personnel carrier behind. The flat top
of the last vehicle is littered with stones, with an empty cola
bottle where you would expect a headlight. And there, tucked
into a crevice on top, is a handle-less broom. To clean up after
the destruction? This little reminder of home economics looks
so foreign in the heaving parade of metallic hardware, and so
innocent with its blue, yellow, and red fringes. It is quickly
lost in the black smoke spewed out to mask the vehicle and cause
confusion.
Another day brings more tanks on a street
nearby. Amidst the detritus the tank has sucked into the street
is a broom which has become part of the clutter it might clear
away. I restore its mission, walking toward the tank and sweeping
the street with ritual, rather than practical, motions. This
has little effect on the rubble in the steet, but delights the
children who cheer this gentle defiance of the tank's bullying.
I hope that the tank's soldiers will not burst a bullet hole
in my bubble of whimsy, but there is no guarantee of their sense
of humor. Very soon the boys, who have been fearlessly lobbing
stones and trash at the tanks, call me back with uncharacteristic
urgency. They report excitedly that an international friend has
been wounded. I think they are joking but they insist that some
of the boys carried her to safety on a home-made! stretcher.
She was getting a few small children off a street when a tank
sniper shot her. A local journalist confirms the news, and we
find her in the Emergency Room at the hospital. Minutes later,
another foreigner is wheeled in, and we learn that UNRWA's Jenin
Refugee Camp director, Iain Hook, has been killed.
The escalation of violence calls for
heightened security measures, so I go back into the street where
tanks are facing off with children, and walk toward the lead
tank. The hatch is open, and I call out to the soldier, "Don't
shoot! They are children!" Am I expecting him to read my
lips? The noise of the tank is deafening, and behind it a mega-machine
is idling with a bass roar. It is the first time I have encountered
a monster-size tank. The soldier in the hatch waves me aside,
but I remain like a fly on the windshield. The monsters lurch
forward and I take a few steps back, still facing them, then
pick up my pace, jogging backward. With both tanks coming toward
me in high gear, I take refuge against the wall of a house. I
realize it was a poor strategy to come close to the tanks and
leave the children behind. The tanks brush by, churning up! more
mud in a dirty sweep.
Clean sweeps and holiness are related
in Semitic tongues. In Arabic, a church is called "kanisa/swept
place," just as a Jewish holy place is called in Hebrew,
"bayt kaneset." The same word is found, with modified
transliteration, in the familiar name for theIsraeli Parliament,
the Knesset.
The morning prayer on the Eid al-Fitr
holiday closing the month of Ramadan was held on the barren ground
of the former Hawashin neighborhood, alarmingly obliterated in
the April invasion. When I heard of the prayer plans, I realized
that the boys I had seen collecting stones were not resupplying
their munitions, but making a clean-swept place for this holy
day.
The image of Sharon sweeping an Islamic
center in a Refugee Camp is still comical. But elections are
coming up. Perhaps the Knesset could use sweeping.
Annie C. Higgins
specializes in Arabic and Islamic studies, and is currently doing
research in Jenin, Occupied Palestine.
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