Ground Zero - Nablus

I didn’t know how I felt about it the first time I tried it, it was just …inteeeresting.  Hot melting cheese, subtly sweet, with a orange beaded crusted top dripping with the sweetest sugar syrup, all cut into this giant square piece of dessert that makes you feel like you ate a brick by the time you are finished.  The first time I had it was in Dearborn, Michigan. Then I ate it in this fancy restaurant in Ramallah, and it was alright, nothing great, still interesting.  And then I had it again in Ramallah, when a colleague brought it over, and I discovered that there are 2 kinds, one that is soft on top and one that is crunchy and I realized that I am definitely the crunchy fan.

And then last week I had Kenafa in Nablus. Fresh kenafa.  Like the dude had this giant circular flat pan of melting cheese over fire that he flipped over right in front of us exposing the bottom orange crusty layer and then he waited a few seconds before pouring the sugar water all over the hot kenafa.  You cant get fresher than that, watching it be made all in front of you! we all oooohed and aahed and the guy was tickled, looking at us like “get a grip on yourself, I do this about a hundred times a day”.  It was Nablusi Kenafa, where kenafa originates.  The kenafa capital of the world. It was mouth wateringly delicious, no longer interesting, but probably one of the best desserts, ever.

That Kenafa shop was our last stop that day, and we ended the long, emotionally exhausting mentally straining tour of Nablus on a sweet note. We were a group of roughly fifteen, mostly composed of Bir Zeit University students, myself and Y (my friend from UNC who just arrived to work in Ramallah for the summer, currently living with me in my apartment).  T, my other roommate, organized this tour for everyone.  Last year she worked in Nablus for 3 months.  Nablus arguably is the real deal Palestine.  Ramallah is definitely not, Ramallah is like the NYC of Palestine, a complete bubble, it’s liberal, it has a night life, and we don’t hear gun shots every night nor is there a nightly curfew because Israeli soldiers are rolling in with their tanks, getting ready to ‘monitor’ the city during the night hours. Nablus is that.  T’s experience in Nablus working on a project introduced her to phenomenal people, one of whom is a friend of hers, a guy in his early 30s who was a medic during the invasions of 2002, during the second Intifada.  He has seen more, experienced more, than your brain can fathom.  He is the one that took us on this tour, of the old city of Nablus, telling us stories about nooks and crannies of the city, stories from only several years ago. 

I had walked through Nablus a couple of times before and I remember the gloomy feeling in my heart because as beautiful as the hustle and bustle of the old city markets was, authentic in many ways than Ramallah will ever be, posters of fighters who were killed, martyrs are plastered all over the city.  Maybe if you don’t know what they are, it’s easy to ignore, but knowing that these young men were killed, who came from this city, I don’t’ know its heavy. You wonder about their age, their story, their families as you stare at them and they stare at you from these walls.

Sunday May 30^th : I learned that Nablus is not just known for their delicious Kenafa.  They are also known for their soap factories.  Most of which were blown up by Israelis, leaving nothing but rubble.  We passed through one part of the city that I’ve passed through before, and Maroof (the medic) stood there telling us that that spot where we were standing, an empty field, was the site of one of the bigger soap factories.  The Israeli soldiers had tied up and blindfolded Palestinian young boys inside the factory, and then dropped a F-16 bomb on it as the boys were inside alive still.  The end result was flesh, blood and a destroyed factory.

When I say that the city is being destroyed, I don’t know how to exaggerate that enough or to convey that it is not an understatement.  Nablus used to boast 42 soap factories, now there are 2 left in the city. The city was in lockdown for nearly 10 years, meaning that no goods were allowed in and nothing was allowed out.  The checkpoints were closed, which means nothing is going in.  how do you live like that? I don’t know.  In America our constant supply of goods and services is something that we take for granted soo much that I don’t think we can imagine what this means when a city is in lockdown for almost a decade, none of us know how to imagine that even.

Invasion of 2002: walking around the city, when actually pointed to look, really look at the walls, I saw perforations, hundreds and hundreds of them, the walls are covered literally with bullet holes.  I don’t know how to convey what it feels like to be physically be in standing ground, to stand where this much violence took place, because you wonder about the people, the human beings that were shooting these bullets and the people that it was aimed at, because bullets have no other purpose than to kill.  We walked under an arch, and M the medic stopped us to tell us that that spot was where 150 dead bodies were lain, all shot dead.  As a medic, they were not allowed to dispose of the bodies.  The Israeli soldiers wanted the dead decomposing bodies to just stay there in the street because they would do their rounds and come back around to do a head count of who they killed and shoot them again in the head to make sure that they were dead.  Mcandidly told us that it took 3 days straight to wash all the blood off the street.

We stopped abruptly at a random spot.   M and his best friend J stopped to tell us about a secret path that they used to take when they had to carry a wounded person back to this small room where they would apply gauzes and bandages and do basic medical things.  They described one instance when they heard gunshots and saw a boy shot on the ground and as they were going to pick him, the soldiers kept on shooting at them instead.  Jihad at that time being only 17, froze in place and couldn’t move out of fear.  Maroof had to go back to get him and together they carried the body through this secret passageway.  They took us through this narrow path, that weaved in thorough a building and out into the main street of the old city.  Even in broad daylight and sunlight, it was dark and we had to crouch and watch our steps on the uneven stairs and steps and walk forward.  I don’t know how they did this at 2 or 3am in pitch black darkness in the dead of the night.

M continued to tell us about their ‘hospital’ room which was basically a makeshift room with basic supplies.  He told us that it was basic medicine that they used to have, and they used to go door to door to see families.  Several times as they were inside soldiers would come inside to demolish everything in the room, leaving htem with no supplies again, until they were able to somehow gather more.

Then they took us to what used to be a very nice museum, boasting the roman history of Nablus.  The place was absolutely destroyed.  I kept on thinking of what could have been.  In a perfect world, if the city was intact, its hard to imagine why tourists from around the world wouldn’t flock to its beauty, history and its gifts (like the best kenafa in the world).  Nablus is one of the world’s oldest cities, having existed continuously for 4 thousand years (THE oldest city in the world is also in Palestine, a city called Jericho).  

It’s the largest city in the west bank.

The city, with its stone walls, arches, reminiscent of roman architecture, narrow cobblestone passageways, situated by mountains on all sides, houses and buildings sitting on the curves of those mountains, I realized is standing currently on a foundation of resistance against annihilation.  Getting off the mini van (the public “buses” here are small orange mini vans called a “service” (pronounced serveeeeese) which usually drops you off at the center of town, what will take your breath away is the view.  High mountains covered with replicas of white stone buildings. I always take a moment to appreciate it, because it truly is a sight.  It’s a conservative town.  There are 2 or 3 restaurants where women are allowed in.  most places are hangouts for men only.  There are a lot more women covering their hair then you see in Ramallah.

Passing through demolished homes, factories, museums in scattered parts of the city I couldn’t escape the thought and the feeling.  It was a familiar feeling in an odd way.  The kind of heaviness that was taking a foothold in my heart was the same feeling I had felt when I had seen Ground Zero for the first time.  The destruction site of 9/11 was somehow this devastating feeling that Americans and people around the world sympathized with.  However, walking around in Nablus, it feels like since the occupation, countless ground zeros here are ignored. But more than ignored, they are tarnished, the deaths are displayed to the world as barbaric terrorists being killed for someone elses ‘security’and their families are never shown, their stories are never told.  I don’t know how Americans would feel if someone shoved it in their throats that all the people that died in the twin towers deserved to die.  Feels awful doesn’t it? that’s how the rest of the world sees Palestinian deaths to many degrees. 

Before leaving Nablus, I saw an especially enlarged poster of a martyr.  T told me that it’s his house under the poster.  I saw a woman and a kid, and T told me that it’s his widowed wife and his son.  That was the hitting point for me, and I couldn’t shake it off.  I couldn’t believe, this young boys’ face that is plastered all over Nablus, that that was his wife and son that I was looking at. 

I hope no one thinks that I personally condone suicide bombing.  I think it is a ludicrously ineffective violent act that is a huge tragedy.  However, people should know the cities that people who are forced to take this action are from and what their stories are.  If America wages wars left and right after one ground zero..  imagine years and years of never knowing liberation and being surrounded by ‘ground zeros’. 


more about Nablus during the invasion : http://www.redress.btinternet.co.uk/rgiacaman4.htm