A Loud and Hungry Darkness

It is between 3 and 4 am on Friday, 29 March 2002.

My father’s face looks down at me as my eyes ease open, his hand brushes the arch of my brows in the same motion that had sent me to sleep several hours earlier. An endless rumbling noise floats in the air around us. I lay a hand on the wall beside me and feel reverberations through the cold plaster. My first thought is an earthquake. Then I remember who we are.

My father ushers my sister and me out of the room. We move to the back of the house, where we are least exposed to the invading army. Other noises float in the air now, too, short and sharp, metallic sneezes cascading through the city’s streets. The electricity is out, so we light what few candles we can find. We spend the night breathing air thick with unknowing as all we know collapses around us.

The tealights still burn as the sun begins to rise. The noises have migrated south now to the city center. My father is the first to leave the room and peek out the front window. He sees a tank across the road, the large barrel of its gun pointed directly at our home, a grotesque parable of the so-called conflict we find ourselves in. Our city is soon declared a closed military zone, restricting journalistic and humanitarian access and, under the guise of security, enabling the invading army to act with impunity.

Military historians know the 29th of March 2002 as the start of Operation Defensive Shield, a euphemistically named Israeli military operation in the Palestinian West Bank that intended to “strike at the terrorist infrastructure,” without much concern for what exactly constituted this infrastructure, why it existed in the first place, or under what constraints the Israeli military should be operating. It lasted until the 10th of May and, after just over a month of reprieve, was followed by Operation Determined Path.

Curfews were key components of these two military operations, which saw one-million civilians placed under a series of curfews that lasted until the end of the year. The nature of curfews during this time was threefold: they were open-ended (we never knew how many days they would last), round-the-clock (twenty-four hours a day), and blanket (applying to the entire civilian population).

Curfews were enforced through the use of live ammunition, tear gas, and other instruments of war by Israeli soldiers stationed inside Palestinian towns. This enforcement was enabled by the basic infrastructure of the occupation: during the Second Intifada, Israel operated around one hundred and forty checkpoints within the West Bank. In a practice known as “urbicide” (a term often used to refer to the deliberate destruction of urban environments as a method of warfare during the Bosnian War), the Israeli army had also damaged 42 percent of the West Bank’s infrastructure between 2000 and 2002, making population control that much easier.

Residents of my city, Ramallah, spent 70 percent of their days under curfew. In other places, such as Nablus, that percentage is even higher. The scale and nature of this collective punishment inflicted on the Palestinian population in 2002 were so severe that Amnesty International considered it might fall under the international legal definition of torture.

Last year was the twentieth anniversary of the events of 2002. I remembered the curfews and all that accompanied them internally and alone. It dawned on me how little we speak about the curfews within our community, be it with our old friends, our parents, or as a society. But we do remember. 

So, I began to reach out to fellow survivors of the Second Intifada, eager to find a way to document our personal and collective memories.

Here, my friends and fellow children of curfew remember a year that changed everything.

*

Ali and Shatha remember.

Ali and Shatha were my best friends. Are my best friends, perhaps, since the bond we share is inimitable. We grew up in the same apartment building and saw each other daily. Ali and Shatha were twelve and eleven when the curfew began; I was ten. We are all in our early thirties now, but this is the first time we’ve spoken about our memories of this period.

We all have vivid memories of the night of the invasion. In a synchronized dance across three separate apartments, our fathers woke us and gathered us in the room furthest from the front of the building. They knew, without exception, from which direction the military was invading. Then, our fathers carefully made their way to the front of the house to try and understand what was unfolding. They tested the electricity (cut off) and the water (still on). Our fathers followed an instinctive choreography, even though this was the first time they had to protect their families from a full-scale ground invasion. They moved through their homes almost wordlessly, speaking only in instructions. No words of comfort, expressions of emotion, or explanations of what was happening were uttered to us. Our mothers exuded a more palpable fear, although they, too, were largely wordless. 

We soon understood the magnitude of what was happening. We were familiar with violence, but we had never seen or heard so many military vehicles entering the city at once, nor had we experienced such sustained shooting. We feared that aerial bombardment might follow. Ali, Shatha, and I had survived a particularly memorable bombardment in December 2001, when the nearby Voice of Palestine radio and television headquarters was destroyed as we sheltered in our building’s hallway. Palestinians have neither air raid sirens nor bomb shelters, so all we could do was shelter in the parts of our building that felt the least exposed.

As long as that night was, the following months were even longer.

There was no time to prepare for the curfew that ensued, no time to plan a large grocery haul or say goodbye to our families. We simply went to sleep one day and woke up to home confinement. Adults lost their income and children their education. There were no exceptions to the curfew, not even to access healthcare.

Even within our homes, deprivation was felt. Water was cut off frequently, so we tried to collect rainwater using large containers: buckets, barrels, anything we could find. We began to fill up our bathtubs whenever there was running water, just in case.

Meals were an act of improvisation. We tried to ration, but how can you ration when you have nothing? There was a lingering hunger in all of us. Sometimes, ambulances or humanitarian vehicles came to drop off bread and milk. This did little to stave off the deep hunger we felt for Friday meals with our family, for our grandmother’s rice, for a mint tea while playing cards with our friends, for traditional Arabic ice cream in the city center, for a lunchbox shared with school friends.

We were never starving, but we were kept just hungry enough to feel it; for even the small pleasure of good food to no longer be ours. Deprivation, humiliation, subjugation. We were being taught a lesson.

We stayed indoors and away from our windows, afraid of what might happen if we showed ourselves to the army. I consider myself lucky to have spent the curfews in an apartment building with children my age. Every day, we snuck into each other’s homes through the central hallway to play. That, at least, was a small pleasure they couldn’t take from us. Still, there was hunger.

Occasionally, the Israeli army would announce a break in the curfew. Bakeries and shops would open, and people would rush out to buy whatever essentials they could find. The curfew breaks had a secondary benefit: they generally provided a slight reprieve from the noises of war that hadn’t left the air since the invasion. Every day, mechanical shrieks of military vehicles penetrated our homes, the sharp whistles and bangs of gunshots, the buzzing of helicopters, the swooshing of fighter jets, and the ground-shaking explosions of missiles. War can be many things, but war is always intrusively, relentlessly loud. At its quietest, it is a distant gunshot that stops you mid-sentence. At its loudest, it is a bomb that vibrates in your bones before reaching your ears, lingering in your body long after the sound dissipates.

Outsiders are always surprised when I mention that children often went out during curfew breaks to help buy supplies. To those who haven’t experienced war, it might seem irresponsible to allow children to leave the house at all. But home was never safe, to begin with. More than that, though, children need to be outside. They need movement. And, now and again, they need to go on a mission.

Ali, Shatha and I went on plenty of grocery missions during curfew breaks. There were a handful of small grocery shops in the area, and it often required a visit to each of them to find the supplies we needed as stocks dwindled. Shatha and I usually went on foot while Ali cycled further away with his brother.

One day, Ali and his brother were cycling back from a shop when they heard the sound of a large vehicle behind them. They turned their heads and saw an army vehicle rapidly approaching. The soldiers inside laughed as they chased the two boys, pretending to run them over.

Ali and his brother got away by abandoning their bicycles behind our local sweet shop, cutting through an open field, and crawling through a hole in our building’s fence. This hole had been there for years. Before the curfews, we used to crawl through it while playing hide and seek, running into the field and crouching behind bushes, waiting to be found.

We were raised in this neighborhood and knew its secrets like the back of our hand. As advanced as the Israeli military was, it was still a foreign occupier, and it was outsmarted by two young boys who knew more than one way home. 

Still, this was the last time Ali ever went out to get groceries during a curfew break.

A thought gnawed at me. I asked Ali if he thought the soldiers would have acted similarly if he and his brother had been girls. Ali believes the soldiers wouldn’t have tormented them if they had been girls. He told me that he genuinely believed, as he cycled as fast as he could, that he would die. When it was over, he was left with an overwhelming feeling of powerlessness. The soldiers had played a sinister game of emasculation with the young boys.

Still, Ali’s fear of being killed was entirely reasonable: during Operation Defensive Shield, fifty-five children were killed by the Israeli army, 85 percent of whom were boys.

* * *

Kindy and Maral remember, too.

Kindy and Maral are the children of one of my father’s close friends. I have fond memories of visiting their home in the old city of Ramallah, a stunning old building with walls as thick as the length of my arms and windows arched in a dramatic U-shape. 

During these visits, our fathers would sit in the lounge and talk about history, philosophy, and culture while we played in and around the house. Their mother would always send us home with a sandwich bag full of sweets.

We are connected through social media, although I haven’t seen or properly spoken to the siblings in years. This changed as I researched the curfews’ impact on children and stumbled upon a ReliefWeb report from 2002 that lists recorded incidents of violence against Palestinian children. Halfway through the report, I read Kindy’s name. I felt silly that I hadn’t thought to reach out to him before, as I knew what had happened to him. I sent a message to him and his sister. We spoke for days.

Kindy was fourteen years old when he was shot in the leg during a curfew break when Israeli soldiers suddenly began firing at Palestinians who had left their homes to buy essentials. Kindy’s sister, Maral, was twenty-five at the time. She still remembers the day as if it were yesterday. They had heard that the army was lifting the curfew for three hours and decided to each do their part. Maral went to buy vegetables and fruits, and their father and Kindy went to get the rest.

Suddenly, Maral heard shots. Loud, too loud. They were nearby. She turned around and saw her father running towards her with Kindy. Her brother was bleeding heavily, his screams deafening. Their mother lost consciousness when she saw him. Their father called for an ambulance repeatedly and with growing desperation, but every time it tried to reach Kindy, the soldiers would shoot, and the ambulance would turn back. In the end, it took a full hour for an ambulance—operated by two Italian medics—to reach them. The incident, including the shooting of civilians and the delay in the ambulance’s arrival, was documented by the human rights NGO Defence for Children International.

Kindy was severely injured. He was shot by a soldier sitting in a tank, half-concealed by the vehicle’s open hatch, at a distance of fifty to one hundred meters. The Mark III Merkava, the primary tank used by the Israeli army at the time, has secondary armament consisting of three 7.62mm machine guns, with an effective range of eight-hundred meters. That’s eight to sixteen times the distance at which Kindy—an unarmed child—was shot.

Kindy underwent surgery in the hospital, saving his limb and life. He returned home to more curfews. He healed amid deprivation, humiliation, and subjugation. It took him a long time to comprehend the effects of what happened to him, although he now knows the labels: anxiety, depression, panic attacks. 

Maral, who had to take care of her brother’s wound while he healed, suffered a lot in the aftermath of what happened too. When she was a nurse, treating patients would bring up memories of her brother’s pain. Today, she works as a journalist and is haunted by the memory of the shooting whenever she covers stories of violence.

A darkness took root in Kindy and Maral’s lives that day, one that lived beyond the physical wounds that eventually healed. There was a new knowing of powerlessness and pain, of being at the mercy of those who care about you the least. Their parents felt it too. I often think about what the curfews did to our parents, how ruthlessly their capacity to love and care for us was assaulted, and how this loud and hungry darkness took hold of their bodies as well as ours.

Kindy and Maral’s father died of a heart attack nine months after his son was shot.

Every Palestinian is born a historian. We come into the world pre-encrypted with the stories of our ancestors. They are with us even before we hear them. Yet, through their telling, we learn the vocabulary that situates our individual existence within our people’s story. Our grandparents and parents help us build an encyclopedia of the self, which we go on to fill with our own memories. Some are dark, others are light.

The light holds the undeniable beauty of family, community, faith, food, and nature. Of your grandmother’s embrace after breakfast, of the glow of the streetlights during Eid, of sipping a cup of sage tea beneath fig trees. Yet the darkness festers in our bodies, even if we mentally suppress it. Our hairs grey prematurely. Our shoulders are tense as a rock. Our ears ring. Our joints burn. Our brains fog up. 

We suffer the darkness collectively and ubiquitously, and yet we suffer it in isolation from one another. For a long time, I wondered whether we are protecting others from our own pain or ourselves from the pain of others. I now understand that we are protecting everyone from everything for fear of how paralyzing it would be to create space to process a generational, ongoing, and all-encompassing trauma. 

But that’s not the only reason we hide the darkness.

Our society is imbued with toxic masculinity; an outgrowth of the mass emasculation that comes with decades of dispossession, violence and hopelessness. Contrary to what outsiders might believe, this toxic masculinity is an act of despondence, not dominance. Young boys on the cusp of manhood have no choice but to act the part: son, husband, patriarch. Even in their anger, young men channel themselves away from vulnerability. Instead, emotions are often jettisoned to the realm of women, but even there, trauma is faced with a defensive harshness. Many women, too, hide the darkness, instead finding purpose within the roles reserved for them: daughter, wife, matriarch. These roles help us focus on our strengths rather than dwell on the pain we cannot change, exercising a deep human need to feel some control, any at all, over one’s life.

You see it in the subtleties of our language, too. In Arabic we rarely, if ever, say that Palestinian refugees fled (هربوا) in 1948. We say that they were displaced (تهجير or تشريد). Sometimes, we use a similar word that lends itself more readily to a passive conjugation – (طُرِد or تطاردوا) – to make it clear that we were made to flee by others.

This linguistic subtlety betrays another vital reason we self-censor: anything we say can be used against us. There is a prominent Zionist claim that the 800,000 Palestinians who were displaced in 1948 to make way for the State of Israel were not forced to leave their homes but chose to do so. This claim of a spontaneous and voluntary displacement is, of course, absurd, yet it continues to sow doubt. Saying that our ancestors fled could implicitly strengthen the narrative that they simply chose to abandon our homeland.

We tread carefully around darkness lest it consumes us or be used against us. We have learned through time and generations that everything is monitored, and nothing is off-limits, not even the words we choose to articulate our experiences.

While authenticity and vulnerability are the only paths to healing, for Palestinians they are also possible avenues of evisceration. Ask the gay man, the free-spirited woman, or the terminally ill patient: our vulnerabilities are routinely exploited by Israel to deprive, humiliate, subjugate, and remind us who we are.

For now, we hold the loud and hungry darkness in our bones and try our best to nurture the light.