Dying for Public Relations

By Samah Jabr With Betsy Mayfield

The Palestinian/Israeli conflict has become a staple of international news through neverending reports that volley our Ping-Pong violence back and forth, inviting an international audience to see bloodshed as it happens. The drama of conflict sells, they tell me, and marketers of news must draw an audience. So far, the Middle East has disappointed neither the marketers or consumers of news. We live the stories, the propaganda, the sound bites. Here in Palestine, we’re all dying, in a sense, for public relations. The world seems to view us as mere actors in a war movie, trying our best to get the lead roles and the support to survive until the world’s directors call, “Cut!”

In Hollywood movies, one man can pummel another and, the next day, the victim is up and about, showing no sign of injury or pain. For us, however, the pain is real, lasting and ugly. Women do not maintain perfectly pressed clothes or unsmeared makeup when shoved into the mud at a checkpoint. Young men beaten with gun butts or kicked in the ribs by soldiers wearing military boots do not jump out of bed the next morning as if nothing had happened to them the day before.

Longing for peace, writing endlessly in hopes of increasing the world’s understanding of our position, caring for the injured in our hospitals, hanging onto my beloved family and friends for strength and relief, I’m still threatened by the shadows of death walking ahead of us to our future here in occupied Palestine.

It has become part of my daily routine to get up early in the morning, pick up a newspaper, look at the pictures and read the names of the latest who died for our cause. I put the paper down despondently, wondering who will be next.

Every day, it seems, we hear about another Palestinian youngster blowing himself up to protest the Israeli occupation. Nor, these days, is the act limited to the “few religious fanatics” of the past.

“Suicide Bomber a Woman,” announced the headlines of Jan. 27. As much as I am haunted by the pain I see in virtually all our people—men, women and children—this headline jolted me into a deeper awareness of my own anguish over what life has become in Palestine.

On the morning of 27-year-old Wafa Idris’s final act, I remember standing with my sister, waiting at the “ultra-obstructed” morning checkpoint—“the half-a-day morning rush,” we call it. Along the wall men stood, waiting with arms raised, car engines still purring. I whispered to my sister, “Look at the line up! I’ll bet there will be a bombing during the day and Israel will shell the skies over our heads tonight.”

“Surprise, surprise,” she replied nonchalantly, passing over my comment with a nod toward the traffic around us.

At noon, from the medical library of Al-Maqassed Hospital on the Mount of Olives, I could hear the horrible sounds of a bomb in West Jerusalem. No surprise, I thought. We have learned to predict violence with uncanny accuracy. Of course, I did not yet know who had died, or how many. The first thought that crossed my mind, however, was the irreverent reflection that, perhaps, we were dying for public relations. Just by the strength of the boom, I knew it would make the news. I did not know, however, how those reports would slant the story.

“Palestinians have terrorism in their genes,” I had recently heard an Israeli suggest. Distracted, now, by thoughts of how the press would tell the newest “bomber” story, I thought, “What a sound bite that phrase is!” Words go out around the world on the same theme: “It’s the Palestinians’ fault—if we could get rid of them, everything would be all right.”

There are, of course, variations on the theme:

“Get rid of Arafat.”

“Shell their homes.”

“Assassinate their leaders.”

“Dismantle their resistance.”

“Build a wall!”

Repetition is the talent of the Zionist spin doctors, and of others who do not know or who reject the humanity that is ours as well as theirs—be they Israelis, Americans, whoever. Such sound bite rhetoric does nothing to “cure the disease” or even,“help relieve the symptoms.” Like violent reaction from either side, sound bites simply aggravate the region’s cancers, and lend themselves to the facile reversal of truth. Who is it who wants to totally push the other off the land? Who is it who always stalls at the peace table? Who is it who demands so many concessions, but concedes so little in exchange?

To the people of the “civilized” world, it often seems, facts and figures have no “sex appeal.” Better to show pictures of violence, the more horrible the better. People will look at them to flavor their less than dramatic lives. Precisely because they finally will pay attention, each day here becomes a predictable horror. In the name of public relations, murder and dying and hate crimes and people cowering in fear attract those who, evidently, find our real life horrors more “entertaining” than the films dreadful enough to be used as lessons about the horrendous cost of war—“Saving Private Ryan,” for example, or “Battle of Algiers.”

Since the day Wafa Idris died, I’ve been confused. Thoughts about a world made aware through the Internet and, perhaps, a press corps awakening to our truth, now seem over idealistic, and simply wrong. Instead, our choices seemed more and more despairing, and relentlessly hopeless.

I long to be an effective voice for peace, for life, but the resounding booms and gunfire from our streets diminish my spirits. All I feel is failure. Should I, too, be choosing death? I think of the pictures I’ve seen of the Sept. 11 destruction in New York. One of the greatest horrors was a picture of people who chose to die by their own method, leaping out of the World Trade Center windows rather than waiting to burn to death inside the building which had become a trap.

I see a connection with those doomed people. Some Americans chose to jump—and some of us choose to die in protest. Similarly, one of the most popular tourist attractions in occupied Palestine is the Massada, a mountainous plateau where Jews once committed suicide en masse rather than be taken as slaves or killed by their enemies.

Palestinian suicide bombing is sad and wrong. While it is not excusable, however, it is understandable. I want to ask the people of the “civilized” world who flinch or shake their heads in disbelief when such an act occurs, and label all of us—all of us—“evil terrorists”: Aren’t there individuals in your own world who choose to kill themselves when things don’t work out the way they wish? If they lose a girlfriend or a fortune, for example? Aren’t there people everywhere who lose all perspective and gun down others, and then themselves?

Our people who commit these acts have lost everything.

Our people who commit these acts have lost everything. Why, then, is it a surprise when certain individuals among us choose death?

When Wafa Idris’s name was released three days after her death, I fell into even deeper despair. Wafa is not, by any stretch of the imagination, the first Palestinian woman to sacrifice her life for our cause. She’s simply the first woman to have walked the steady steps to death since the al-Aqsa intifada started 16 months ago. As I write these words, on a day in March, another woman, Dareem Abu Aisheh of Nablus, has followed in Wafa’s steps. My own and other people’s inability to stop people like Wafa from killing themselves rattles my reason. I knew neither of these women, and their deaths, of course, were not my fault. Why, then, do I feel so guilty, so pained, so despairing? Perhaps because I so identify with the despair these women must have felt.

Wafa, from Al-Ama’ari refugee Camp, was a young, active, lively paramedic who was pulled into the “martyrdom syndrome.” Why she decided to die as she did is a choice that is gone with her. We can speculate, however. Perhaps it was the endless televised accounts and pictures of burnt human flesh on floors and walls, blood pooling in a bathtub, the still-warm mattresses of assassinated Palestinians left in the wake of another Israel “Defense” Force’s “political” murders. Was she acquainted with one of those killed? Perhaps her own experiences or clashes at roadblocks pushed her over the edge. Had she herself been beaten or humiliated?

What is certain is that Wafa did not choose to die because she thought 100 virgins would greet her in heaven. In fact, Wafa was affiliated with the Fatah Party, which does not engage in suicide bombing. She was a healer who had invested herself in life, not in death.

The Israelis made so much of the fact that Wafa, a woman, had committed “terrorism.” Was she different from an Israeli woman required to serve in the Israel “Defense” Force? When Israeli tanks roll into our towns and villages bent on destruction, the women soldiers often are right in there with the men.

Settlers and Soldiers

I think of the endless examples of civilian losses and deaths at the hands of Jewish settlers—women and men; Israeli soldiers—women and men—who delight in bullying us at checkpoints; genderless Israeli missiles which smash our citizens daily, with a violence that generates less media “buzz” than the revelation that “a woman did it.”

Wafa’s suicide resounded around the world. Surely some who paid attention to her death will begin to wonder about the pain, the desperation that could have led her to such an act. Wafa’s story is no different from those of virtually all of our suicide bombers. Her gender, however, made her action different enough to get the world’s attention.

Today, I look out my window at the hills of Palestine and wonder if we can do anything better than die to make the world recognize our humanity. I think of the horror of checking the daily papers every morning to see who died yesterday. For yet another day, I take a deep breath and choose to survive as an advocate for truth and justice. I stay alive to continue searching for the words that speak of our goodness and our being. I seek out words to share so that violence is not the only viable response to oppression we Palestinians have.

I lift my voice, as I always will in my lifetime, to ask you—the liberals, the humanists, the freedom fighters of the world, the people of conscience who are too busy with their own causes and communities to worry about the last occupation on earth, hopefully, that is taking place in Palestine. I ask you, who say you understand, to take a firmer moral stand against the injustice that is overwhelming millions of us in the Holy Land. What we face each day on the West Bank and Gaza is not a Hollywood script or a clever, dismissive sound bite to enhance rhetoric. It’s real violence, real war, real evil.

I take my stand on the side of dialogue and statesmanship, not that of violence that destroys all human potential. For Wafa Idris, and others like her, I pull her pain into my heart and continue to live, because I care about the woman she was and, now, always will be.

Samah Jabr is a medical intern in her native city of Jerusalem. Betsy Mayfield is a writer living in Ames, Iowa.