Eric's Reports from Palestine

Assault in Qalqiliya  - School for the Deaf   7/15/2003

    

Mohamad Nazzal explains to us what the soldiers did that day. He does not use words to explain, he uses his hands. The soldiers had come while the students were sleeping, banged on the door and since they did not hear, forced the door open with explosives. The soldiers ordered the students and got angry when they didn’t understand. Without words, Mohamad shows us the still broken doors where they forced their way in to a daycare nursery and then into the school’s computer lab one flight up. The armed intruders took all the computers down the stairs, out to their military vehicles, and smashed them with baseball bats. Nothing was sacred during the March 2002 invasions by Israel into the Palestinian Occupied territories, and the Al-Amal School for the Deaf was certainly no exception.

 

Many Americans have grown up in elementary school learning to respect the deaf and often learn basic sign language. Just because you do not understand a person at first does not mean they’re stupid. No matter how foreign and strange a person’s tongue, it does not mean they are to be treated as less than you. Mohamad shows us how to sign the words ‘Palestine’, ‘American’, and ‘Freedom’ in Arabic sign language, a different language than American sign language. He shows us around the school for

the deaf, now closed for summer vacation, shows us the creative art that the students have made.

 

The nursery is filled with color and small wooden crib stacks line either side of the room. The fourth floor is a computer lab and there are a few small jars on top of the top shelves containing fluid and strange shapes. The students show us what is inside them: small preserved snakes and scorpions. They sign to us how they had caught them and put them in the jar.

 

The center was built by Al-Amas Association for the Deaf, composed almost completely of deaf members.

 

In 1997 a poll showed there were about 1100 deaf Palestinians in the West Bank and another 1100 living in Gaza. The actual number could be considerably higher since many families do not say if they have a deaf child.

 

Israeli soldiers often mistake deaf Palestinians of having disobeyed orders or somehow threatened them and while there is much risk to the lives of ordinary Palestinians, deaf Palestinians are at even higher risk. A Palestinian teenage boy describes in sign language how he feels about his deaf brother, martyred by Israeli soldiers.

 

“We were planning to open a store together and had even designed it. We were more than brothers, we were best friends.” One of the men translates his sign into spoken Arabic and then it is translated into English by the Palestinian coordinator who brought us here.

 

Our Palestinian coordinator, it turns out, is also fluent in Arabic sign language even though he is not deaf. The reason he says, is because two of his nephews are deaf.

It is heartbreaking and inspiring at the same time, this spirit in the midst of adversity.

 

The school president is animated and has a smile on his face more often than not. Several teenage boys have come out tonight to show us the school and to welcome us with soda and kannafi, a sweet fried sugary desert.

 

“Our people are peaceful, they like peace and want to live like all people in the world,” says Mohamad.

 

Eric Monse

Qualqiliya