The West Bank Blog: Nablus Pt.1

I want to caution you that this might be my most anti-Israeli post yet... hard to believe? Let me tell you what I did today...

Jabal an-Nar - Mountain of Fire - is the nickname for the West Bank's most populous city: Nablus. Why Mountain of Fire? Nablus has been the city historically most difficult to govern. Fierce opposition to the Turks, the British and now the Israelis characterize how the city has been seen and treated by their successive rulers. (Uhhh... and it's hot?).

I wanted to visit Nablus, lying about 60km north of Ramallah, since I read Beshara Doumani's Rediscovering Palestine:Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus 1700-1900 this past year in class. Its a socio-economic history of the town and its surrounding villages which I enjoyed and left with me a desire to see it first hand.

You can't actually drive to Nablus. You take a cab up and it lets you off at a place called Hawara. Hawara is actually a major checkpoint: kind of like a disheveled Qalandia. Going into Nablus is no big deal. You get out of the cab and simply walk a half kilometer through a fenced corridor around the installation which houses the soldiers checking people leaving. Like Jerusalem in reverse, the Israelis don't care who or what enters Nablus - only what comes out.

At the other end of the fenced corridor await dozens of taxis that take you into the city itself. A short ride later and we are in the Old City. Walking past - much to our surprise - a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet (it was closed and sealed up) we navigate through the cars and people into the covered bazaar. The first couple of tables are music and DVDs (mostly pirated). Then comes the guy selling Palestinian nationalist trinkets (this is, in all honesty, surprisingly rare in Palestine). We stand and talk to him while looking at the dozens of necklaces with the images of different Shaheeds (martyrs). He shows me four that maybe I would like to buy... Osama Bin Laden?, Sheikh Nasrallah?, Saddam Hussein?, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi?. I tell him that I think Zarqawi was majnoon (crazy) and intentionally neglect to tell him what I think of the others. He gives me a dirty look but that seems to change when I start actually naming some of the faces I see. "Abdel Rantissi" - the Hamas leader who was executed by the Israelis in April 2004... "Sheikh Yassin" - the quadriplegic, "spiritual" leader of Hamas, executed by the Israelis a month before Rantissi.. "Yahiya Ayyash" - also known as "the Engineer" mythologized as the brains behind a suicide bombing campaign following the disastrous Oslo "Peace" accords, Ayyash was executed by the Israelis with a booby-trapped cell phone in 1996. My admittedly limited knowledge of a few icons of the Palestinian Resistance seems to absolve me of my offense to the psycho Zarqawi. We move on.

The Old City is clearly not geared towards tourists - Nablus obviously gets few - but is filled with fresh produce stands, butchers and clothing stores. We wander around, speaking to the odd local. I find Nablus to be quite a bit more welcoming than Jenin, even though both have suffered terribly under the Occupation.

We get spit out of the Old City back near the closed up KFC. Even though it's early we decide to get lunch where we enjoy the rest and cooler air as much as the food itself. We're going to be heading back towards Hawara where we can see the damage caused by an Israeli incursion a few weeks ago.

Three weeks ago the al-Aqsa Brigade killed an Israeli soldier as he and his unit entered Nablus on a foot patrol. The Israeli response was to surround the Muqata'ah (the government compound) which housed Police Headquarters with a small jail, the Ministry of the Interior and a large medical clinic. They fired tank shells into the buildings and called in an F-16 air strike. The siege killed a half dozen Palestinians including a boy in an apartment across the street.

Walking up to the destroyed buildings immediately reminded me of the photographs and video of news coming from Lebanon. It was a row of three buildings along one side of the street. The street side of the buildings had been reduced to rubble. The gentle slope of concrete and cement that rose from the destruction to the half of the building that remained standing gave the false impression of serenity to what was a truly horrifying scene.

Amid the rubble I found X-Rays, Medical Logs, Passport Applications. This was what was left of Nablus' civilian infrastructure. I can't really explain what it is like to stand at the foot of a five storey building and have half of it at your feet and be able to peer into the rest like a doll house.