July 20, 2006
“Whatever”: A Mideast Weapon of Mass Destruction
“What we can do?” This is a response, accompanied by a shrug, that I heard often from Palestinians in response to my question: “How are you doing?” as I went about my business in Jerusalem over the last couple of days.
The Palestinian vendor who specially grinds my coffee with dried and green Cardamom responds to my question: “Ehhh. This is not new. What we can do?”
When I ask the Ecuadorian woman in my Arabic class how her Palestinian in-laws are responding in East Jerusalem, she tells me they don’t even watch the television. They have lived with this for so long that it’s nothing new. And anyhow: “What we can do?”
When I picked up the newspaper at a newsstand on Salahadin just outside the Damascus Gate the vendor replied with a pained smile to my question about how long it took him to get to work: “Ehh. What we can do?”
Today we drove from Lea Tsemel’s office in East Jerusalem to the military tribunal in the West Bank at which she is attending, as a defence lawyer, a sentencing hearing.
40% of the total Palestinian male population in the Occupied Palestinian Territories have been arrested by Israel between 1967 and 2006. And the Jewish Israeli lawyer Lea Tsemel, at great personal cost, has represented many of them. Some of them have been held in administrative detention that allows in practice for the detention of every Palestinian; some on charges that fall under the open-textured category of “security reasons”. Others have been arrested for participating in an exhibition to benefit a charity organization linked to Hamas, which is a crime of “terrorist association”; others for carrying or placing a Palestinian flag; some for removing the rubbish put in the middle of a road by Israeli soldiers after they have left; others for firing in the air during a wedding as a form of celebration; some for participating in a class at a Hamas Koranic school; others for participating in a demonstration; and some for pouring coffee for a member of a declared illegal association as this constitutes support for a terrorist organization.
The day in court can no longer be put off by Lea Tsemel’s “desperate illness” over the last several days. That legal strategy, which had a limited shelf life, has been exhausted and so we head off during this, one of the worst possible moments to find oneself facing a sentencing judge at a military tribunal as a Palestinian.
As we drove, she asked me to tell her what I see in East Jerusalem. “Describe it to me,” she says. “I’ve been here for so long I’m not sure I see it anymore.”
As I’m telling her what I see, we stop in front of a bus of Palestinians that is discharging its passengers and she interrupts:
“Oh la la. Look at their faces. They look so miserable. You see how they are walking. Look at their faces. Oh la la. There goes one of the families I’m working with, and there’s another, and there’s another. Ahh no. I know the stories and the misery that they are carrying around with them today.”
In my Arabic class, I learned a new phrase that could have some potential as a weapon of mass destruction (WMD): Su biqululi.
The neutron bomb’s (erroneous) claim to fame was that it could destroy human beings and yet leave the buildings intact. Like all WMD’s this new one is also potently dangerous in the wrong hands. But it has the virtue of leaving both buildings and human bodies intact.
North American teenagers are capable of rendering their parents apoplectic with a withering facial shrug coupled with the simple, yet blindingly infuriating word “Whatever”.
From what I gather, this word does not quite have a teenage equivalent in Arabic. If the proxy phrase “su biqululi” (whatever you say) were just inflected with that same frenzy-inducing shrug and slyly injected into the Arabic language, the entire social fabric can be effectively made to slowly erode at the generational seams.
The danger lies, however, in the possibility that, in the wrong circumstances and hands, entire societies might have access to its potency. Indeed Arabs and Palestinians appear, in large part, to be poised to perfect the final steps in its production in response to increasingly frenzied escalations of collective punishment.
Surely we all remember being in Miss Chaffee’s grade five class as she insisted that she would keep the ENTIRE class from having recess if the person who shot the spitball at the blackboard did not come forward.
Though we didn’t realize it at the time, while we all craved nothing more than heading out to skip rope and wrestle and play Champ and Red Rover, the REAL person who was being punished for not allowing the excess boy energy to blow off steam at recess was, of course…the teacher.
By the time we all got to grade 7, we had wisened up a bit. We had by then enough experience with substitute teachers to realize that the well placed – in fact the INDISCRIMINATELY placed – “Whatever” would be sufficient to top off a day’s quotient of collective thrills.
In the morning, as the surprise gift of a substitute would be writing his or her name on the board, we would begin to rub our collective mental hands in anticipation. Then we would sit back and watch, with delicious horror, as the substitute teacher would grow increasingly frazzled in front of our eyes (seemingly just for our very own amusement) as tacks were placed on chairs, and spit balls fired from lord knows where, and pennies placed perilously on the chairs of unsuspecting classmates who would make them drop with maddening and unintentional frequency as they shifted innocently in their seats, and as whispered instructions electrified the room for the entire class to start humming softly, with their mouths closed, so the sub could not pinpoint from where this vexatious sound was emanating.
All of it was potent enough that, if distilled and purified into collective response to collective punishment, it could ultimately prove sufficient (we all knew) to one day wipe that smirk off the face of the President of the United States of America. Those most terrifyingly giddy moments were when we managed to provoke a substitute teacher to utterly blow a fuse. We talked for days, for years, about that day that we managed to “make the landlord go crazy”, in Ehud Olmert’s perfect phrase for this phenomena.
The radioactive words in Arabic, like basic ingredients, are there in the language: “Su biqululi.” “This is not new.” “What we can do?” They just need to be assembled and combined with the withering facial shrug and there we have it: “Whatever.”
Devastating.
Unanswerable.
And therefore devastating.
Turn on CNN or BBC and you can almost hear the linguistic assemblage taking place as Christian, Sunni Muslim, and Druze Lebanese civilians stumble, stunned, over the border into Syria holding up the two finger victory salute when the American or British journalist asks them what they think about Hezbollah NOW.
Su biqululi.
Whatever.
Professor Susan G. Drummond, professor of comparative and family law at Osgoode Hall Law School, continues with her research on mixed marriages in Israel/Palestine