Nothing has changed since a version of this column first appeared in 2020 in another publication under the title “A Lethal Virus Called Israeli Occupation: A Somber Easter in Occupied Palestine.”
The original title drew on the spread of COVID in Palestine and Israel’s refusal to allow Palestinians to acquire life-saving vaccinations. If anything, conditions in the occupied West Bank have devolved into a free for all, with settlers and Israeli forces killing, maiming and stealing more lands on which illegal settlements are built.
And in Gaza, a genocide — aided, funded, armed and abetted by the United States and most European countries — is about to begin its sixth month.
Raouf J. Halaby
That 31,781 Gazans have been slaughtered, 13,000 of whom are children; that 80% of Gaza structures have been reduced to rubble; that thousands of people are buried under the rubble; that hospitals are bombed and attacked; that medical professionals are arrested and sent off to prisons; that preemie newborns are left to die; that starvation is affecting the lives of 2.3 million Gazans; that Israeli soldiers have repeatedly killed (with impunity) hungry and destitute civilians attempting to grab life-sustaining flour (such as the Flour Massacre); that Israel is not allowing food into the strip in what has been called “the use of starvation as a war weapon”; that more than 1,100 children have had limbs amputated (without anesthesia); that, on a daily basis the 180 babies born in Gaza will die of hunger because their mothers are too anemic and/or are having difficulty recovering from C-section operations without anesthesia; that the Gaza war has introduced a dastardly heniety in modern warfare in which anything goes, and in which American media has been complicit — this is a sad comment on the state of world affairs, a world in which the powerful dictate how, where, and when the weak will die or starve to death.
For centuries, Easter in Palestine has been a special familial and communal celebration that commemorated the passion of the Christ, his Crucifixion, and his triumphant Resurrection.
“For centuries, Easter in Palestine has been a special familial and communal celebration.”
Not unlike Christ’s times when Pharisees and Sadducees shrieked their hateful rhetoric, today’s Easter celebrations in Palestine are marred by Zionist genocide, hatred, apartheid, vengeance, brutality, corruption, militarism, rabidly virulent racism and a lethal viral genocide called Israeli occupation.
In the face of repeated Israeli assaults on Palestinians and their rich cultural heritage, familial, communal, and national traditions and customs have been the glue that has held the fabric of Palestinian society together; it is precisely these bonds that have maintained the fragile framework of cohesiveness; they also have been an important factor in preventing societal disintegration. To face adversities and heinous apartheid policies imposed by their brutal occupiers, Palestinians exercise Sumood (stoic resilience), and they are determined to hold onto and pass their rich heritage to their children and grandchildren.
Even though I live in diaspora in my adopted country, I am still spiritually, intellectually and emotionally attached to my native Palestine. I believe it is fair to say the day-to-day living of every Palestinian is punctuated with the daily struggles to forget and to get on with life — on the one hand — and to remember and advocate on behalf of justice for Palestine and her oppressed children on the other. Simply put, politics and the cry for justice are the Sisyphean burden inflicted on every Palestinian, no matter where she or he lives.
Easters in Palestine
By recording childhood narratives of Easters in Palestine, I aim to present a testimonial to my rich heritage and record my experiences under Israeli occupation.
Following the Julian calendar, Orthodox Easter is celebrated anywhere from 10 days to a fortnight after its counterparts in the West celebrate theirs. My family celebrated Easter in the Antiochian and Greek Orthodox traditions.
Traditionally, Palm Sunday launches this Holy Week. Dressed in their Sunday best, children, carrying their Shȃ’neené (palm fronds), accompany their parents to church. For this special occasion grandfathers, fathers or older siblings spend hours fashioning the Shȃ’neenés into works of art that include designs in a variety of cruciform expressions, often with white ribbons, white lilies or motifs and images drawing on a rich tradition of Byzantine iconographic imagery.
In the old city, the faithful would line up and participate in processions, often listening to homilies and often participating in the singing of liturgy in a variety of denominational traditional expressions and melodic articulations. Arabic, Syriac, Coptic, the occasional Aramaic, Greek, Russian, Latin, Spanish, and French choral descants filled the air.
On Juma’a (Arabic for Friday) al Hazeené (Arabic for sorrowful/mournful/grief stricken) people fasted and attended services throughout the day; some would wear sepulchral-colored clothing as an expression of mourning; theaters would shut down, and festivities would be held to nil. All in all, this was a time for reflection, prayer and a time when good deeds were undertaken to help the widows, orphans, the needy, the shut-ins and the sick.
This year in the West Bank and Gaza, bifurcated and occupied Palestine Juma’a al Hazeene’ is a day of sorrow, anguish, despair and hopelessness. It is a day when rotting maggot-infested corpses are either run over by Israeli tanks or eaten by starving dogs. It is a day in which hunger grips at survivors, and especially children of all ages who, even before Israel’s assault, were anemic. It is a day when a newborn’s first gasp of air could very well be his last. It is a day when Catholic-practicing Joe Biden has to beg Israel, “Please, don’t kill that many civilians.”
An oft-repeated narrative from the treasure trove of memories from my childhood and adolescent years crops up during the Easter season. And now that I have been living in diaspora for the past 60 years, these nostalgic memories resurrect themselves in a fusion of pleasant yet unpleasant, joyful yet sorrowful, and pleasurable yet excruciatingly painful recollections and nostalgic reminiscences.
Easter, Christmas, Ramadan and Eid under Israeli occupation
Since 1967, the year Israel completed its stealth of the rest of Palestine, the Israeli government has progressively curbed Easter and Christmas festivities for Palestinian Christians as well as Palestinian Muslims during the feasts of Ramadan and Eid.
While foreign tourists are allowed to freely roam the streets of Jerusalem and have free access to all the holy shrines, Palestinians are routinely denied access to hospitals, schools, universities, places of employment and public spaces. Having lived on their ancestral lands for centuries, today to attend special religious services in churches and mosques Palestinians are required to apply for permits months in advance, permits that are routinely denied.
“The Palestinians are an undesirable impediment in Israel’s grand masterplan of having an ethnically pure country where Jews live and rule supreme.”
Nobody tells you the only democracy in the Middle East denies Palestinians access to their churches, mosques, streets, towns, villages, parks, mountains, valleys, the Mediterranean Sea, the Jordan River, their farms, vineyards and so much more.
And the reason? Foreign tourists spend dollars, euros and other currencies that help boost the Israeli economy. The Palestinians, on the other hand, are an undesirable impediment in Israel’s grand masterplan of having an ethnically pure country where Jews live and rule supreme.
U.S. foreign policy, evangelicals and the Holocaust
Wrapped up in their self-centered defense of “our way of life” and living the good life, most Americans are incapable of comprehending the misery their government continues to visit on Palestine and her destitute people, including the miseries visited on Asian, African and Latin American masses who are brutalized by their leaders and exploited for their natural resources to sustain the West’s “way of life.”
Wrapped up in their distorted belief that modern day Jews are God’s chosen (a view held by Zionist evangelical Christians, especially of the Hagee and Huckabee stripe), and peddling the notion that “the world owes us for the transgressions of the Holocaust,” I don’t expect the vast majority of Israelis and their Zionist abettors around the world to comprehend what successive Israeli governments have done to pulverize Palestine and her people into occupation, subjugation and anonymity. Israel’s commission of crimes against Palestine and generations of her children is akin to a nasty and deliberately infused perpetual lethal viral genocide with a known antidote/vaccine: Justice, the only corrective cure for the Palestinian/Israel imbroglio, is under lock and key in the Israeli Parliament, and their servile and successive compliant U.S. administrations/Congresses and their European lackeys.
“Justice, the only corrective cure for the Palestinian/Israel imbroglio, is under lock and key in the Israeli Parliament.”
Lest I be accused of being a Holocaust denier and for the record, what dastardly crimes Christian Germany perpetrated on Europe’s Jews are unforgivable. Likewise, what happened to the Armenians, Cambodians, Vietnamese, Laotians, Iraqis, Syrians, Algerians, Congolese, Libyans, Yemenis, Ugandans, South Africans, Latinos, Rwandans, Native Americans and Palestinians, to name but a very few, is equally abhorrent.
While the Holocaust Industry (a phrase coined by “self-hating” Jew Norman Finkelstein, the son of Holocaust survivors), assures that Hollywood, the television industry, documentaries, educational institutions, literary works, the media in all its forms and myriad other venues keep hammering the reprehensible policies of Nazi Germany into the mental body collective. Yet one hears precious little about the aforementioned genocidal atrocities committed by Israel, the United States and its European allies.
How can victims become such abusers?
And for this reason my quibble with Jewish Zionists is this: How can you, who’ve suffered so much, inflict such misery on a Palestinian population innocent of Europe’s barbarism? How can you cry wolf when your leaders are perpetrating Nazi brutalities on women, children, and the aged? How can you, who’ve received tens of billions of dollars in German Holocaust reparations, steal everything from Palestinians — their lives, their homes and possessions, their lands, their resources, their olive and fruit trees, their orange and citrus groves and, above all, their identity, dignity and self-respect.
“My quibble with Jewish Zionists is this: How can you, who’ve suffered so much, inflict such misery on a Palestinian population innocent of Europe’s barbarism?”
To the Zionist Jews, I hope during your Passover seasons you will look in the proverbial mirror of human accountability and stop your denial of the tragedy called Palestinian dispossession and diaspora, a tragedy you created in 1948 and a tragedy that has become an endemically virulent virus chiseling away at was once a peaceful and beautiful country that for eons had been violated by covetous invaders.
Between the years 2000 and 2022, more than 18,000 Palestinians were killed in wholesale slaughters in Gaza and the West Bank. This includes women, children and innocent civilians whose only crime was to have been Palestinian. Will Israelis and their supporters around the world stop during their Passover and Yom Kippur celebrations, even for a brief moment, to say a prayer of atonement for their continued crimes? Will the Israelis and their supporters around the world demand that the siege of Gaza and the West Bank be lifted in the post-Corona days? Or will they let them suffer and die a slow and excruciating death?
The Gaza genocide will be remembered for its depravity.
Would we allow such a genocide?
Four years ago, Phillip Weiss (yet another “self-hating Jew”), editor of the remarkable Mondoweiss digital blog, exhibited his moral fortitude in a report under the title “During the Coronavirus Crisis, Israel Confiscates Tents Designed for Clinic in Northern West Bank.”
B’Tselem reported the following: “This morning, Thursday, 26 March 2020, at around 7:30 a.m., officials from Israel’s Civil Administration in the West Bank arrived with a military Jeep escort, a bulldozer and two flatbed trucks with cranes at the Palestinian community of Khirbet Ibziq in the northern Jordan Valley. They confiscated poles and sheeting that were meant to form eight tents, two for a field clinic, and four for emergency housing for residents evacuated from their homes, and two as makeshift mosques. The force also confiscated a tin shack in place for more than two years, as well as a power generator and sacks of sand and cement. Four pallets of cinder blocks intended for the tent floors were taken away and four others demolished.”
While the whole world battled an unprecedented and paralyzing health care crisis, Israel’s military devoted time and resources to harass the most vulnerable Palestinian communities in the West Bank.
“Israel never has acknowledged that its ethnic cleansing policies are inhumane.”
Shutting down a first-aid community initiative during a health crisis is an especially cruel example of the regular abuse inflicted on these communities, and it goes against basic human and humanitarian principles during an emergency. Israel never has acknowledged that its ethnic cleansing policies are inhumane. It is high time for the Israeli government to acknowledge that today, of all times, Israel is responsible for the health and well-being of the 5 million Palestinians who live under its control in Gaza and the West Bank.
While in 2020 there was a great outpouring of genuine concern for the COVID-stricken Bronx Zoo tiger, there was not a single report by any major news outlets on the coronavirus outbreak in Gaza (and the West Bank), an enclave with the highest population density in the world, a hermetically sealed open-air prison that had been under lockdown for the past 17 years.
Gaza is some 20 miles in length and 5 to 7 miles in width. Before October 2023, Gaza’s 2.3 million population had only 62 respirators and 2,300 hospital beds. And even though Gaza was a COVID-19 petri dish, Israel refused to allow medical supplies to come in.
Where is the moral outrage?
Tata Maria’s stories
Sitting on the large raised concrete patio in my grandfather’s house, Tata Maria, my paternal grandmother’s sister, would tell us about the Easter celebrations in Palestine.
In the 1930s and ’40s, Tata Maria and her husband owned a small souvenir shop in one of the narrow, cobbled pedestrians-only streets inside Jerusalem’s Old City. She’d often mention that the cobbles of these streets were a witness to the many feet that traversed them on their way to the Church of the Holy Sepulture, Golgotha, the Mosque of Omar, the Al Aqsa Mosque, the Via de La Rosa, the Room of the Last Supper (Upper Room) and the many Jerusalem landmarks.
She noted that of all the pilgrims who descended on Palestine’s Jerusalem Easter celebration, the Russian pilgrims, dressed in conservative drably somber dark attire, appeared to be the most devout. The Europeans, especially the French, were the loudest, the Brits cold and distant, the Italians felt at home with their kindred Mediterranean compadres, the Germans standoffish, and the Americans infinitely less reverent and more concerned about the price of olive wood trinkets and having their pictures taken with camels and donkeys.
“I wonder what events and stories the ancient cobblestones anchored for centuries in the narrow pedestrians-only streets of Jerusalem’s Old City could tell us about the past and present agonies and wailings in the land of the prophets.”
Tata Maria spoke Arabic, Russian, Greek and enough Hebrew, German, English and French to carry on meaningful conversations. A good looker in her younger days and in the presence of her husband, once a wealthy American tourist, taken by her charm and eye-catching Palestinian and Greek striking beauty, flirted with her and offered to take her to America. While we delighted in hearing this story, she derived more fun in narrating it, each time mimicking the Yankee’s accent who insisted on taking her photograph with his old Kodak Wirgin folding camera. I worshipped this loving, kind and gentle woman whose story-telling powers mesmerized me and took me and my twin brother to the four corners of the world and beyond.
In their store, Tata and her husband sold Mistka Arabieh (Gum Arabic), Yemeni incense and coffee, cardamom, hand-embroidered silk or brocade notions, pillow cases and kerchiefs, hand-carved olive wood camels, jewelry boxes, crucifixes, olive wood kitchen utensils, silver, and mother of pearl rosaries, and Christmas crèches, carved ivory and mother of pearl icons, picture frames, old coins and so much more.
She was a widow by the time Palestine fell in 1948 and a new racist and brutal European colonizer appeared out of the ashes of Europe’s death camps, camps where the grotesque orgy of hate and killing went unabated, a cauldron of extermination that murdered 6 million Jews and the oft-forgotten 5.5 million others: Poles, Hungarians, Dutch, Romanians, Gypsies, homosexuals and the mentally and physically disabled.
I wonder what events and stories the ancient cobblestones anchored for centuries in the narrow pedestrians-only streets of Jerusalem’s Old City could tell us about the past and present agonies and wailings in the land of the prophets, a land whose capital city is Al Quds (the Holy City) for Palestinians, and Yerushalayem (city of peace) for Israelis, a fought-over city that has yet to discover the ever-elusive peace.
Easter family and communal ritual in Palestine
Just as Eid and Ramadan are sacred religious occasions for Palestinian Muslims, a time when special delicacies such as Barazek, Ka’ak, Ma’moul, Burma, Ka’ak bi Asawer, Baklawa, and Ghraibé are baked, gifted and consumed, Palestinian Christians take pride in making these same scrumptious delicacies.
Since my family lived in occupied West Jerusalem, like most Palestinians, the making and baking of these delicacies was both a familial and a communal ritualistic event that unfolded on the evening of Juma’a al Hazeené.
Somewhere in my hippocampus, prefrontal cortex and amygdala linger the images, sounds and smells of our Palestinian family Easter preparations. The setting is either our kitchen or my grandmother’s kitchen just across and up the street. Vials of orange blossom water, rose water, olive oil and water lined the countertop; bowls of flour, coarse and fine semolina, butter, yeast and ground dates sat within easy reach; smaller vials of walnuts, pistachios, toasted sesame seed, ground cinnamon, cardamom and nutmeg, including mahlab (an aromatic spice), and mistka (gum Arabic) crowded the rest of the countertop.
Traditional wooden greibeh arabic cookie molds with star shape carvings (Shutterstock)
The gathering would begin when mother and an aunt would mix all the dough ingredients in a large tub, all the while pulling, stretching and kneading the dough; a bit of flour would be sprinkled to keep the dough from sticking to the bowl; and large portions of the by now springy dough would be drawn in aerial circular motions from the top, only to be supplanted back to the bottom where the olive oil and butter awaited the plunging propulsion of hands into the off-white semolina dough.
The process is a tediously grinding one. Once the dough is ready, as many as five people, mostly females, sit in a circle, dip into the tub of the by now elastic dough and work through the entire tub until its contents disappear.
Ka’aak bi Ma’Moul are shaped (by hand) into a hollow 3.5-inch equilateral triangle with a flat base and a pointed pyramidal apex. Prior to sealing the pliable dough, a concoction of pistachios, walnuts, rose water, cinnamon and other spices are stuffed; rose water provides an added rich flavor.
When making the Ka’aak bi Ajwe (cookies with dates), the reader is urged to think of 3.5-inch miniature tire-tubed shaped dough, the interior of which is stuffed with ground dates. Each of the above is placed on a large tray and allowed to harden. Once the dough has sufficiently hardened, the team begins to use half-inch wide corrugated, pincer-like utensils to pinch the dough’s surface in a combination of hatching and cross-hatching patterns. My mother bequeathed her heirloom utensil to my sister, and, upon moving into a retirement home, my sister gifted these same utensils to a sister-in-law.
True or not, I am told that the triangular Ma’Moul shape represents the Holy Trinity and the circular one represents eternity.
Once the yeast has done its work, these delicious cookies are baked, sprinkled with powdered sugar, shared with relatives and neighbors and consumed with a stout cup of Turkish coffee.
I so wish that my sons, nieces and nephews had a visual record of the Easter family Kaak and Ma’Mool sessions enacted in the Upper Baq’aa, West Jerusalem neighborhood Halaby home, a place that nurtured me, helped shape my personality and inculcated in me a deep sense of justice and worthy moral values I’ve attempted to instill in my boys.
Palestinian society survives
Since 1948, Israel has systematically connived and plotted to fragment and destroy Palestinian culture and to deny its existence.
Strong family bonds and traditions such as the baking of Easter and Eid cookies, communal sessions of three generations of women embroidering the Palestinian thowbs (gowns) or wedding dresses, the singing of a mawwal to the beat of a durbakké, the recitation of poetry, the planting and harvesting of vegetables and fruits, the respect for elders, the story-telling sessions, the large feasts, and the tradition of generosity and sacrifice for family members and community are encoded in the DNA of every Palestinian.
And it is precisely the extension of these resilient and durable family bonds and traditions, instilled in the collective Palestinian consciousness, that will prevent Israel and her Zionist allies from killing Palestinians with the deadly genocidal virus called Israeli occupation and extermination.
The determined Palestinian Sumood never will allow Israel and her apologists to relegate Palestinians to the crematorium of history.
Raouf J. Halaby is a professor emeritus of English and art. He is a writer, photographer, sculptor, an avid gardener and a peace activist.