http://www.zmag.org/content/Mideast/hassdd.cfm
Destruction and Degradation
by Amira Hass
May 06, 2002
No one deluded himself that the Palestinian Ministry of Culture, which
takes up five of the eight floors of a new building in the center of El
Bireh, would be spared the fate of other Palestinian Authority offices in
Ramallah and other cities - that is, the nearly total destruction of its
contents and particularly its high-tech equipment.
After all, Israel Defense Forces troops were deployed in the building for
about a month.
Armed vehicles were always parked in front of the building, around which
the familiar pictures of destruction accumulated; crushed cars, banks of
earth, deep ditches in the roads, broken pavements, dismantled stone
fences, toppling electricity poles, loose cables and clouds of dust and
dirt enveloping every vehicle, tree and roof in thickening layers.
The Ministry of Culture is located in the large residential area the IDF
kept under curfew, even after its partial withdrawal from Ramallah on April
21 and its focus on the siege of Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser
Arafat's headquarters.
Every night the neighbors, who hid in their houses, heard the sounds of
objects smashing as they were hurled through the windows of the Ministry of
Culture.
During the 10 days that preceded the lifting of the siege on Arafat's
office, the force in this building shot every night at the Asra, a large
commercial building opposite the ministry, on the slope of the hill.
The residents of the neighborhood at first tried to locate armed
Palestinians who had perhaps opened fire at random in the direction of the
military base. But there were no armed Palestinians there.
The neighbors concluded that this was nightly entertainment for the soldiers.
All that was left for them to do was to stay awake and alert for four or
five hours every night and listen, against their will, to the ceaseless
shooting that the walls and windows of the Asra building, causing fragments
of building stone to fall straight onto the roof of the small stone house
nearby with a noise that echoed through all of the valley east of the
building.
After one bullet got stuck in the wall of the home of H. and her two
daughters, they decided to leave.
One night the neighborhood awoke to the sound of barking: They saw that
someone had attached a speaker to a tape recorder and was playing a
recording of barking dogs. Within a few minutes all the dogs in the
neighborhood woke up and joined the racket. Very soon the barking reached
more distant neighborhoods. A night's sleep down the drain.
This is an established neighborhood of single-story or two-story stone
houses, surrounded by gardens and thick with cypress and fruit trees. L.
remembers how her husband planted some of the trees several decades ago.
The rural character of the neighborhood was unaffected despite its
proximity to the busy main streets and the tall commercial buildings that
have sprung up during the past 10 years.
A few days after the partial withdrawal, neighbors were astounded to hear
bulldozers and the cutting down of he shady row of cypresses.
One cypress tree was lying across the road, a natural barrier against cars,
and an apricot tree laden with fruit had been uprooted from the garden of
one woman who lives in the neighborhood and whose entire world is her
35-year-old son who is mentally retarded.
On the evening of Wednesday, May 1, when the siege on Arafat's headquarters
was lifted and the armored vehicles and the tanks had rumbled out, the
executives and officials of the ministry who had rushed to the site did not
expect to find the building the way they had left it.
Employees of the local radio and television station, Amwaj, also hastened
to the scene, as did the employees of the local television channel,
Istiqlal, which take up three stories of the building.
But what awaited them was beyond all their fears, and also shocked
representatives and cultural attaches of foreign consulates, who toured the
site the next day.
In other offices, all the high-tech and electronic equipment had been
wrecked or had vanished - computers, photocopiers, cameras, scanners, hard
disks, editing equipment worth thousands of dollars, television sets. The
broadcast antenna on top of the building was destroyed.
Telephone sets vanished. A collection of Palestinian art objects (mostly
hand embroideries) disappeared. Perhaps it was buried under the piles of
documents and furniture, perhaps it had been spirited away. Furniture was
dragged from place to place, broken by soldiers, piled up. Gas stoves for
heating were overturned and thrown on heaps of scattered papers, discarded
books, broken diskettes and discs and smashed windowpanes.
In the department for the encouragement of children's art, the soldiers had
dirtied all the walls with gouache paints they found there and destroyed
the children's paintings that hung there.
In every room of the various departments - literature, film, culture for
children and youth books, discs, pamphlets and documents were piled up,
soiled with urine and excrement.
There are two toilets on every floor, but the soldiers urinated and
defecated everywhere else in the building, in several rooms of which they
had lived for about a month. They did their business on the floors, in
emptied flowerpots, even in drawers they had pulled out of desks.
They defecated into plastic bags, and these were scattered in several
places. Some of them had burst. Someone even managed to defecate into a
photocopier.
The soldiers urinated into empty mineral water bottles. These were
scattered by the dozen in all the rooms of the building, in cardboard
boxes, among the piles of rubbish and rubble, on desks, under desks, next
to the furniture the solders had smashed, among the children's books that
had been thrown down.
Some of the bottles had opened and the yellow liquid had spilled and left
its stain. It was especially difficult to enter two floors of the building
because of the pungent stench of feces and urine. Soiled toilet paper was
also scattered everywhere.
In some of the rooms, not far from the heaps of feces and the toilet paper,
remains of rotting food were scattered. In one corner, in the room in which
someone had defecated into a drawer, full cartons of fruits and vegetables
had been left behind. The toilets were left overflowing with bottles filled
with urine, feces and toilet paper.
Relative to other places, the soldiers did not leave behind them many
sayings scrawled on the walls.
Here and there was the candelabrum symbols of Israel, stars of David,
praises for the Jerusalem Betar soccer team.
Someone had forgotten to take his dog tag with him. His name is recorded in
the newspaper's editorial offices.
Now the Palestinian Ministry of Culture is considering leaving the building
the way it is. A memorial.
No response was available from the IDF by press time.
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