Update August 26, 2003

This article appeared on the front page of the Richmond Times Dispatch, Monday 18 August 2003.

Bethlehem's Daily Ordeal

BY MICHAEL MARTZ
TIMES-DISPATCH STAFF WRITER Aug 18, 2003

Taking out the garbage required courage in the little town of Bethlehem in early April 2002.

The Israeli army had taken over the town's center the day after Easter and laid siege to the Church of the Nativity, celebrated as the birthplace of Jesus.

Tank fire woke Alison Jones Nassar and her Palestinian Christian family each morning in their small apartment in the neighboring Beit Sahour township.

On the third day, Nassar risked a run to the street to drop the household garbage. She told her three daughters to stand against a wall and wait for her. She edged her way to the street along the wall, crossed quickly and threw the garbage bag onto an overflowing pile.

"Maybe 15 cats exploded out of the heap, scaring the wits out of me," she recalled in an e-mail message the next day. "I ran back up the driveway, and when the girls saw me, they started jumping up and down and cheering.

"Every kid knows the story of Rania Haroufah, who went out to buy her babies milk during the second invasion and didn't come back."

The ordeal of everyday life is the meat of an unusual book that Nassar, a former Chesterfield County resident, has published about raising a family in the midst of an uprising, bombings, invasion and siege in the Occupied Territories of the West Bank.

"Imm Mathilda: A Bethlehem Mother's Diary," translated from Arabic as "Mother of Mathilda," is a series of long e-mails that Nassar composed in fearful isolation between August 2001 and April 2003. The diary also chronicles the family's flight from the Beit Jala township during the intifada's first year, their appalled reaction to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and the ongoing legal battle to prevent Israel from confiscating their farm near Bethlehem for a new settlement.

"The worst suffering is the everyday," said Nassar, 44, sitting in the living room of a family member's house in western Chesterfield. "It's getting through each day, and that's hard to communicate to people."

Nassar, her husband, George, and their daughters have been in the United States since mid-June. Their second daughter, Nadine, recently had a medical procedure here for a congenital heart condition.

Though they plan to return to Bethlehem, they were not there when Israeli troops withdrew this summer. For a change, they have seen the conflict from afar, as most Americans do.

"You're so far away from all that stuff. It's so abstract and you've got your experts blabbing on and on," she said with a derisive motion toward the silent television set in the living room.

For the Nassars, the sprawling Chesterfield suburbs are a novelty. For three years, they have not been able to drive any farther from their Bethlehem home than the several miles from their quarters in the Cross Creek subdivision to Midlothian Turnpike.

The days of being able to drive to Jerusalem or Tel Aviv or a beach on the Mediterranean are a distant memory, said George Nassar, who turns 46 this month.

And now a wall has arisen to further isolate people and, in some cases, cut them off from their land, he said. "What is happening there is instead of both peoples stepping into the future is they're stepping backwards."

Leaving the isolation of the occupied territories has been healthy in other ways for Alison Nassar, whose anger against Israelis and their American supporters dissipated on the first trip to a shopping mall in Jerusalem.

"You recognize, they just want to live," she said. "I came here and I had the same realization."

Similarly, Nassar considered eliminating some passages from the book that reflected her frustration and anger at the destruction surrounding her family. She and her collaborating editor, Fred Strickert, decided against major revisions of the e-mails.

"As the news of yet another suicide bomber came on Tuesday, I believed I could understand the depth of his pain, frustration, and exhaustion beyond all human comprehension," she wrote on Sept. 6, 2001. "And I have only had to withstand all this for 10 years."

Nassar went to the Middle East in 1987 to work as an archaeologist in Israel. She grew up in an American military family and supported Israel without qualification. Her views have changed "180 degrees," she said, but her compassion remains for Israelis also living in fear.

"The whole point of the book is I'm not saying that Israelis haven't had a history of suffering or that they do not suffer now with the threat of bombings," she said, "but consider the other side."

"I think that what's needed more than anything is for people to put themselves in the shoes of Palestinians and ask, 'How much can they live with?'"

She married George Nassar, a landscaper, gardener and farmer, in 1991. His family had left Jerusalem for nearby Bethlehem in 1948. His father, who died in 1976, refused to follow other Palestinian families that left as refugees to Jordan after the Six-Day War in 1967 that led to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank.

His 66-year-old mother and eight siblings have never known anything but war and occupation, he said. "It wasn't anytime normal. . . . It's completely complicated."

Nothing is normal for their children, either: Mathilda, 10; Nadine, 9; and Phoebe, who will turn 5 this week. They speak two languages, English and Arabic. Their mother would like them to learn Hebrew, too, but their school does not teach it.

The book ends with a three-page message from the girls that gives their view of the experience: the death of a neighboring doctor who was trying to aid bombing victims; their classmates whose homes had been shelled; the names of the dead.

They write, too, of the fear that their father could be shot at a checkpoint or be put in jail on his way home from work.

"Bethlehem is where Jesus was born, and He is sad about all this fighting in His town," they wrote. "He wants people to get along and be fair."

Contact Michael Martz at (804) 649-6964 or mmartz@timesdispatch.com

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