Today was Independence Day in Israel, a holiday, needless to say, not much celebrated on the West Bank. But it wasn’t an ordinary day at my University, either: there was some question about whether we would hold classes.  The Al Quds faculty has been on strike, on and off, this spring, demanding that their salaries be paid in full.  The University had recently received a sizeable sum as a gift from the Emirates, but not enough to fully erase its deficit, so the administration was offering to come up with 80% of its faculty’s salaries, and the faculty union was going to meet this morning to decide whether they would accept that offer.  I haven’t yet heard how they voted, so don’t yet know if they will continue to strike.

Our students cannot not be demoralized by the frequent interruptions of their course work, but they’re in general a cheerful bunch.  On the way to my poetry class I found a young woman showing off a village wedding costume.  But the class discussion itself was languid: people hadn’t done the reading, perhaps because they hadn’t been sure we were actually going to meet this morning.  I talked too much to fill in the silence and then headed off to lunch with a colleague at a café across the plaza from the University’s main entrance–the same café that had been torched two years ago, now open again under new management.  As we talked–I was sitting facing the front door–I watched a couple of IDF personnel carriers cruise by, and wondered what they were doing in Abu Dis.  They usually stay away, unless there’s some trouble to contend with.  What I couldn’t see from where I sat was that they had parked about a hundred yards down hill, by the stretch of The Wall that skirts the campus.  And their presence had–was this their intention?–prompted some of our students to start chucking stones their way.  So of course they had to return fire: they lobbed a couple of tear gas canisters our way, the wind was behind them, and presently the gas seeped through the closed doors of the café to where we sat.  The owners, used to this chaserei, passed out onions for us to sniff.  I noted that tear gas technology had progressed since I had last had a dose,  years ago, in basic training at Ft. Dix–it’s nastier.  We waited for a lull in the exchange to dash across the plaza back into the University buildings.  A few students were still facing off with the soldiers: click on this image and you’ll see a slingshot in the guy’s back pocket:  unlike the students in my poetry class, he seems to have come to school prepared.

The south wind dissipated the tear gas and, a while later, I could make my way out to the minibuses and back to Ramallah.  So just what had gone on this noon at Abu Dis?  Had the soldiers been instructed to stir things up a bit?  Netanyahu, only yesterday, speaking at a ceremony honoring the IDF’s dead–part of the Independence Day warm-up–had reminded his audience at the national cemetery that “a stone is a lethal weapon.”  And this past week a debate–if you could call it that–on the ethics of Palestinian stone-throwing had been prompted by an article of Amira Hass’s.  Hard to tell, in this time of hair-trigger irritability, what’s intentional and what’s not.  Back on my street, a sign scrawled on a dumpster may sum it all up.