When the Birds Stopped Singing: Life Under Israeli Occupation

Introduction: Context of the Second Intifada

When the Birds Stopped Singing is a deceptively delicate title for a book about a harsh period of recent Israeli history. The book focuses on the 2002 Israeli invasion of Ramallah — perhaps inevitably, given that it is written from the perspective of a resident of that city — and is told chronologically. To fully appreciate the book, however, one must understand the broader context of the region's intifada.

The Second Intifada was an uprising of Palestinians on the West Bank and Gaza Strip of Israeli-occupied territory, which at the time was increasingly encroached upon by fundamentalist settlers. This environment encouraged many young Palestinians to spontaneously revolt and agitate against their perceived military occupiers and oppressors. Although the PLO and other official organizations supported these young people — who were throwing rocks and shouting at occupying soldiers rather than tossing bombs and firing bullets — the intifada was not largely a calculated movement, at least not in all of its first, fleeting expressions of anger at the pace of reform.

The Intifada and International Sympathy

This uprising gained a certain additional legitimacy for the Palestinian cause internationally. The shadow Palestinian government of the then still-living Yasser Arafat also benefited from the uprising in a way that it had not from its earlier efforts to gain sympathy and attention through terrorist activities.

The Palestinian cause had historically been unpopular in America, at least in part because Palestinians had resisted a two-state solution in the 1940s. But the vulnerable image of unarmed, young Palestinians facing armed soldiers stirred international sympathy, much as the once-precarious position of Jewish settlers had done before. Yet, as the author of When the Birds Stopped Singing suggests, the world's sympathy is not always translated into political currency. Where are the real, practical territorial reforms and gains? he asks.

Structure and Tone of the Diary

The book takes the form of a day-by-day diary, stressing the increasingly small and confined — almost prison-like — existence of its author. Raja Shehadeh is a human rights lawyer living in the occupied city. His expressed political attitudes, however, far from setting an activist tone, strike the reader as having a rather anxious and neurotic quality. At the outset, he states that in the face of horror from all sides, he desires to bury himself in work and lead an "ordinary, orderly life" (5).

Shehadeh had initially valued living in Ramallah because the presence of foreigners provided some protection for his family and his professional activities, and helped limit the Israeli military's shows of force. The invasion ended all such pretense and much of the foreign presence. On the very first day chronicled by the book — March 28, 2002 — the foreigners retreat out of fear as the Israeli army moves in to occupy the city. "A sense of impending catastrophe loomed in the air" (2). A paper calls this the second Palestinian War of Independence, but at first Shehadeh can only think of the inconveniences the occupation causes him and his law firm's work, which extends far beyond the confines of a single city (3).

Works Cited

Shehadeh, Raja. When the Birds Stopped Singing. New York: Steerforth, 2003.