By Lion's Gate I sat down and surveyed the Valley of Jehosophat. Well, actually, we Arabs call it Nutmeg Valley after the trees that used to grow here in abundance. Opposite me, across the valley, is the Mount of Olives where the pine trees favoured by Israelis to give a European look to the landscape are overtaking the indigenous olive. At the top of the hill to my right the UN has placed its offices - unwisely perhaps, for to the Biblically minded this is the Hill of Evil Counsel where Jesus' arrest was planned in the house of Caiaphas. Behind me are the walls of al-Haram al-Sharif, the great enclosure housing the al-Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock. I have just walked away from the gate to the Haram because the Israeli soldiers would not allow my non-Muslim friends to go in with me. Signalling to me from behind the soldiers, the Palestinian caretaker apologised and said he would have welcomed us all in but these were "their" regulations. We were in Jerusalem, Ramallah and Bethlehem for the Palestine festival of literature which I, Brigid Keenan, Eleanor O'Keeffe, Victoria Brittain and other friends had put together. It ran from May 7 to 11 and in every city our venues were filled to the rafters and our authors rode high on the enthusiasm of the audience. Roddy Doyle in Bethlehem got thunderous laughter and applause when he said he would be seeking reparations from the residents for the slaps he had received at his Irish school for saying baby Jesus was born in Nazareth. His books sold out in three days. A young man at Birzeit University was overwhelmed to meet Ian Jack; he had kept up his subscription to Granta since moving back from the US nine years ago. Schoolkids cried with joy when they met Khaled Abdalla; they had just seen The Kite Runner. Every night we bedded down in a different hotel, and every morning we packed up and got on the bus and off at a checkpoint. At Qalandiya, we left our heavy luggage on the bus and learned to squeeze through the metal cages of the turnstiles without leaving a gap; the cages rotate a given number of times then stop. Once through, we were told we had to turn round and go through again - carrying our luggage. We saw a weeping woman, cradling her baby and propping up her husband, who was so ill he had tubes coming out of him and looked like her grandfather. The soldiers had turned them back. We could do nothing for her. At Bethlehem University the students were so taken by Jamal Mahjoub they asked for his novels to be put on the syllabus. The young women on Andy O'Hagan's and Pankaj Mishra's workshops asked if we couldn't run longer courses. Now I'm standing in the Muslim cemetery and below me Christian and Jewish graves, too, cover large tracts of ground. Everyone wants to be buried here, in Nutmeg Valley, for it is here that the trumpet shall sound and the dead shall rise. Silwan, the Palestinian village nestled in the corner to the right, has for centuries found employment tending the graves. We walk round the mellow walls of the Old City till we are overlooking the village. An Israeli friend (call her "B") is showing us the excavations that burrow through the ground towards al-Aqsa. They are undertaken, she says, in an "ideological spirit". A guard at al-Aqsa once showed me the great well that used to store oil for the lamps: "This is where they plan to come in," he said. B tells us that 60% of Silwan has been taken over by settlers and the remaining villagers are fighting to stay on their land. She teaches us to read the landscape, to see the three small, fiercely antennaed hilltop settlements placed to cut off the main approaches to East Jerusalem, to trace the giant tunnel linking the Hebrew University on Mount Scopus to the (illegal) settlement of Ma'ale Adumim. We cluster around her maps and diagrams. Our group is dwarfed by tourists getting off giant coaches marked "Jewish National Fund". Esther Freud and Hanan al-Shaykh decide to walk to the hotel. They take a short cut across some waste ground behind the building and are surrounded by a pack of growling dogs. Israeli soldiers appear and question the two writers. The soldiers tell them they're in a military zone and they'd been watching them and could have shot them. By the entrance to Western Wall Plaza, a massive billboard from the Israeli ministry of tourism proclaims that Jews pray there to express their "faith in the rebuilding of the Temple", and in a slick shop nearby they sell drawings of the Haram cleansed of al-Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock. They show plans and raise funds for the Third Temple rising in their place. In al-Khalil/Hebron, we walked through the emptied streets of the old town past the shuttered shops of what had been the beating commercial heart of Palestine. Groups of robust American settlers jogged by us in shorts with machine guns. We saw the houses where Palestinian families who refused to leave were not allowed to use their front doors but had to climb into their homes through the back windows. And the houses where they were forbidden to lock their doors because the Israeli soldiers came in to check on them every night between midnight and 3am. We were very silent when we left. But in Bethlehem that night the al-Funoun Troupe danced and flew across the stage in their brilliant costumes, and the audience stomped and yelled and whistled and, next morning, the students jostled and laughed and argued. We're here, the Palestinians were saying, we read and question and blog and shop and play and dance. We live.
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By: Amira Hass
Date: 27/05/2013
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Slain Bedouin girls' mother, a victim of Israeli-Palestinian bureaucracy
Abir Dandis, the mother of the two girls who were murdered in the Negev town of Al-Fura’a last week, couldn't find a police officer to listen to her warnings, neither in Arad nor in Ma’ale Adumim. Both police stations operate in areas where Israel wants to gather the Bedouin into permanent communities, against their will, in order to clear more land for Jewish communities. The dismissive treatment Dandis received shows how the Bedouin are considered simply to be lawbreakers by their very nature. But as a resident of the West Bank asking for help for her daughters, whose father was Israeli, Dandis faced the legal-bureaucratic maze created by the Oslo Accords. The Palestinian police is not allowed to arrest Israeli civilians. It must hand suspects over to the Israel Police. The Palestinian police complain that in cases of Israelis suspected of committing crimes against Palestinian residents, the Israel Police tend not to investigate or prosecute them. In addition, the town of Al-Azaria, where Dandis lives, is in Area B, under Palestinian civilian authority and Israeli security authority. According to the testimony of Palestinian residents, neither the IDF nor the Israel Police has any interest in internal Palestinian crime even though they have both the authority and the obligation to act in Area B. The Palestinian police are limited in what it can do in Area B. Bringing in reinforcements or carrying weapons in emergency situations requires coordination with, and obtaining permission from, the IDF. If Dandis fears that the man who murdered her daughters is going to attack her as well, she has plenty of reason to fear that she will not receive appropriate, immediate police protection from either the Israelis or the Palestinians. Dandis told Jack Khoury of Haaretz that the Ma’ale Adumim police referred her to the Palestinian Civil Affairs Coordination and Liaison Committee. Theoretically, this committee (which is subordinate to the Civil Affairs Ministry) is the logical place to go for such matters. Its parallel agency in Israel is the Civilian Liaison Committee (which is part of the Coordination and Liaison Administration - a part of the Civil Administration under the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories). In their meetings, they are supposed to discuss matters such as settlers’ complaints about the high volume of the loudspeakers at mosques or Palestinians’ complaints about attacks by settlers. But the Palestinians see the Liaison Committee as a place to submit requests for permission to travel to Israel, and get the impression that its clerks do not have much power when faced with their Israeli counterparts. In any case, the coordination process is cumbersome and long. The Palestinian police has a family welfare unit, and activists in Palestinian women’s organizations say that in recent years, its performance has improved. But, as stated, it has no authority over Israeli civilians and residents. Several non-governmental women’s groups also operate in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem, and women in similar situations approach them for help. The manager of one such organization told Haaretz that Dandis also fell victim to this confusing duplication of procedures and laws. Had Dandis approached her, she said, she would have referred her to Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, which has expertise in navigating Israel’s laws and authorities.
By: Phoebe Greenwood
Date: 27/05/2013
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John Kerry unveils plan to boost Palestinian economy
John Kerry revealed his long-awaited plan for peace in the Middle East on Sunday, hinging on a $4bn (£2.6bn) investment in the Palestinian private sector. The US secretary of state, speaking at the World Economic Forum on the Jordanian shores of the Dead Sea, told an audience including Israeli president Shimon Peres and Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas that an independent Palestinian economy is essential to achieving a sustainable peace. Speaking under the conference banner "Breaking the Impasse", Kerry announced a plan that he promised would be "bigger, bolder and more ambitious" than anything since the Oslo accords, more than 20 years ago. Tony Blair is to lead a group of private sector leaders in devising a plan to release the Palestinian economy from its dependence on international donors. The initial findings of Blair's taskforce, Kerry boasted, were "stunning", predicting a 50% increase in Palestinian GDP over three years, a cut of two-thirds in unemployment rates and almost double the Palestinian median wage. Currently, 40% of the Palestinian economy is supplied by donor aid. Kerry assured Abbas that the economic plan was not a substitute for a political solution, which remains the US's "top priority". Peres, who had taken the stage just minutes before, also issued a personal plea to his Palestinian counterpart to return to the negotiations. "Let me say to my dear friend President Abbas," Peres said, "Should we really dance around the table? Lets sit together. You'll be surprised how much can be achieved in open, direct and organised meetings."
By: Jillian Kestler-D'Amours
Date: 27/05/2013
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Isolation Devastates East Jerusalem Economy
Thick locks hug the front gates of shuttered shops, now covered in graffiti and dust from lack of use. Only a handful of customers pass along the dimly lit road, sometimes stopping to check the ripeness of fruits and vegetables, or ordering meat in near-empty butcher shops. “All the shops are closed. I’m the only one open. This used to be the best place,” said 64-year-old Mustafa Sunocret, selling vegetables out of a small storefront in the marketplace near his family’s home in the Muslim quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City. Amidst the brightly coloured scarves, clothes and carpets, ceramic pottery and religious souvenirs filling the shops of Jerusalem’s historic Old City, Palestinian merchants are struggling to keep their businesses alive. Faced with worsening health problems, Sunocret told IPS that he cannot work outside of the Old City, even as the cost of maintaining his shop, with high electricity, water and municipal tax bills to pay, weighs on him. “I only have this shop,” he said. “There is no other work. I’m tired.” Abed Ajloni, the owner of an antiques shop in the Old City, owes the Jerusalem municipality 250,000 Israeli shekels (68,300 U.S. dollars) in taxes. He told IPS that almost every day, the city’s tax collectors come into the Old City, accompanied by Israeli police and soldiers, to pressure people there to pay. “It feels like they’re coming again to occupy the city, with the soldiers and police,” Ajloni, who has owned the same shop for 35 years, told IPS. “But where can I go? What can I do? All my life I was in this place.” He added, “Does Jerusalem belong to us, or to someone else? Who’s responsible for Jerusalem? Who?” Illegal annexation Israel occupied East Jerusalem, including the Old City, in 1967. In July 1980, it passed a law stating that “Jerusalem, complete and united, is the capital of Israel”. But Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem and subsequent application of Israeli laws over the entire city remain unrecognised by the international community. Under international law, East Jerusalem is considered occupied territory – along with the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Syrian Golan Heights – and Palestinian residents of the city are protected under the Fourth Geneva Convention. Jerusalem has historically been the economic, political and cultural centre of life for the entire Palestinian population. But after decades languishing under destructive Israeli policies meant to isolate the city from the rest of the Occupied Territories and a lack of municipal services and investment, East Jerusalem has slipped into a state of poverty and neglect. “After some 45 years of occupation, Arab Jerusalemites suffer from political and cultural schizophrenia, simultaneously connected with and isolated from their two hinterlands: Ramallah and the West Bank to their east, West Jerusalem and Israel to the west,” the International Crisis Group recently wrote. Israeli restrictions on planning and building, home demolitions, lack of investment in education and jobs, construction of an eight-foot-high separation barrier between and around Palestinian neighbourhoods and the creation of a permit system to enter Jerusalem have all contributed to the city’s isolation. Formal Palestinian political groups have also been banned from the city, and between 2001-2009, Israel closed an estimated 26 organisations, including the former Palestinian Liberation Organisation headquarters in Jerusalem, the Orient House and the Jerusalem Chamber of Commerce. Extreme poverty Israel’s policies have also led to higher prices for basic goods and services and forced many Palestinian business owners to close shop and move to Ramallah or other Palestinian neighbourhoods on the other side of the wall. Many Palestinian Jerusalemites also prefer to do their shopping in the West Bank, or in West Jerusalem, where prices are lower. While Palestinians constitute 39 percent of the city’s population today, almost 80 percent of East Jerusalem residents, including 85 percent of children, live below the poverty line. “How could you develop [an] economy if you don’t control your resources? How could you develop [an] economy if you don’t have any control of your borders?” said Zakaria Odeh, director of the Civic Coalition for Palestinian Rights in Jerusalem, of “this kind of fragmentation, checkpoints, closure”. “Without freedom of movement of goods and human beings, how could you develop an economy?” he asked. “You can’t talk about independent economy in Jerusalem or the West Bank or in all of Palestine without a political solution. We don’t have a Palestinian economy; we have economic activities. That’s all we have,” Odeh told IPS. Israel’s separation barrier alone, according to a new report by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTD), has caused a direct loss of over one billion dollars to Palestinians in Jerusalem, and continues to incur 200 million dollars per year in lost opportunities. Israel’s severing and control over the Jerusalem-Jericho road – the historical trade route that connected Jerusalem to the rest of the West Bank and Middle East – has also contributed to the city’s economic downturn. Separation of Jerusalem from West Bank Before the First Intifada (Arabic for “uprising”) began in the late 1980s, East Jerusalem contributed approximately 14 to 15 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) in the Occupied Palestinian territories (OPT). By 2000, that number had dropped to less than eight percent; in 2010, the East Jerusalem economy, compared to the rest of the OPT, was estimated at only seven percent. “Economic separation resulted in the contraction in the relative size of the East Jerusalem economy, its detachment from the remaining OPT and the gradual redirection of East Jerusalem employment towards the Israeli labour market,” the U.N. report found. Decades ago, Israel adopted a policy to maintain a so-called “demographic balance” in Jerusalem and attempt to limit Palestinian residents of the city to 26.5 percent or less of the total population. To maintain this composition, Israel built numerous Jewish-Israeli settlements inside and in a ring around Jerusalem and changed the municipal boundaries to encompass Jewish neighbourhoods while excluding Palestinian ones. It is now estimated that 90,000 Palestinians holding Jerusalem residency rights live on the other side of the separation barrier and must cross through Israeli checkpoints in order to reach Jerusalem for school, medical treatment, work, and other services. “Israel is using all kinds of tools to push the Palestinians to leave; sometimes they are visible, and sometimes invisible tools,” explained Ziad al-Hammouri, director of the Jerusalem Centre for Social and Economic Rights (JCSER). Al-Hammouri told IPS that at least 25 percent of the 1,000 Palestinian shops in the Old City were closed in recent years as a result of high municipal taxes and a lack of customers. “Taxation is an invisible tool…as dangerous as revoking ID cards and demolishing houses,” he said. “Israel will use this as pressure and as a tool in the future to confiscate these shops and properties.”
By the Same Author
Date: 24/05/2008
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The Palestine Literature Festival was an Enlightening Experience - but not Always for the Right Reasons
By Lion's Gate I sat down and surveyed the Valley of Jehosophat. Well, actually, we Arabs call it Nutmeg Valley after the trees that used to grow here in abundance. Opposite me, across the valley, is the Mount of Olives where the pine trees favoured by Israelis to give a European look to the landscape are overtaking the indigenous olive. At the top of the hill to my right the UN has placed its offices - unwisely perhaps, for to the Biblically minded this is the Hill of Evil Counsel where Jesus' arrest was planned in the house of Caiaphas. Behind me are the walls of al-Haram al-Sharif, the great enclosure housing the al-Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock. I have just walked away from the gate to the Haram because the Israeli soldiers would not allow my non-Muslim friends to go in with me. Signalling to me from behind the soldiers, the Palestinian caretaker apologised and said he would have welcomed us all in but these were "their" regulations. We were in Jerusalem, Ramallah and Bethlehem for the Palestine festival of literature which I, Brigid Keenan, Eleanor O'Keeffe, Victoria Brittain and other friends had put together. It ran from May 7 to 11 and in every city our venues were filled to the rafters and our authors rode high on the enthusiasm of the audience. Roddy Doyle in Bethlehem got thunderous laughter and applause when he said he would be seeking reparations from the residents for the slaps he had received at his Irish school for saying baby Jesus was born in Nazareth. His books sold out in three days. A young man at Birzeit University was overwhelmed to meet Ian Jack; he had kept up his subscription to Granta since moving back from the US nine years ago. Schoolkids cried with joy when they met Khaled Abdalla; they had just seen The Kite Runner. Every night we bedded down in a different hotel, and every morning we packed up and got on the bus and off at a checkpoint. At Qalandiya, we left our heavy luggage on the bus and learned to squeeze through the metal cages of the turnstiles without leaving a gap; the cages rotate a given number of times then stop. Once through, we were told we had to turn round and go through again - carrying our luggage. We saw a weeping woman, cradling her baby and propping up her husband, who was so ill he had tubes coming out of him and looked like her grandfather. The soldiers had turned them back. We could do nothing for her. At Bethlehem University the students were so taken by Jamal Mahjoub they asked for his novels to be put on the syllabus. The young women on Andy O'Hagan's and Pankaj Mishra's workshops asked if we couldn't run longer courses. Now I'm standing in the Muslim cemetery and below me Christian and Jewish graves, too, cover large tracts of ground. Everyone wants to be buried here, in Nutmeg Valley, for it is here that the trumpet shall sound and the dead shall rise. Silwan, the Palestinian village nestled in the corner to the right, has for centuries found employment tending the graves. We walk round the mellow walls of the Old City till we are overlooking the village. An Israeli friend (call her "B") is showing us the excavations that burrow through the ground towards al-Aqsa. They are undertaken, she says, in an "ideological spirit". A guard at al-Aqsa once showed me the great well that used to store oil for the lamps: "This is where they plan to come in," he said. B tells us that 60% of Silwan has been taken over by settlers and the remaining villagers are fighting to stay on their land. She teaches us to read the landscape, to see the three small, fiercely antennaed hilltop settlements placed to cut off the main approaches to East Jerusalem, to trace the giant tunnel linking the Hebrew University on Mount Scopus to the (illegal) settlement of Ma'ale Adumim. We cluster around her maps and diagrams. Our group is dwarfed by tourists getting off giant coaches marked "Jewish National Fund". Esther Freud and Hanan al-Shaykh decide to walk to the hotel. They take a short cut across some waste ground behind the building and are surrounded by a pack of growling dogs. Israeli soldiers appear and question the two writers. The soldiers tell them they're in a military zone and they'd been watching them and could have shot them. By the entrance to Western Wall Plaza, a massive billboard from the Israeli ministry of tourism proclaims that Jews pray there to express their "faith in the rebuilding of the Temple", and in a slick shop nearby they sell drawings of the Haram cleansed of al-Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock. They show plans and raise funds for the Third Temple rising in their place. In al-Khalil/Hebron, we walked through the emptied streets of the old town past the shuttered shops of what had been the beating commercial heart of Palestine. Groups of robust American settlers jogged by us in shorts with machine guns. We saw the houses where Palestinian families who refused to leave were not allowed to use their front doors but had to climb into their homes through the back windows. And the houses where they were forbidden to lock their doors because the Israeli soldiers came in to check on them every night between midnight and 3am. We were very silent when we left. But in Bethlehem that night the al-Funoun Troupe danced and flew across the stage in their brilliant costumes, and the audience stomped and yelled and whistled and, next morning, the students jostled and laughed and argued. We're here, the Palestinians were saying, we read and question and blog and shop and play and dance. We live.
Date: 26/11/2003
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The Waiting Game
I thought it was bad three years ago. Now the landscape itself is changed. New settlements spring up everywhere; more than 60 since I was here last. You can watch their metamorphosis from a handful of caravans, to some Portakabins, then basic bungalows and, finally, the bristling, concrete hilltop fortress that is an Israeli settlement. Hardly a Palestinian village exists without an Israeli settlement lowering down on it from above. Everywhere there is construction going on - illegally: wide, Israeli-only highways to connect the settlements to each other, great mounds of rubble and yellow steel gates to block the old roads between Palestinian villages. And there are people waiting; waiting with bundles, with briefcases, with babies, at gates, at roadblocks, at checkpoints, waiting to perform the most ordinary tasks of their everyday lives. All this, Israel tells the world, is in the cause of security. On my first morning here we drive up through the West Bank to see the biggest construction of all: Israel's "security fence", a monster barrier of steel and concrete that separates farmers from their land and refugees from their homes. Brute technology hacking away at a living body of land and people. It rears up to block the sunset and the evening breeze from the people of Qalqilya, then spreads out to swallow great stretches of land cultivated over hundreds of years by the neighbouring villages. This section of the barrier has been built right up close to the western side of the village of Jayyus. From the windows of the village hall you see it slide down the hill, snake into a huge S and vanish around the farmland to the right. Running along the inside of the barbed wire is a deep trench. There is also a patrol road, a swept sand track to reveal footprints and an electronic fence with hidden cameras. Alongside this barrier, at short intervals, red signs in Arabic, English and Hebrew proclaim: ANY PERSON WHO PASSES OR DAMAGES THE FENCE ENDANGERS HIS LIFE. You cannot read the signs from here, but you can see them punctuating the acres that the mayor of this village has spent the past 40 years of his life cultivating. From his office window he can watch - on his land on the other side of the barrier - his olive trees waiting to be harvested, his guava trees dropping their ripe fruit on the ground. In each of his three greenhouses, 40,000 kilograms of cucumbers are hardening. From this village of 3,000 souls, 2,300 acres have been confiscated for the barrier. And on the other side of the barrier another 2,150 acres, with six groundwater wells, are inaccessible, 12,000 olive trees stand unharvested, and the vegetables in 120 giant greenhouses are spoiling. Three thousand five hundred sheep have been driven off the land; actually, 3,498, because one man has lost two lambs. Three hundred families are totally dependent on their farms. Now their harvest is rotting before their eyes and they cannot get to it. They are feeding their flocks the husks from last year's planting. There are yellow steel gates in the barbed wire but they are closed. Farmers are busy making phone calls, some are going to see the Israeli military to demand that the gates be opened. Eventually, soldiers arrive. Harvesting is a family affair so the soldiers face a crowd of men, women and children. What they do is this. First they collect all their identity papers. Then they call the people out one by one. Today they have decided that no male between the ages of 12 and 38 will be allowed on his land. Also, no woman will be allowed unless she is over 28 and married. So the majority of the farmers - men, women and teenagers - stand at the gate, the Israeli soldiers and the barrier between them and the harvest that is their sustenance and income for the coming year. Two men set off to try and find a way of infiltrating their own land. The rest make their way back to the village hall. On the mayor's desk lie some 600 permits that appeared in the village this morning. They are issued by the Israeli authorities and made out to individual farmers. About half of them are in the names of people who can't use them: babies, infants, a couple of men who have been in Australia for 15 years. But that is not the point. The point is that the people know that if they use these permits they are implicitly accepting their terms: three months' access with no recognition of any rights to the land. They suspect that after three months Israel will start playing games with them. Permits like these were one of the mechanisms by which their parents and grandparents were dispossessed of their land in 1948. What should they do? Use the permits and try to salvage their crops and deal with the rest later? Boycott the permits and starve? The next day a Jewish Israeli woman gives me a copy of the military order on which the permits are based. It names the West Bank land now trapped between the barrier and Israel's borders the "Seam Zone". It states that the people who have the right to be in the Seam Zone without permits are Israelis or anyone who can come to Israel under the Law of Return. That is, any Jewish person from anywhere in the world. But in this district alone, 11,550 Palestinians have their homes in the Seam Zone. "It is Nuremberg all over again," she says. Today, the mayor is beside himself as he tries to get advice from the governor. One man tells me that his father, who is 65, is talking of buying explosives. "There will be no life for us anyway without the land," he says. The fighters and the suicide bombers have generally come from the urban deprivation of the camps. Now they will come from the villages, too. Monday, Jerusalem al-Quds Our taxi driver says: "The Israelis are clever. They build the wall and now everybody is talking about the wall. The wall is just a wall. It was built and it can be removed. The real questions are the borders, the settlements, Jerusalem and the refugees." Wednesday, Bethlehem It is less than two months to Christmas and the streets of Bethlehem are empty. There are no tourists, no pilgrims. On Star Street many of the shops are closed. The market where the neighbouring villages brought their produce to feed the town is deserted. The closures imposed by the Israeli army mean that farmers cannot come into Bethlehem and Bethlehemites cannot leave the town. The Monument to Peace built to celebrate Bethlehem 2000 has been demolished by Israeli tanks. The International Peace Centre - built on land where Turkish, then British, then Jordanian police stations each stood in turn - was used by the Israeli army as its headquarters when it besieged the Church of the Nativity. "They put up a crane with a box on top," says the friend who is taking us round, "with lights and a camera and an automatic sniper. And recordings. They played terrible sounds: explosions, animals, people screaming. All the time. Into the church." In the church today, an old priest dozes on a chair. Two Franciscan monks are silently busy about the Armenian altar. A young man - one of the besieged "gunmen" - explains the Tree of Life mosaic to a group of schoolgirls. Three young women in hijab sit in a pew reading. And Christ and the Madonna observe us from the walls. The settlements of Gilo, Har Gilo and Har Homa surround the city. Israel's military edicts are doing their best to strangle her, but Bethlehem will not lie down and die. The Peace Centre hosts an exhibition of Nativity scenes sent in by schools from all over the world. Annadwa, a new cultural centre, is buzzing with activity. The staff there are young and dedicated. They are headed by the softly spoken Reverend Dr Mitri al-Raheb, a gentle and impressive man who is fluent in many languages and has a beautiful and stylish wife. They run an exhibition space currently featuring a Norwegian artist, a gift shop that sells its merchandise on the internet, a workshop, a state-of-the-art media centre and a theatre. Today, Al-Raheb has been refused a permit to travel to a church meeting in Washington DC. Every road out of Bethlehem is blocked by mounds of dirt and a checkpoint. Imagine driving along as you have always done, between Hampstead, say, and Regent's Park, when you come upon a barrier of earth thrown up the night before. Soldiers stand at the barrier in full battle gear, yelling at you in a strange language or a pidgin version of your own. They tell you to get out of your car - you're not allowed to drive here any more. If you're allowed to carry on, you will do so on foot. They yell at you to line up and they take their time checking your papers, questioning you - Where are you going? Why do you want to go there? Prove to me that your daughter/best friend/dentist/music teacher lives there. A few metres away you can see the new highway that cuts across your old road. Cars are speeding along on it, driven by men and women of that other people, the people that the soldiers belong to. We stand at one of these checkpoints, my son taking photographs of the pedestrians waiting to be allowed to walk to the next village. Two soldiers leave the checkpoint and stride towards us, raising their M16s to the level of our heads and shouting: "No photographs! Give me your camera. You! No photos." "Where's the notice that says no photography?" we call. "Everyone knows. Give me the camera. I can shoot you. You take photo of me..." "We took photos of the people waiting." "You took photo of me. I can shoot you..." "What's the problem? Are you ashamed of what you're doing? Show me the paper that says we can't take photos." This is Tony, our Palestinian guide. He's a film editor with an international press agency and has a US passport. "I don't need no fucking paper. I can shoot you, that's my paper." "Show me the paper." "This is Israel, I do what I like. I can shoot you. Here I do what I like." "This isn't Israel. This is the West Bank." "West Bank? What is this West Bank?" The soldier turns to his friend questioningly. My son tries to chip in but I stamp on his foot. "Look: in there, is Palestine. You do what you want. Here is Israel. In your country, can you take pictures of secret soldiers?" After a bit more of this Tony gets out his mobile and phones the army. The soldiers take off their shades and turn into unhappy young men: "You think I like to do this? You think I like to stand all day wearing this, and this, and this? This I have to do so my mother is safe in Tel Aviv." We suggest it might be a happier situation all round if they did this on the green line. "Green line? They can creep under the green line. Look: we give them everything. They always want more. We give them land, we give them water, we give them electricity. They want more..." "But you are stealing these people's land. What about the settlements?" "That is for the politicians. We don't know about that. It is the politicians." They go back to the checkpoint. We keep the camera. Tony has to take our photos to the army censor for clearance within 48 hours. Tony's family's business is on Star Street, close to Manger Square. Four years ago he and his father pooled their savings and built a spacious home on five floors: one each for Tony and his three sisters, the parents at the top. He is married to a diaspora Palestinian who has come back from Europe to live with him in Bethlehem. Two weeks ago his first child was born. I guess he is thinking a lot about what kind of life his child will have here. On the walls in the street the portrait of Edward Said has taken its place alongside the pictures of Christine Saada, the 10-year-old girl shot in her father's car in March, and Abed Ismail, the 11-year-old boy killed by a sniper in Manger Square. "Look at it! Look at it!" The arc of Tony's arm takes in the brand-new conference centre completed in 2000 and shelled by the Israelis a few months later. The large hotel and leisure complex set up next to Solomon's Pools and also shelled by the Israelis. And then the wall. Here it comes, creeping up on the west of Bethlehem... Saturday, Birzeit Three years ago, Birzeit university was 20 minutes' drive from Ramallah. Now, on a good day, it takes over an hour to get there. The Israeli army has blocked the road at Surda and though today the checkpoint is not manned, people have to get out of their transport and climb on foot over the rubble. I'm told that anyone attempting to remove rubble is shot at and that the rubble is replenished from time to time by the army. We climb over and proceed on foot for one kilometre till the next roadblock. Alongside the road a market has sprung up with stalls selling food, drinks and housewares. There are horses and donkeys for hire, mule-drawn carriages and small carts pushed by men. There are also some young volunteers with wheelchairs for the infirm and elderly. We walk along in the crush and I'm thinking of how one of the tasks of the occupation is to push people into more and more primitive conditions. But I am also thinking that this doesn't really matter, that it's manageable, that it's not the worst thing that can happen. Then I hear a low but spreading murmur - "They've come, they've come" - and a Humvee appears at my shoulder. The car is squat and broad and its windows are completely black. It is shouting incomprehensible commands throughits Tannoy as it moves in jagged, erratic bursts among the crowd. People step quietly out of the way but no one looks up. This, in general, is how the people treat the Israeli army: by ignoring it as much as possible. But I can feel in my stomach and my spine that the Humvee is here to show us all who is master, who runs this road. Getting to class here is an act of resistance and at the university the Kamal Nasser Auditorium is full. No one wants to talk about the occupation. For three hours, these students and their teachers want to talk literature, theatre, music. And they want to do it in English. But over lunch they tell me that earlier in the day the Humvee had parked across the university gates and the Tannoy had sputtered insults. "Provocation. They provoke the students and hope one of them throws something then they can begin to shoot." One young man tells me that a few days before, when the checkpoint was manned, he had been among some 200 students that the soldiers had detained there. Eventually, as the students protested about being made late for class, one soldier had a bright idea: every young man who had gel in his hair could go through. "Today," he said, "gel will buy you an education." Sunday, Jerusalem al-Quds Daphna Golan teaches human rights at the Hebrew University. She takes her students out to the "field", the West Bank, to research specific topics. The right to education, for example. Today, they have been south of al-Khalil (Hebron). The settlers there have been terrorising children on their way to and from school. The kids' journey should take 20 minutes but to avoid the settlers they go by back routes which take them two hours. I ask how old the children are. "Seven or eight. Today they went the short way because we were with them and the settlers could not harm them but we could see that the children were very, very frightened." I ask how the settlers terrorise them. "They beat them. And they are armed. It is very strange," she says. "You know, these are not the settlers that you imagine. These are young people like hippies. Long hair, bright clothes, rasta hats. They grow organic vegetables. They carry their guitars and their guns and they are vicious." How many stories can I tell? How many can you read? In the end they all point in the same direction. Every Palestinian I meet (and many Israelis) tells me the same thing: what Israel wants is a Palestine as free of Arabs as possible. This is the big push, the second instalment of 1948. Israeli policies make life unbearable so that every Palestinian who has a choice will go. The ones left behind - the ones with no options - will be a captive population, severed from their land, from their community, caged behind barriers, walls and gates. This is the labour that will work in the industrial zones Israel is already building near the barrier. The Palestinians describe what is happening as ethnic cleansing. They also say that they have lived through 1948 and there is no way they are leaving. Dr Nazmi al-Ju'ba has the optimistic job of restoring old Arab architecture in Palestine. "The Palestinians have many options," he tells me, smiling. "We can live in a binational state, we can live in a Palestinian state, we can live under occupation - but we will live in any case. And we will live as a collective; as a Palestinian nation." Thursday November 20, Jayyus The farmers took the permits. Finally, they could not bear to watch their harvest die. And then the games began. Abdullatif Khalid, the engineer who runs the Emergency Centre at Jayyus, tells me he has just come back from a smallholding owned by four brothers. They are struggling to feed their flock of 150 sheep. Since the beginning of November they, like all the other farmers, have been dividing a day's food over five days. They are trying to slow down the process of starvation. Some of their ewes have miscarried and some of their lambs have died. They drive their sheep to the yellow steel gate in the barrier. They have their permits and the Israeli soldiers have no problem letting them through to their pasture. But they refuse to let in the sheep. They have no orders, they say, to let in sheep. Khalid says that all the sheep owned by the village are going to starve, while their pastures lie across the Israeli security barrier. "Can somebody intervene here?" he asks. "You know when birds get stuck in oil slicks or whales get beached, everybody rushes to help them. Maybe helping the Palestinians is complicated. But the world could help the sheep. That should be simple." Source: The Guardian Date: 26/09/2003
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Edward Said: My friend
Edward Said, who died yesterday, was not just a formidable thinker and writer - he was a loyal and thoughtful friend It was 12 years ago that Edward called me, early on a summer evening, to tell me he had just been diagnosed with leukemia. There was no hushed tone, no sadness, no fear in his voice. There was surprise and anger. It was "Guess what? I've got fucking leukemia. Apparently I'm dying." I said: "You can't be dying." It was an impossibility as far as I was concerned, and continued to be an impossibility - until today. Our loss cannot be measured. For 22 years Edward has been my friend. And the friendship started in a way typical of him. He heard I was in New York. He had read my first published story. He phoned up and invited me and my husband to dinner at his house. We met Maryam, his wife, Wadi and Najla, his kids, and a few others. At the end of the evening he walked Ian and me out. At the door of the lift we all shook hands then he opened his arms and gave me a huge hug. We had become old friends. Now I say to myself: he was 68, he had a wonderful family, he saw his children grown up and had huge happiness and pride in them, he leaves us his work, he has touched and influenced millions of people across the world and, in the end, death comes for each and every one of us. But it brings no comfort. The loss to his family I cannot speak of. For us, his friends, we are orphaned. What shall we do without him? He brought love and concern and loyalty and charm to his friendships, and he kept them in good repair. He was ready with help before you even knew you needed it. Many times, alone in a strange city, my hotel phone would ring and it would be a friend of Edward's: "He said I had to look after you so I'm coming round to take you out." When I told him last Christmas that I was going to Rome, he gave me a phone number: "Get in touch with her. She's a wonderful woman. You'll love her." It was his music teacher, from Cairo, from half a century ago. She still adored him. She said he had never lost touch and that she and her husband prayed for him every night. "Edward and his 3,000 close friends" is how one of us puts it. Yet when you were with him, you always felt unique. He noticed if you wore your hair differently, he commented on your clothes, on what you chose to eat. In my car, recently: "Would you mind switching off this dreadful racket?" of a currently popular Egyptian singer. And then, turning to me: "But if you like this stuff, how can you bear not to live in Cairo?" It is a measure of his no-holds-barred friendship that, when I was alone one night some two years ago, with the diagnosis of my husband's lung cancer just off the fax, it was to Edward in New York that I turned. He talked me through that first hour and gave me phone numbers of doctors, medical centres and friends who had been through it. When I made contact I found he had already called them and told them, again, to "look after" me. At the last two of his public events that I attended with him - one in Brighton, the other in Hay - people were coming up afterwards just to touch him. It was as though he was a talisman. He laughed it off: "You know me, I'm just an old demagogue," he said. But he wasn't. He was a guide and an example. In the most private conversation, as well as in public, he was always human, always fair, always inclusive. "What is the matter with these people?" he asked after a recent debate. "Why does no one mention truth or justice any more?" He believed that ordinary people, all over the world, still cared about truth and justice. My life and many others' are desolate without him. Source: The Guardian Date: 07/04/2002
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Open letter to Tony Blair by Egyptian born novelist
Dear Mr. Blair, London, It is midnight now and I have spent these last three days of Easter here, in London, moving between TV channels, the Internet and the walls of my home as the Israeli army moves into the towns of the West Bank. I feel a tremendous anger and a tremendous frustration. And thousands in Britain, millions in the world, feel the same way. We hate what is happening. We fear what is about to happen. On Saturday I received an e-mail signed by eight Palestinian and 17 Israeli academics. They say, among other things: "We call for the international community not to wait for massacres on the scale of those in Sabra and Shatila in 1982; the time for action is now." Now, Mr. Blair, now. When you were elected, much was made of your "ethical" foreign policy. Where are the ethics of your foreign policy now, Mr. Blair? Women and children are trapped in their homes. Men are blindfolded and shot in the streets. An entire civilian population is being terrorized in the name of rooting out terror - will you do nothing about it? Two months ago, in a talk in central London, the Israeli anti-occupation activist Jeff Halper told us that Israel will never, ever pull out of the West Bank voluntarily. And why should it? After all, this is how Israel first came into being. Bands of settlers taking over land and driving out the original inhabitants. The policy that was adopted in 1905 and which remains unchanged is "talk peace and create facts on the ground". This is what every Israeli government has done so far. The Sharons are simply more upfront about their intentions than the Baraks. But there are differences between then and now. One is that some young Israelis, born in Israel and loyal to their country, are beginning to think differently. Some of them are the soldiers now (numbering 384) who are bravely refusing to serve in the occupied territories. Here is one, Gil Nemesh, staff sergeant, engineering: "Those terrible things happening in the territories have little to do with the security of Israel and stopping terror. It is all about the settlements. Choking and starving and humiliating millions of people, to provide safety to the settlements." Another difference between then and now is the Palestinian people. They have learned the lessons of 1948; have learned what happens to you once you let yourself be terrorized off your land. And so they are staying to the bitter end. Not that the duration has been any less bitter. They have gone the way of negotiations and talks and discussions, and have seen that in 32 years it has led them nowhere. That in the nine years since the Oslo accord the illegal settlements have doubled while the world is lulled by talk of "peace processes" and "stages" and "negotiations". Now their backs are to the wall. Bring the occupation to an end and you will have peace in the time it takes to withdraw the Israeli army and the illegal settlers to within the Green Line. The situation is still retrievable - but only just. The vast majority of Palestinians do not condone suicide attacks-or any attacks - upon civilians. Here is another Israeli soldier: Tal Belo, staff sergeant, armored corps: "The women of Gaza were the true heroes. While the men were busy tending to the miseries of life and looking for ways to liberate themselves from this or that occupation, the women were busy taking care of the kids, preparing the food and working in the groves... All alone there, they cried for their youth and for their dreams; for the sons who were killed or sent to prison, or for the sons who will be killed or will be sent to prison." But now young girls strap explosives to their bodies and blow themselves up. Can you imagine the despair and the anger that would lead a young woman to such an act? Do you know what happens in the West Bank and Gaza, Mr. Blair? What has been happening there for years? Let me tell you - or better still, let another Israeli soldier tell you. You see, Mr. Blair, I am quoting heavily from these young men. This is to make up the credibility I may lack as a UK citizen of Egyptian origin and to dispel the prevailing myth that this is a "religious" conflict rather than a political one. So listen to Assaf Oron, Sergeant, first class, Infantry: "...when, as a sergeant, I found myself in charge, something cracked inside me. Without thinking, I turned into the perfect occupation enforcer. I settled accounts with 'upstarts' who didn't show enough respect. I tore up the personal documents of men my father's age. I hit, harassed, served as a bad example... I was no aberration. I was exactly the norm..." Have you seen the pictures of the Israeli army stationed on the roofs of people's houses? Do you know what that is like, day by day, hour by hour? Listen to Avner Kohavi, sergeant first class, infantry: "First, the external walls of the house were black with coffee leftovers spilled by the soldiers from the roof. The yard was full of shit and toilet papers because it served as the soldiers' latrine. On the roof there were piles of trash and empty cans. The military vehicle bringing every new shift in would shatter the pavement and entrance to the house. When a shift changed at 2am, all the tenants would wake up, and since there was a baby in the house he would start wailing. I remember the look on the face of the tenants whenever I bumped into them on the stairway: a look of humiliation." And this was in the good old days, before they started making men strip to their underwear to walk through the checkpoints, before they started digging trenches so that people couldn't get to work, before they placed their tanks at hospital gates so women delivered their babies in the streets, before they started the executions. So tell them, Mr. Blair, tell them that this life, with no end in sight, is preferable to blowing themselves up and taking a few of their tormentors with them. The people who get blown up are often not their specific tormentors. A sad and terrible truth. But still, as Tamir Sorek, sergeant first class, army intelligence, writes: "The deprived (Palestinian) habitants are still desperately demanding their rights. The obvious facts that their uprising includes hideous assaults against innocent privileged (Israeli) people do not subtract from the legitimacy of their claim for freedom from non-elected rule.” How is that for straight, moral thinking? Do something to stop the occupation, Mr. Blair. For days presidents and world leaders have been pleading with Sharon not to harm Chairman Arafat. Arafat's life is not worth more than any other and the man is no picture, but filmed by candlelight he looked like a Rembrandt on the television screen. That is the image that will fuel the years of anguish that will surely follow if anything happens to him. The occupation is not negotiable. It is illegal by all accepted international laws. It is immoral, obscene, corrupting. Negotiations about the other issues in question should take place after the occupation is ended. The calls for help are coming not only from the Palestinians but from Israelis too. Listen to them. And tell your friend in the White House that Israel needs to be bound by international law. Tell him that the Arabs' quarrel with America is because of its dishonesty on the Israeli issue; that it cannot pick a fight with Iraq for not heeding international law and at the same time fund the Israeli slaughter of Palestinians with American taxpayers' money. As Sgt. Oron writes: "We are the Chinese young man standing in front of the tank (in Tiananmen Square). And you? If you are nowhere to be seen, you are probably inside the tank, advising the driver." Yours, Ahdaf Soueif. (GNS) Contact us
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