This is the second part of a travel essay by a a skills exchange writer travelling through Palestine 

“There is one interesting story you might want to know,” begins Mohammed Sahin, hunched down, hands clasped tight. “We have no evidence, but it is strange. In 2003, behind these few houses, Bila saw a soldier come early one morning, and throw a gas canister on the ground outside. There was no explosion, only a yellow blue gas that separated after 15 minutes. It was strange, it was 5am, everybody was sleeping. Later they came back to collect the can.
“Ever since then, seven children from these houses have died with abnormal conditions. Bila’s son died when he was two, his brain developed abnormally. My neighbour’s daughter was born without a leg. Ali has problems, he can’t have children now. We never had these problems before.”

Bethlehem

The red earth beneath the olive groves outside Bethlehem compresses like a fresh gathering of snow. Stooped down, Mahmoud Suliman, part-time farmer and director of the Popular Community Against the Wall, is proud to show off his little patch of gold dust.

“We are planting these trees because they are symbols of peace. This land is the best land in the West Bank, these olive trees will need some irrigation for the five years before the first harvest, but after that once a year is enough,” he explains. “The soil is perfect for olive trees, it absorbs the water and holds it for a long time.”

We are planting around two dozen saplings 100 metres from the sand pits that mark the route of the uncompleted separation barrier, which in Bethlehem’s southern villages has eaten up 4,000 dunams of Palestinian farmers’ land. Rabbis for Human Rights’ (RHR) Olive Tree Campaign has fostered new friendships in these fields, where its members come to work side by side with local farmers, in the hope that their presence will also help stave off the threat of belligerent Jewish settlers. 1 Farmers in these parts have been shot at by radical settlers motivated by what they consider a divine duty to ‘redeem’ all of the land of Israel.

Only one year ago, the 67-year-old owner of land nearby, Abu Elias, woke one morning to the sound of Israeli bulldozers outside his window, ripping through the fields. He then climbed an adjacent hill to survey the 400 dunams of his land rendered isolated on the Israeli side of the path. Consumed by despair, Abu Elias dropped dead.

“Believe me, it’s the most depressing thing in the world to see your trees torn from the ground,” says Mahmoud. “Just look at what has happened in the north. First they will build a path and say you can come and go [to their lands beyond it]. Then they will say you need permission, then eventually the owner will die, and they’ll say it’s their land. If it’s not used for three years, they can take it anyway. Israeli law says that.”

In the presence of foreigners, like all Palestinians Mahmoud is seizing his opportunity to speak to the world. He is walking a psychological tightrope, struggling to reconcile an underlying rage with a diplomatic imperative. But in the defiant tremor so discernible after almost every word, he is claiming ownership over this moment, and might as well be saying, a la ‘Braveheart’, that ‘you can take our land, but you can never take our rights, or our convictions’.

He forges on: “The idea is to make us refugees in our own land. Years ago I would walk to Bethlehem and smoke one cigarette on the way. Next year I’ll go through a whole box. They’ll put a barrier here, a checkpoint there, and eventually it will be so hard for me to get to work I’ll have to move to Bethlehem – a city of 160,000 people in 800 metres of space. Then the settlements on the hill tops will surround our empty land. Then we will fight among ourselves, and then it will be all finished. This is what they want.”

Farmers here are compelled to call upon their deep reserves of sumud (or steadfastness) – a determination of sticking to the land. Because as the late Israeli academic Tanya Reinhart observed, in an echo of Mahmoud’s wistful forecast, “right from the start, Palestinian organisations warned that Israel was trying to push the Palestinians into a civil war in which they would slaughter one another”. 2

As for the rabbis, and their indefatigable executive director, Arik Ascherman, it is the route, and not the fact, of the separation barrier that has brought them into the fields in solidarity with the farmers.
“We have created a conflict between right and right – the Israeli right to defend itself, and the Palestinian right to work their land. If the wall had been built on the green line, you could have your cake and eat it, but that’s not what has happened,” explains Rabbi Ascherman.

In June 2006 RHR, together with five local councils, won a major victory when the Supreme Court ruled in favour of its petition demanding that Israel guarantee farmers access to their lands. 3 But despite the order, obliging the IDF to protect farmers from extremist settlers, “the results on the ground have not been great. Although farmers often have greater access to their land, the bulldozing of olive trees has not changed, and nobody has been brought to justice.”

Discrepancies emerge between what the court rules and how the IDF chooses to interpret that on the ground. Local commanders are under huge pressure from settlers, with whom some of them may share an ideological affinity.

“The order is clear, but the translation is complex,” explains Rabbi Yehiel Grenimann, an Australian Jew who moved to Israel in order “to defend my people” during the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Like Rabbi Ascherman, he considers his concept of Zionism as having been subverted by covetous forces within the Israeli military and settler movement. As he puts it: “There is a hierarchy of values in Judaism, and as holy as the land of Israel is, human life is more holy.”

The prevention of home demolitions is another prong to the rabbis’ overt defence of human rights in the Occupied Territories. Some years ago in East Jerusalem – where the government exerts its demolition policy with particular vigour, and where RHR is therefore particularly active – Rabbi Ascherman literally put his body on the line in trying to prevent the destruction of two Palestinian homes, and wound up in court to face charges as a result.

In a letter written ahead of the trial to the then prime minister Ariel Sharon beseeching him to see sense, RHR of North America issued a poignant decree that could refer as easily to the ruination of land as it does to the demolition of houses:

“A sense of home is an essential part of our humanity. The destruction of a home can only be experienced as a violation by its inhabitants. Something fundamental to one’s identity has been removed. To be deprived of one’s home is to be naked in the world. This is why Rabbi Ascherman stood with the Maswadeh family in Beit Hanina when the bulldozers came, leaving the entire family homeless within a matter of minutes. It is why he stood with the family of Ahmed Mousa Dari in Issawiyah, when the bulldozers came to demolish their home. It is why he is now standing trial.” 4

The day’s planting is done and Mahmoud, whose family have lived in these parts “for 70 grandfathers”, has taken us to a hill to the other side of Bethlehem, to show us more cast-off land. There are 12km, and 26,000 dunams, between this spot and the green line; 10,000 grape trees and hundreds of olive trees have been felled to make way for the barrier. There is a moment’s contemplation as we dwell on the irony that the settlers also oppose the barrier – but only because they claim all of the land as theirs.

It is not lost on Mahmoud that RHR pulls many strings with contacts inside Israel to assist Palestinians. Again, he is raring to connect with a sympathetic audience, and takes to his rocky rostrum like a mute who has suddenly discovered how to speak.

“We need to see Jews on the street, a movement to change things. We have to push from the bottom to the top, to build trust. You need to publish this message in Israeli society. You have a lot of things to do; they are pushing Palestinians towards violence.”

Rabbi Ascherman delivers a few soothing parting words. “If you hear of more farmers who can’t get to their land, tell us. We might be able to help.”

And with that, we tuck into our mini-bus and abandon the fields of Bethlehem. Later, along Route 60, the longest tunnel in the Middle East that runs underneath the city, Rabbi Grenimann pauses for thought, and leaves us with a stirring last word.

“We are speaking to higher values than land,” he says of RHR. “You can’t realise a dream of God’s kingdom on earth through repression and violence. Nationalism is a false God. Land is for all religions.”

“There are three seas around me,” says Mohammed. “I can smell the salt of Galilee. And I have never seen any of them, because we are locked here. That is what I would like. I am 24 years old and the farthest I have been is to Ramallah.”

Flight from Faqua

Bila’s beautiful, daintily dressed daughter, Zadil, is occupying the best seat in the house, on her father’s lap, as Bila sets the night’s main feature in motion with a touch of the mouse.

The seven of us are sitting in the lap of relative luxury. Compared to other Faqua living rooms, this is a model of sophistication with its three sofas, cupboard, linen-covered plastic table and computer. We sip tea and fix our eyes on the unfolding drama.

The opening sequences could be a Palestinian ‘Blair Witch Project’ – there are a half-dozen young men loitering around mountain sides, their frames blurred by a thick mist and the obstruction of olive trees, seeming not to know which way is what. The air is tetchy, a couple of them are dozing on the ground in sleeping bags and plastic sheeting, their only obvious belongings; another is speaking on his cell phone.

The camera pans behind them, into the dense mist, as if a pack of wolves are about to emerge from it. There are no wolves, but all of a sudden, the group makes haste to a new location, where they regroup and survey their options. Apparently out of danger, one of them sets up his bed in an olive tree, though the leaves there are a poor substitute for camouflage.

In this West Bank village, where horror stories are ubiquitous, the horror in this home-made movie is that one of the main protagonists is Zadil’s father; two more are also among the audience this evening.

When Israel Zangwill, a prominent British Zionist spokesman, was asked in 1918 by the Jewish Chronicle for his thoughts on what ought to be done with Palestine’s then Arab majority, he opined that “we must generally encourage them to trek… To fold their tents and silently steal away is their proverbial habit: let them exemplify it now.” 5 Mr Zangwill would make a delighted spectator of the flight of the boys from Faqua, so precise a coming to life of his vision, minus the tents.

Bila’s mobile-phone video is the product of two illegal work expeditions inside Israel, documenting the appalling conditions young West Bank men endure in between stints of labour there, having to constantly evade IDF patrols and the prison terms that are meted out if they are caught. The hill-side forest in this video, near Nazareth, is a favourite lodging spot, and their presence there, typically for three-month periods each time, is characterised – apart from having to sleep in trees – by the fear of leaving a trail.

These men are mostly single and under the age of 35 – fitting the profile of those Israel has denied work permits to work in Israel since the beginning of the second intifada in December 2000, lest they strap explosive devises to themselves en route. It is estimated that 110,000 Palestinians have lost their jobs in Israel in the period since. But the ability of these young men to enter Israel at all, in spite of the West Bank barrier, casts significant doubt on Israeli assertions that the reduction in suicide attacks is testimony to the success of the barrier in keeping bombers out.

The clandestine operation to shuttle illegal West Bank workers into Israel goes like this: 15 to 20 men will pack into a mini-bus with blacked-out windows. The driver will be an Arab, but the vehicle yellow-plated, and therefore licensed to move around inside Israel. Each man pays between 150 and 200 shekels to the driver, who on the basis of several calls will calculate an opportune time to approach the checkpoint. The IDF soldiers, usually so forensic and obstinate in exercising scrutiny, allow their diligence to lapse this once, and wave the mini-bus through.

Once inside, it is all about biding one’s time in the olive groves, avoiding the IDF, and waiting for the call to work. Bosses inside Israel, usually Arab Israelis, are only too happy to profit from the stream of cheap labour. Work in construction and other menial sectors arrives haphazardly and potentially from any corner of the country, and is arranged by an ‘intermediary’, who picks them up, delivers them to work, and takes a cut for the service.

The 200 shekels (€38) a day Mahmoud has earned at a chicken farm in Bersheeva recently is not what he would have earned before the intifada – nor the 400 shekels an Israeli earns for doing the same job – but with a wedding to plan for this summer, he doesn’t dwell for too long on the perils involved. Besides, the unemployment rate has soared in the West Bank, where work is at a premium and poorly paid.

Owing to the fact that the barrier does not follow the ‘green line’ – and that at certain points there is a steady flow, therefore, of Palestinians entering and exiting lands and villages they have been cut off from – getting back home to Faqua is a cinch. Illegal workers simply make for the gate in Bar’ta, and if challenged as to why they don’t have permits, convince that they came through that morning without being stopped.

As the joke goes in the West Bank, the trouble is getting into paradise, returning to prison is no problem.

The prevailing tendency is for men to resist the audacious trek once they have married, though Bila has few qualms in leaving Zadil and his wife behind if there is opportunity to improve their lot. “I have nothing to lose,” he says, though he risks eight months in jail a 2,000 shekel fine.

It is by way of this economic strangulation, a by-product of Israel ostensibly safeguarding its security, that, as the Israeli journalist Amira Hass contends, “the occupation’s balance of power between ruler and petitioner has been redoubled, leaving the Palestinians even more dependent. It is the policy of closure that has proved to be the most effective means of control and leverage”. 6

Zadil will grow up fast on these streets. It is to be hoped that for a childhood teetering so precariously on the edge of innocence, she continues to believe in hide and seek for as long as possible.

Sporadic IDF forays into villages usually occur at night. When they knock at homes, soldiers will punch in glass with the butts of their rifles, or blow open doors if they get no immediate response. Night time is also the only time of day Muslim women, in the privacy of their homes, are ‘uncovered’. When soldiers knocked on the door of a house in a village near Jenin four years ago, the girl inside scampered for clothes to cover herself up. It took a little while, but when she was ready she hurried to the front door. By the time she had the door knob clenched, the pin had already been pulled from the grenade.

City of Gods

Lunch today is a delicious spread of fresh salad, spiced chicken and brown rice, and Revuel, who had been imploring me to come join his group, engages me with some no-nonsense banter.

“Read the bible, and you will see, the end is coming soon. I don’t know if it will be one day or one hundred years, but I know we are close.”

An American Jew despondent with Jewish people’s failure to realise that Jesus was their saviour, Revuel has been called here by the man above.
“Just like sheep no longer look white when it snows, compared to Jesus we all look like sinners, because he was the only man who never sinned.”

If it were anywhere else, such discourse would protrude like a sheep swimming in mud, but Revuel is one among thousands who stream into this city to answer a spiritual calling. Now, in the week leading up to Easter, the stream has become a flood, and in this Christian hotel, adjacent to Jaffa Gate in the historic Old City, a full complement of theological fodder is being served up.

The name Jerusalem was first used as far back as the 19th century BC. It comes from the Canaanite word ‘Urushalimu’ – Uru means foundation; ‘Shalim’ was the Canaanite god of plenitude. 7 After generations of conquests, war and expulsions, today Jerusalem stands on the front line of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, as a sacred shrine of Islam, and as the ‘eternal and undivided’ capital of Israel. But for a place perceived so exclusively in terms of its polarity, there are chaotic non-linear narratives flourishing underneath the surface here.

Inside Jaffa Gate one stands at the junction of the Muslim, Christian and Armenian quarters of the Old City. Barely five minutes on foot to the east is the Jewish quarter, home to 2,000 Jews today, and built on the ashes of the Maghribi quarter that dated from the reign of Afdal ed-Din, son of Saladin, between 1186 and 1196. 8 The 1967 Israeli invasion of the West Bank and East Jerusalem precipitated the expulsion of 6,000 Muslim and Christian residents from the quarter.

The confiscation of land in the Maghribi quarter facilitated the creation of a large plaza in front of the Western, or Wailing Wall, the sacred place of Jewish devotion – Jews claim that the wall is the remains of the first temple of Solomon, son of King David and ruler of southern Judea. Even today, archaeologists are hard at work behind the wall underneath the Temple Mount – which houses the Al Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock, from where Muslims say the prophet Mohammed ascended into heaven – searching for evidence of the first temple, but no such evidence has ever been found.

Israeli soldiers guarding the entrances to the Temple Mount provide a menacing fact – their presence through all the Old City might seem more benign if it wasn’t for the creeping Jewish colonisation of the city. The judaisation of the Muslim and Christian quarters is no secret, nor is the fact that extremist Jews have long coveted the Temple Mount in order to build the third temple there.

This is all territory east of the ‘green line’, which the international community still considers under occupation, but which Israel treats as part of Israel proper. Though blue ID cards allow Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem to live in the city, it doesn’t confer all of the civil or political rights afforded to Jews.

Muslim men under the age of 40 are routinely prevented from entering the Al Aqsa mosque for prayer, while tourists wanting to survey the Mount are ushered away from the Muslim quarter entrances towards one at the Wailing Wall. Muslim traders are convinced this is simply the Israeli government effecting the corporate strand of its policy of strangulation of the Muslim quarter – in essence, that it wants to divert as much tourist revenue as possible to the Wailing Wall and Jewish quarter.

In a city where trying to absorb information is like trying to catch rain drops, stories pertaining to the surreptitious tactics of Jewish business people, in attempting to expand the Jewish foothold in the Muslim quarter, sound particularly ominous. There have been a litany of cases where local tenants under pressure to pay rents, particularly more elderly residents, have buckled to offers of Jewish businessmen to finance payments until the tenant dies – so long as they hand over tenancy rights (in effect, ownership) of their property in return.

Back in my hotel on the edge of the Christian quarter next to Jaffa Gate, the proprietor, Mr Abu Walid Dajani, is a picture of perpetual unease. Himself a refugee of the 1948 war – he shows me on a map the spot two miles further west, on the other side of the green line, from where his family fled – these days he is preoccupied by the ongoing court case that is endeavouring to unravel a mess instigated by the sale of the New Imperial Hotel by its owners, the Greek Orthodox Church, to a group of wealthy Jewish investors. 9 This was all done behind the backs of the Dajani family, who as the property’s long-term tenants, feel they have had their world pulled from beneath them.

The potentially explosive ramifications of the secretive deal are better understood in the context of geography, with the hotel located at a strategically vital point where the Christian, Armenian and Muslim quarters meet, and right in the middle of a line that runs from the Jewish quarter to Jewish central Jerusalem.

In this city, where economics, politics and religion are woven into one complex and neurotic mesh, individual testimonies shed much light on the way of things. Jean-Marie Dansette is the director of Produits de Palestine, which he established after coming to help Palestinian farmers harvest their olives during the second intifada. He had been outraged by stories of the West Bank farmers being shot at by Jewish settlers, so he came to sample the bullets for himself. For a week he has been my companion, as he sought out new products to import, and as I sought information. His disenchantment with his French compatriots is palpable as he observes how religion, politics and commerce collide.

“I see French people go there in Bethlehem [which lies five miles south of Jerusalem in the West Bank] with an Israeli tour bus company. The city is surrounded by a wall, but they go to the church of the nativity, and they don’t see the wall. They come out of the church to buy souvenirs and the guide tells them ‘no you shouldn’t buy souvenirs here, it’s dangerous.’ Then they leave, go back into Israel to buy the same souvenirs, but for five times the price. I’ve seen this myself, and this is how they kill the economy in Bethlehem.

“I’ve heard Israel wants to build a new church of the nativity outside Bethlehem, bring the tourists and say ‘come here, it’s the same church!’

“I look at these French tourists on Via Dolorosa, where Jesus carried the cross on his way to crucifixion, and it’s like they are in a tunnel. They are fanatical Christians, saying wow look where we are, but they have forgotten the message of Jesus. Jesus devoted himself to the poor and the suffering, but these people don’t see how the Palestinians suffer.”

It is Sunday, March 9, and in a Jerusalem Post article, the public security minister, Avi Dichter, is calling for the expulsion to the West Bank of East Jerusalem Palestinians who have been involved in terrorism. 10 Only three days before, eight young Jewish students in a West Jerusalem yeshiva were murdered by a gunman, Ala Abu Dhaim, from the Arab neighbourhood of Jabel Mukaber. The air, thick with religious pilgrims, is tense.

Beyond the Temple Mount and the precipice of the old city wall to the east, Palestinians of East Jerusalem number over 200,000. They can roam freely around West Jerusalem with their blue identity cards. But they are a nuisance for Israel, and the subject of its audacious reconfiguration of East Jerusalem’s demography.

Jerusalem was first closed off in 1994, when Israel erected nine checkpoints at entrances to the city. This preceded the decision of the Shimon Peres government in 1995 to demand that Palestinians prove their lives revolved around the city in order to hold onto their blue identity cards. Denied the right to vote in Israeli elections or hold Israeli passports, nevertheless Arabs of East Jerusalem find themselves at the receiving end of rigid Israeli planning laws, making it almost impossible for them to build property or expand communities. Despite comprising one-third of the population of municipal Jerusalem, they only have the use of 3.5% of the area for their housing and community needs. 11

Israel’s separation wall slices through Arab neighbourhoods in East Jerusalem, cutting off families from their relatives, stifling economic growth and restricting movement of people. With the construction of the wall, Jerusalem residents on the West Bank side suddenly found themselves forbidden from entering their own city. Palestinian buildings in East Jerusalem can only be one or two storeys high, while Jewish ones can rise to eight floors. Arab residents are enticed to move to cheaper suburbs outside the wall, and blue identity cards – renewed annually – are rescinded on the most spurious of pretexts. It is a policy known as ‘quiet transfer’.

While Jewish settlers are offered lucrative financial packages to move to settlements that have sprung up on confiscated Palestinian land and that now encircle East Jerusalem, Palestinians in East Jerusalem are forced to pay sums of up to $40,000 for a permit to build on their own land.

It is a dizzying reality not easy to tally with any natural system of justice, but in Jerusalem, with its nebulas convergence of opposite and disparate forces, there is a modicum of sense even in the nonsensical. I am brought back to Revuel, and his searing optimism ahead of the impending armageddon.

“These are extraordinary times we live in. You should be elated, as long as you have Jesus in your heart.”

“So how do I find him, Revuel?”

“Just ask him into your life. Call him.”

“Ok, maybe I’ll call him later then.”

“Well it’s only a local call from here.”
1 Rabbis for Human Rights was founded in 1988. It is composed of more than 100 reform, orthodox, conservative, reconstructionist and renewal rabbis and rabbinical students. It says that it is the sole Israeli organisation that gives voice to the Jewish religious traditions of human rights and justice as reflected in the sacred texts and Israel’s Declaration of Independence.
2 Reinhart, How to End the War of 1948, p196.
3 The state versus Rabbis for Human Rights, June 26 2006.
4 Letter to Ariel Sharon, Rabbis for Human Rights of North America, April 2002.
5 Masalha, Expulsion of the Palestinians, p14.
6 Hass, Tell Me No Lies, p351.
7 Alternative Tourism Group, Palestine and Palestinians, p81.
8 Ibid, p117.
9 Donald MacIntyre, “The Man Who Sold Jerusalem,” The Independent, May 10 2005.
10 Etgar Lefkovits, “Israel Probes Hizbullah Involvement in Yeshiva Attack,” The Jerusalem Post, March 9 2008.
11 Alternative Tourism Group, Palestine and Palestinians, p88.