July 11
Things continue. I came here knowing a good amount about the situation here, but what I've learned since Friday seems like months of information and experience. I feel as though I have been here for months.
I forgot to report on an important activity that our group was involved in yesterday. From the Aida refugee camp we marched to the opening in the Wall for vehicles going from Bethlehem to Jerusalem. The Israeli military closed the gate right before we arrived and basically ignored us, except for snapping up a lot of pictures from their outpost tower. After being at the gate for a while we walked back to the camp, observing the wall as we did. I am right now in the shadow of this sad, pathetic structure built out of fear, greed, ignorance and hate.
Today we went up north to the outskirts of Qalqiliya. We didn't enter Qalquiliya because were afraid we would never be able to get out, given that the city is surround on all sides except for a tiny corridor which is blocked by an Israeli checkpoint. It is a totally controlled ghetto, with almost all of its agricultural land in the hands of settlers and the state of Israel.
The importance of the Wall in the occupation of Palestine cannot be underestimated. As you go north in the West Bank you see it snaking everywhere, in and out, separating Palestinians from their lands, making travel from place to place difficult (for Palestinians) and making ugly a beautiful land. The illegal Jewish settlements are also omnipresent - they are everywhere in the West Bank - north, south, east, west.
We went north with a woman named Sheerin, who is from al-Walaja, the village we visited yesterday. She was telling me stories as we went and explained what we saw on the way there.
We saw an area where over a thousand trees were chopped down, now just stumps. They had been destroyed for Israeli security concerns. No other explanation was given.
Sheerin told me about a village we passed which is now surrounded by the Wall. While Israel was constructing that section of the Wall, villagers were granted permits to be in Israel 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, as long as they didn't make trouble about the wall. It is almost unheard of from Palestinians in the West Bank to get this kind of access to Israel. The villagers needed money, they needed jobs, and they were able to find good paying jobs in Israel. As soon as the section of the Wall was completed the access to Israel was taken away, and now the only entrance to their village is closed between 9pm and 9am. Half of their lives they are completely prisoners, and the other half their freedom of movement is determined by the whim of Israeli soldiers. Most of the villagers have given up and left.
This is one of countless examples that show that this separation Wall has nothing to do with security and everything to do with making people's lives so miserable that they leave, allowing the State of Israel and settlers to take their lands. If these people were so dangerous that they needed to be kept out of Israel by a wall, why were they granted complete access to Israel for many months?
Abandoned land will become Israeli land. In Israel, if your land is left empty for three years, the State takes title to the land. This is true even if the land was abandoned because it is on the other side of a Wall from you and you cannot travel to it.
In the West Bank, the rules are different for Jewish settlers and Palestinians. If a Jewish someone approaches the home of a Jew, he or she has the right to self-defense. If a Palestinian home is approached, he or she must call the proper authorities and wait for help.
We passed a gas station on the side of highway by the Eli settlement. The station was owned by a Palestinian, which was not liked by the Eli settlers. Two settlers beat the owner to death. Nobody was charged with the murder, and with the help of a Palestinian collaborator, these same settlers now own the gas station.
These settlers at Eli, like a many religious settlements, routinely burn the Palestinian crops. The Palestinians have no legal recourse to such actions.
While we were travelling I asked Sheerin how to I could tell which buildings were Palestinian and which were controlled by settlers. She said it was easy. Only the Palestinian homes have water tanks on their roof. Settlers don't need tanks. They have access all day every day to water reservoirs and water from the Jordan River. The Palestinian access to water is severely restricted and they must use tanks to survive.
Mikorot is an Israeli company that controls all water in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. It is impossible for a Palestinian to get permission to dig a well. All Palestinian wells that you see were created before 1967. The average Israeli uses 8 times as much water as the average Palestinian.
All the Israeli road signs are written in Hebrew, Arabic and English. In the West Bank the signs identify every Israeli settlement, no matter how small, but only identify the largest Palestinian cities, like Ramallah. Palestinian town and villages are not marked by road signs. Still, you see them, they do exist.
I saw that on many of the signs identifying settlements, the Arabic had been covered with spray paint. I am guessing the settlers feel that naming their communities using Arabic letters was an insult. I saw one sign where the Arabic for "Jerusalem" was blacked out. On no sign was either English or Hebrew blacked out.
We arrived at the town of Ezbet Attabib just outside of Qalqiliya. The Israeli military is building a section of the Wall through the town, and they are building yet another illegal settlement on part of the town's land. Soldiers are often in the town. The villagers are all refugees from the town of Topsa, part of what is now Israel. Most will soon be refugees again, because out of towns 45 homes, 33 have been scheduled to be demolished.
We (Palestinian villagers and international supporters marched to a section of the wall that the Israelis have been building. It was a thick bramble of concertina wire. People started to pull on and cut the wire. Eventually Israeli military patrols approached, but we had already finished messing with the wire. The soldiers blocked the road with their vehicles and we marched past them and told them to go home. The got out of the vehicle and remained there. After some discussion they backed up. They promised to leave the town if we left the road. We left the road and they went out of sight. But they came back and blocked the main entrance to the town all afternoon. We left through a back route.
During the march I talked to a woman who is a school teacher from Qalqiliya. She teaches in Ezbet Attabib. She told me how in 2007 her house was demolished by the Israeli military. There was a man whom the Israeli military considered a criminal whom they suspected of staying in one of five houses. So they bulldozed all five houses. In three of the houses there was no warning to the bulldozers coming. This lady was home with here three small children when she heard rumbling. The house was being destroyed and she had to rapidly flee with her children. She had no time to salvage her belongings before the destruction.
We then went to a nearby village named Isla. At this village there is a gate in the wall. The gate is electrified in three places, and has a sign in English, Arabic and Hebrew warning that trying to tamper with or enter the gate without authorization will likely result in your death. It is an agricultural gate. If you are Palestinian and you can prove that you have title to land on the other side, you can apply for a permit to farm your land. If you do get the permit, it is only you, the title holder who can get access to the land. So if you are 80 years old and want your son or grandchild to do the farming, or if you need more than one person to farm to land, you are out of luck. The gate is opened once at 6am, then closed all day. It is reopened at 5pm. Thus you have to commit an entire day if you want access to the land.
There is a similar situation in nearby Jayous, which is the birthplace of the International Solidarity Movement. The wall has separated this village from its best land. We talked to Sharif Omar who owns several greenhouses on the other side of the wall. Jayous is high and the land is low, so we got a good look at the situation.
The wall is 6 kilometers from the green line (pre-1967 border). On the Green line there is a double layer electrified fence. It is impossible to cross without dying. In between the Wall and the green line is Sharif Omar's land.
Omar is 68 and has a permit to work his land. His son has a PhD in Agricultural Engineering from an Italian University. He works for a Swiss agency. He has the right to visit everywhere in Israel except Eilat. But he is denied from visiting his family's land between the green line and the Wall for "security reasons."
When we got back I visited the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem and had a drink with other activists. I talked to an American family about the things I have seen in last few days.
I have many photos - I hope tomorrow I will have time to download some.
I think my previous fear of deportation might have been overblown, although I have gotten mixed answers on the question. I think that as long as I am not arrested I probably won't be deported. But there is a good chance that I was photographed by soldiers, my face will be identified, and once I leave I will be put on a blacklist so that I can never return.
I want to remind you that presently there are still 49 French citizens in prison in Israel, and others of other nationalities, for telling the truth that they were planning to do what I am presently doing. They all came to Ben Gurion Airport on July 8, just as I did.
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