I'm trying to keep pretty good notes about what I see and hear and learn here, so I am writing a lot. I forgot to write about how a bunch of us in our group went to see a big open air concert in the center of Ramallah. It was great music, including a song about falling in love at the Bethlehem checkpoint. "The soldier gave me my papers and told me I could go, but my eyes remain with you and my heart will always be at the checkpoint", that's what I am told was sung.
July 15
I left our group of Welcome to Palestine activists and went to Jerusalem on my own. I am in Jerusalem right now. I attended a giant march in Jerusalem in support of Palestinians being dispossessed in Sheik Jarrah (the neighborhood just north of the old city.) It probably had around 2000 people, almost all Israelis. It also seemed to have the purpose of gathering Israelis who support the right of the PA to be admitted to the UN in September. Unlike all the actions I have attended in the West Bank, this rally was not attacked or threatened by soldiers.
I was talking to a couple of the people marching and was surprised that none of them had ever been to the West Bank. One lady said that she supported two states, one for us and one for them. She said that the settlements should be given to Palestinians, and they should live in their West Bank and Gaza state and we will live in ours. This solution doesn't really seem to make sense to me, as it ignores the desire of refugees in the West Bank, Gaza and around the world to return to what is now Israel. It doesn't deal with ongoing discrimination and land confiscation of Palestinian-Israeli citizens. And it seems politically unlikely that any government will make the nearly 500,000 Israelis now living in settlements would just up and leave. And the Wall? And water rights? Any solution will be more complicated than just you've got yours on that side of the line and we've got ours on this side of the land.
I think the march was pushing no one consensus on these issues. It was good to see that many Israeli out marching.
A couple hours later I went to see a talk by Israeli historian Ilan Pappe. He recently wrote a book called "The Forgotten Palestinians" about the history and present situation for Palestinian-Israelis. He started out by telling how he read letters that some of the first Zionist settlers in Palestine sent back to their countries. They complained about everything, but especially about how many Palestinians there were. They saw them as an alien presence in their Jewish country. Pappe said this was unique among colonial projects, even those more brutal than the Zionist project - in no other place did the colonist see themselves as natives and see the natives as an unnatural, alien presence.
Pappe said that 106 years later this same attitude remains. The Zionist project continues with the same methodology of "Judaizing" the land, house by house, acre by acre. This is true not only in the West Bank but in Israel itself. Pappe said that the original Israeli leadership was not strong enough to complete the original ethnic cleansing of what is now Israel. Of the 1,000,000 inhabitants in 1947, 150,000 still remained in the early 50s. There was internal debate about what to do about these people, and expulsion was considered a good option until 1956, when because of the will of Moshe Sharrett it was taken off the table.
By 1966 Palestinians in Israel were given citizenship, but it is second class citizenship. Like in the West Bank, they have grossly unequal rights to land. They are not allowed to expand their communities - they are being pushed into smaller and smaller agricultural areas and eventually forced into the cities. There are 47 unrecognized Palestinian towns in Israel - they exist, people live there, but the officially don't exist. Their towns and villages are razed frequently, just as is the case in the West Bank.
This citizenship of Palestinians is always held up as a model for how amazingly liberal and tolerant the state of Israel is. The argument goes like this - even though we know that these people are dangerous, that they are potential terrorists, that they threaten us in every way, we are still so generous that we offer them citizenship. But it is not full citizenship - as long as the state of Israel is defined as the state of the Jewish people and Palestinians are seen as aliens there is no option for the Palestinians in Israel to become full citizens. Assimilation is not an option.
Pappe says as long as Israel is a Zionist state, the Palestinian-Israelis will always be at risk of expulsion. They, as well as refugees around the world, should be involved in decisions about any resolution of the conflict.
After the talk I met up with a Portuguese friend from the action and we walked around the old city, which was full of Orthodox Jews making their way to pray at the Western Wall for Shabat.
July 16
Today I took a tour of the Jordon Valley with the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, or ICAHD. Itay Epstein led this quite informative (and disturbing) tour. I took about 16 pages of notes, but I don't want to overwhelm or bore so I will try to summarize, concentrating what I saw with my own eyes.
To sum up, the Jordan Valley, except the center of the town of Jericho, has pretty much been totally taken over by settlers. There is a policy of complete ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in the Jordan Valley. In fact, Itay recently asked the chief legal counsel for the minister of defense if there was a plan of ethnic cleansing in the Jordan Valley and the man responded "There is no plan, and it is going very well." This is the desert area on the West Bank of the Jordan River.
We first went to the unrecognized Bedouin village of al-Khan al-Ahkbar, a series of shacks on the side of a highway. It consists of Bedouins who were expelled from what is now Israel in the 1940s. Their grazing areas used to extend from the Negev into Jordan, but has been reduced to almost nothing now. For 44 years they have not been allowed to build anything.
Less than a couple hundred buildings of any type have been legally built since 1967 anywhere in the West Bank. The state of Israel considers the Jordanian zoning plans of 1967 to be the guide to what is and is not allowed. Meanwhile, around 25,000 Palestinian homes have been demolished, with an estimated 30,000 to 40,000 slated for demolition. A Palestinian is never compensated for his or her demolished home.
Getting back to al-Khan al-Ahkbar, it is in the shadow of a settlement called Kfar Aduumim. This is where Israeli Ambassador to the United States Michael Oren lives. The settlements are beautiful homes, with running water all the time, electricity all the time. They even have swimming pools, from which they can bathe and look down on the Bedouins in shacks, who have no water or electricity. If they try to get access to the water that is being pumped to the settlements from what used to be their wells they are arrested, jailed and fined. In fact, they had to go to court to remain having access to walk from their town to the road. This cost the Bedouins 20,000 dollars.
The main school and several homes in the town are slated to be demolished any day. So far only the bathroom of the school has been demolished. Why did the IDF come to the school with a bulldozer and knock down the bathroom and nothing else? Nobody knows.
We next saw al-Wuja, just outside of Jericho. What was once a lush place now is dry - all the water has gone to Israeli settlements, where organic grapes and dates are grown to make products that are sold for a high price mainly in Europe. The Palestinians who are being displaced are the people who do the working growing the grapes and dates - they have no other choice to survive.
We then went to the village of Fasiyil al Rousta. Around 100 Bedouins live on the outskirts of town. Their homes were just demolished. The place is full of rubble. They spent days in the desert sun and now live under plastic tents. They have an especially tough time because they are not trusted by many of the other non-Bedouin Palestinians in the town, and so they didn't get a lot of support.
The way demolitions work is that the state must deliver a message about demolition one week before it happens. The order does not need to be delivered to a person, just the building.
In this town the bulldozers came at 5am. Itay says the new conscripts who are 18 or 19 years old are the people sent to knock down homes, because they are the easiest to manipulate and the least likely to refuse the order. The people of Fasiyil al Rousta have had their homes demolished several times. They keep rebuilding - they have nowhere else to go and they don't want to lose their land. Once they leave the land will be declared vacant and they will lose it forever to the State of Israel, which will likely give it to a nearby settlement.
According to the State of Israel, no Palestinian has title to any land in the West Bank south of Nablus (Nablus is in the northern part). This is because between 1948 and 1967 the state of Jordan was conducting a land ownership census (a cadastre) of Palestinian land in the West Bank, but it was a slow process and they started in the north and went south. They had only gotten to Nablus when the Israelis took control of the territory. Israel does not recognize traditional communal ownership nor do they usually recognize titles from the Ottoman Empire.
We then went to the town of Palestinian town of Jiflik, which is adjacent to the Israeli settlement of Massua. The settlement is settled by "socialists", who live amongst themselves as socialists, but continue to steal the water and land of the people in Jiflik.
We saw jeeps driving into villages. It is part of a policy of "drawing resistance". They hope to provoke a response in order to have a reason to arrest people.
We then talked with the people of the Jordan Valley solidarity project. Abdel Rahim-Sharod told about how he has a small barn for sheep, and it was demolished. He was not allowed to take the sheep out before demolition and a dozen sheep were killed in the demolition. The sheep were officially deemed a security threat. Where he lives now has pipes running underneath them. These pipes carry water to settlers. He has to go 16 kilometers and spend three hours and then spend money in order to get drinking water for his family. If he were to tap into the water flowing under his home he would be fined up to 10,000 dollars and he would be jailed.
We went to the Hamra checkpoint. This checkpoint essentially separated the Jordan Valley from the rest of the West Bank. Along with the checkpoints Israel has created earthen mounds which prevent tractors for traveling freely between the Jordan Valley and the rest of the West Bank.
We went to the "Fabric of Life" gate. This is the only gate through which tractors can travel from the Jordan Valley to the rest of the West Bank. It is open twice a day, for 20 minutes in the morning and 20 minutes in the afternoon, Tuesday through Saturday. We were looking at it for 8 minutes before soldiers came and chased us off.
On the way back we saw several places which are very holy places in the Christian religion. Israel has taken all these sites from Palestinians. They now get all the profits that come from controlling these sites. In fact, the state of Israel just developed a "Good Samaritan" archeological site that is now heavily visited by Christians around the world. A Palestinian family was kicked out of the land, with no compensation, in order to develop the Good Samaritan site.
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