On nights spent lounging on the balcony with Maher and Nisreen, sipping
on mint tea, drawing apple-infused smoke through the nargila and
exchanging conversation – partly in my tentative Arabic – I find myself
forgetting entirely where I am. Where I am is Bait Sahour, in the
Israeli-occupied West Bank, but the adjective ‘occupied’ tends to lapse
from my consciousness with disturbing regularity. And it’s not as if
there’s a dearth of visual reminders; there’s the eight metre high
concrete monstrosity of the separation wall snaking its way through
Palestinian land; there are the Israeli soldiers lugging M16s around;
there are the illegal settlements with their thousands of houses, each
one a bland and soulless replica of every other; there are the
omnipresent checkpoints, erecting barriers between every point of note.I felt deeply unsettled the first time I saw an armed soldier – the
casual way in which he held his gun jarring with its sinister
potential. The first time I saw the wall, my eyes struggled to take in
its size and its ugliness. My first experience of being held up at a
checkpoint left me furious and frustrated with impatience. But
familiarity breeds desensitization. You begin to dissassociate: the
wall from the land it confiscates and the communities it splinters; the
soldiers’ presence from the humiliation of military occupation; the
settlements from how they appropriate and carve up another people’s
land. Words become devoid of any meaning deeper than their respective
OED definitions. A wall becomes just a wall, a settlement just a
settlement, a checkpoint just another checkpoint. The real tragedy of
occupation does not manifest itself in the visible but in the lives and
minds of the occupied; so as an outsider it is easy to be blinded to
the sorrows of occupation.
Moments of poignancy then take you by surprise. Tragedy slips easily
into what would otherwise be the most ordinary of dialogues and
situations: Maher interrupts the peace of an evening on his balcony to
recall a memory from the first intifada, when, aged 14, he was shot in
the leg with a rubber bullet, knocked unconscious and then beaten
because he threw a stone at a soldier. Manar’s tour of her university
takes in the auditorium, the faculties, the monument to students killed
by the Israeli army, and the view onto the hill from which the army
shelled buildings, as if each landmark were as run of the mill as the
others. My Arabic teacher oscillates between merry anecdotes of her
German students to tearful recollections of encounters with the army –
feeling “like a sheep” when she nervously crossed the checkpoint into
East Jerusalem, walking away from a soldier so he wouldn’t see her cry
when he came to inform her that the army had taken her land. The
parallel running of the trappings of a ‘normal’ life alongside the
misery of occupation is tragically expressive of the fact that here the
misery of occupation is normal life.
It wasn’t until I heard Amjad Rfaie (Director of the Social Development
Centre in New Aska Camp, Nablus) verbalise it that the meaning fully
resonated with me: “Everyone here has a sad story. Sometimes it’s a
small sad story, sometimes it’s a big one, but everybody has a sad
story”. The statement has since stood out in my mind for being eloquent
in its simplicity, yet ineffable in its implications: as an
international, you can never fully fathom the grief of a society
crumbling under the burden of 4 million sad stories, big and small. The
closest you can get is reading the stories, with all their layers of
meaning, as they unravel before you every day.
Like the 27th July 2005, when three houses in the village of Al-Khader
were demolished by the Israeli army. Last year Israel demolished the
homes of 1,471 families, mostly for “administrative” purposes. The
buildings in Al-Khader are being cleared because they are too close to
the settler bypass road; the army use the excuse that the residents do
not have a building permit. Whatever the reason the action is contrary
to international law: the Fourth Geneva Convention strictly prohibits
any destruction of property by the Occupying Power “except where such
destruction is rendered absolutely necessary by military operations”.
The day after the demolitions I journey to the ruins with a group of
internationals. By asking “ween?”(where?), while miming out destruction
to every villager we pass, we finally accumulate the directions to the
site of the demolitions and meander our way through Al-Khader to the
ill-fated destination. There we are confronted with the sprawling
concrete and metal corpse of the bulldozed homes. The houses have been
ripped out from their very foundations, bleeding a tangle of metal
arteries onto the earth.
Metres from this wreckage a newly homeless family sit on their
hurriedly salvaged furniture in the cooling shade of an olive tree. The
small children, who number twelve and one on its way, shyly eye their
international visitors with excited curiosity, immuned by the bliss of
youthful ignorance. The farmer and his two wives rest in near silence,
possibly reflecting, maybe contemplating, perhaps forcing off the
moment of realisation and the inevitable question, “What now?” Their
sombre tranquillity is momentarily broken when a settler decelerates
past the scene, orange anti-disengagement ribbon trailing from his
aerial, car horn blaring to signal out his glee.
In the face of the wretched combination of Israeli bureaucracy and
bulldozers I feel drained of every semblance of utility. Still, the
family thank us, in apples, for our solidarity, explaining that the
presence of internationals brings hope when it seems like the whole
world is deaf and blind to the situation here. Their words – translated
through a local – provide some comfort for a Westerner selfishly
seeking her validation. Before we leave, the family amble onto the
rubble remains to strike a disorientated pose, captured on our cameras
and allied with a promise to show and tell people back home. The difficulties the Israeli army impose on attempts to move from A to
B, saturate any journey with innumerable sad stories. Restri0ctions on
movement in Nablus – the largest city in the West Bank – wring
especially tight. Four checkpoints control movement in and out of the
city. Each of these is an internal checkpoint, impeding movement from
one Palestinian area to another. The Huwara checkpoint, restricts
movement to the south of Nablus, and is the biggest in the West Bank –
an average of 6,000 people pass through daily. But the production line
of the Huwara checkpoint churns out the perverse freedom at a painfully
slow rate: to exit the city you must pass through a sheltered area
encompassing a series of floor to roof turnstiles, metal detectors, bag
searches and questioning. Soldiers, many of them just teenagers,
control passage: they can hold you up for hours, turn you back to
Nablus, at a button’s press they can command the opening and closing of
the turnstile.
I approach the checkpoint and filter into the line for women and
children. As I wait to exit the incarcerated city I watch a soldier
ease his boredom by trapping a child between the cold metal bars of the
turnstile. The imagery invokes memories of snippets of conversation
from back in Bait Sahour: Maher imparting, “It feels like we’re living
in a prison”; Nisreen intoning, “See how they treat us? They treat us
like animals”. After a passport inspection and routine grilling from
the 18 year old soldier at the end of the production line, I’m free to
taxi back to Bait Sahour, with one checkpoint down and two to go.
The day makes good preparation for my trip to the city of Tulkarm. The
recent Netanyu suicide bomber hailed from near Tulkarm, and so the
residents of the city are finding themselves subject to a range of
collective punishments: floating checkpoints, road blocks, closures. A
three hour (there and back inclusive) journey stretches out into a 10
hour road rageist’s nightmare. I count a total of 12 obstacles
obstructing our freedom of movement, including road blocks, and all
manifestations of checkpoints: at one point soldiers march down the
aisle of our bus, inspecting papers; we wait in traffic jams to pass
through floating checkpoints, which are temporary and can appear
anywhere, at any time. We are held up for two and a half hours at a
four way checkpoint at a cross roads, where we observe a soldier train
his gun at an elderly women while the sun scorches above. It’s
monotonous travelling and it tires you out. We sit in buses, in taxis,
and on the hot ground before the checkpoint, quiet with fatigue. Once,
the silence is broken, by our guide, Mohammed, saying, “This is what
happens every day; all I want to do is go home and see my children.”
His voice is heavy with weariness from countless repeats of the day I’m
experiencing now for the first and last time.When asked why the checkpoints, why the wall, why the imprisonments
with no charge? Palestinians answer, “Security,” permeating the word
with heart-rending sarcasm. The word sounds no less hollow when uttered
by the Israeli soldiers. “Security” is perhaps the emptiest word here
in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT). A quick look at a map or
a day spent on the ground in the West Bank is enough for that
realisation to dawn. It’s clear when you watch soldiers arbitrarily
turning cars back in the road, and then driving off and leaving the
remaining traffic to its own devices. It’s clear when a soldier at an
internal checkpoint turns your taxi driver back because he happens to
be from a particular village, and it’s clearer still when the taxi
driver is forced to take a long-cut (known to the Israelis) which puts
him back on the road not a hundred metres past the original checkpoint.
And it was clear when a recently retired Israeli general who led the
civil administration in the OPT said, “Of course the wall is not a
security wall – it’s a political wall. Just look at the map.”
The Wall is unnecessarily the author of a thousand sad stories. It
slices through the Ayda Refugee Camp in Bethlehem, leaving many
Palestinians on the “other side”. The wall separates these people from
their medical and educational facilities. Cars cannot pass through the
checkpoint in the wall, where people can be held up for many hours. The
children are always late for school, the emergency medical services are
always potentially too far out of reach. The tactic aims at driving
these people off their land and to the other side of the wall.
In July last year, the International Court of Justice, the principal
judicial organ of the United Nations ruled that “the construction of
the wall being built by Israel, the occupying Power, in the Occupied
Palestinian Territory, including in and around East Jerusalem, are
contrary to international law; Israel is under an obligation to cease
forthwith the works of construction of the wall being built in the
Occupied Palestinian Territory, to dismantle forthwith the structure
therein situated, and to make reparation for all damage caused by the
construction of the wall.” Yet, the damage continues unabated.
Standing on the balcony of Issa’s house, near Tulkarm, I can see out
onto his acres of olive tree groves. Each olive tree is imbued with its
own particular character. Their branches contort into the most
human-like of expressions; they demand anthropomorphising. The
Palestinian people oblige, referring to the trees as their
grandfathers. An innocuous looking fence, barely discernable against
the yellow hues of the desert land, runs across the horizon a few
metres from the house. The fence is part of the planned 400 mile length
of the separation wall and this section is severing Issa from his
family of trees. Issa can only access his olives through a gate in the
fence, five kilometres distant from his house, which is just ten metres
distant from his land. For the olives to be harvested he must call a
soldier to open a gate in the fence. Typically a teenager will saunter
up to the gate three or four hours later. Issa is then permitted to
work the land for two hours. He cannot bring vehicles onto his land: he
relies on his own work power and that of his wife and donkey (whose
names the soldier mockingly interchanges). These constraints make it
impossible to harvest enough olives. Most go to rot, ten metres from
his home. “They say this is for security, but where is our security?”
he implores.
Whatever your feelings about the Israel-Palestine issue, to materialize
an opinion on the above, there is no need for recourse to complicated
historical, religious, nationalist or political debate. There is no
need to construct arguments for or against why the wall should be torn
down, the settlements dismantled, the checkpoints and house demolitions
confined to the dustbin of history, and with immediate effect: it has
all be done for you. The collective punishment, the wall, the house
demolitions, the very occupation are all explicitly prohibited by
international law. It seems then that the most extraordinary thing
about the occupation is how very ordinary it has become.ARCHIVE: 1st week MT 2005
A very ordinary occupation
