It’s been a tremendous couple of weeks in so many ways. I’ve been living with 60 or so people from different parts of the globe, and together we’ve been re-building two houses for the same number of families, both of them having been demolished within the last year or so. Brief context about house demolitions in the West Bank – since 1967 there have been over 24,0000 (500 Palestinian villages, towns and urban neighbourhoods destroyed in 1948 and after). It’s impossible for Palestinian families to build houses on land that they own – they can’t build without permits which they have to apply to the Israeli authorities for and being Palestinian, they never get. For the privilege, they have to pay thousands of dollars just to apply and as permission almost always gets turned down, some don’t apply in the first place because they can’t afford to, but many do and are going through the courts and waiting for their cases to be heard having put their life’s earnings into the fee, and they still don’t get permission to build. On top of this they actually have to PAY for the demolition itself! So there are also some families, when they get their demolition order, who even demolish their own houses to avoid having to pay for the destruction of their own homes.The house I was working at was owned by a man called Abu Hussein (Hussein’s father), whose son I met early on in the week. When he’s not at the house, he’s working at Modi’in, one of the biggest settlements in the West Bank (on the green line) between Ramallah and Tel Aviv, helping to build the new settlements which Israel agreed to stop expanding during the Annapolis negotiations. With resignation he told me “We build their settlements while they destroy our houses...” The irony of the situation is so devastating. So many Palestinians are forced into taking work not only on the settlements but also on the separation wall – they are themselves helping to build their own walled prison. It’s impossible to imagine that people would do this but the economy leaves them with little choice. The Israeli government has closed Palestinian banks, shops and much else besides. Since the early 1990’s Israel closed its borders to the 150,000 Palestinians that used to come each day to work in Israel. On top of this, inside the Occupied Territories there are the checkpoints, the road closures and the settler-only roads which make it so horrendously difficult for Palestinians to get from one place to another in the West Bank and making trade virtually impossible. As a result, 70% of Palestinians living in the Occupied Territories now live on less than 2 euros a day and most rely on humanitarian aid to survive. They work on settlements and the apartheid wall when work comes along – which is frequent and overlooked by the Israelis despite it being illegal because it’s cheap labour, and it is often taken by Palestinians needing to feed their families and to survive. There are Palestinians who don’t share this view though. I spoke to one man who was completely against Palestinians working on the wall – he told me “People should find other work in Israel if they need to, any work but the wall... Will we be able to enter Israel to even work after the wall is finished?”
Honestly the ironies and contradictions of this ‘holy land’ are devastating.
So other than build houses, we’ve dug caves, moved more stones than I ever knew existed in the world... met with a number of Palestinian and Israeli peace and human rights organisations, the latter who are trying their best to share the facts of this horrifying occupation with their country folk, many of whom won’t even accept there is an occupation let alone a very sophisticated strategy of ethnic cleansing. Also visited Balata refugee camp – the smallest in the West Bank but with the highest number of people - 25,000 people live in one square kilometre... The ‘roads’ are tiny cobbled pathways which couldn’t fit two people walking down them at the same time. It’s so overcrowded it has to be seen to be believed, 50-80 people living in one house which because they can’t afford to leave and build or buy houses of their own. And they can’t build new homes in the refugee camp because there’s just no space – horizontally and vertically every last millimetre of space has been used. There are three schools in the camp for the 6000 children that live there which means that there are at least 50 children in each class. On top of this the children have seen and experienced things that no human being should ever be exposed to. Many have seen their parents or family members killed in front of them by soldiers, or their front doors exploded and parents brutally arrested in the middle of the night, their houses demolished with the family still inside, curfews – where people weren’t allowed out of their homes for days and sometimes months except for a window of two hours twice a week to go to the market. 99.9 per cent of the children living in these camps not surprisingly have serious psychological problems – nightmares, depression, aggression – some spent their time during the second Intifada picking up limbs and body parts from those killed in the streets. There are so many stories each one more horrendous than the last.
I’ve also been to two demonstrations, one where rocks were returned with tear gas grenades and we left just before the ‘stink bombs’ were fired which is this absolutely disgusting concoction of something which smells like five years worth of excrement and stays on your body and in your senses for almost as long if you’re unlucky enough to get hit.
Within the first two days of our being here, a right-wing Israeli extremist had walked into a lesbian and gay centre in Tel Aviv and pulled out a gun, killing three people and injuring 15. The next morning at 5am Palestinian occupants of two houses on the outskirts of Jerusalem were stormed and evicted for Jewish settlers to be installed in their place. These houses are part of a compound of 28 houses which belonged to a Jewish group who bought them at the end of the nineteenth century and abandoned them in 1929. The Israeli Government in its infinite wisdom has recently decreed that the houses should return to Jewish ownership, so eviction orders have been placed on all 28 houses. The two families that were evicted a couple of weeks ago are now living in tents at the back of the houses... So Israel deems it appropriate to give back property to Jews who owned land less than a century ago (taking away their homes and destroying the lives they have built for themselves) but not to the hundreds of thousands of refugees (now generations later the number is into the millions) who were evicted from their homes in 1948 after having lived there for generations....
My Arabic is coming along slowly slowly (thus shwai shwai arabe...) I now know the words for sand, gravel, water and cement...!! I’ve realised that I can remember more of the Hebrew alphabet than I thought so maybe those hateful Hebrew lessons all those years ago weren’t so useless after all! What I am learning though, is far removed from many Israelis’ command of Arabic – the former IDF (Israeli Defence Force ie, the army) soldiers we’ve met admit that the only Arabic they know are words such as ‘if you don’t move i’ll shoot you” and ‘you’ll be dead if you don’t do what I say”. Palestinians on the other hand, need to know at least basic Hebrew to survive.
I’m now in Jerusalem having been here for a couple of days – the camp ended on Sunday and I’m trying to organise a place to live which is more permanent than the hostels I’ve been staying in. The first couple of nights I stayed in a calm Franciscan pilgrims hostel in the Christian Quarter of the old city. The joy of a room to myself with a shower which I could stay in for as long as I wanted (without 40 other people queuing behind me) But it wasn’t a cheap joy - there aren’t many of those in Jerusalem, it’s a very expensive city – so I am now in a hostel with lots of backpackers and sharing a dorm with 6 or so others. I will go into meetings from tomorrow with about the project I will work on and I am looking forward to the next part of this journey.
