A brief audience with David Wilder – Spokesman for the Jewish Community of Hebron

I went with B’tselem, an Israeli human rights organisation, recently to Hebron and we were hosted for half an hour by David Wilder, a spokesperson for the settler community there. There was an opportunity for questions and answers which I have transcribed so as to give an insight into the Zionist thinking of the settler community in the only place in the occupied West Bank where settlers are living right in the centre of a Palestinian city. The recording was bad quality so I have transcribed what I heard but there were a few words I wasn't able to decipher, so a few words here and there may not be completely accurate.

David Wilder's introduction to the Q&A:
Jews have been living here for literally hundreds of thousands of years and there have been massacres, they’ve been expelled but it doesn’t mean that Jews can’t continue to live in Hebron. In 1947, we didn’t occupy, we came back home. And that shouldn’t have been in vain, and because they were murdered in 1929 that shouldn’t mean that Jews can’t live in Hebron. The Jews and everybody else wants access to the tomb of the Patriarchs to be able to pray there. It’s considered to be the second holiest site in the world for Jewish people so we believe that anyone in the world that wants to identify with that site and go there to pray should have the right to do that. Of course any Jew should have the right to worship there, a right that has been taken from us for several hundreds of years.

Do you think, as you have the right to return here, that Palestinians should have the right to return to Israel and if you don’t based on a biblical belief, do you think that everyone should be treated equally within the land of Israel?
In terms of whether Arabs should be able to return to villages or whatever one has to keep something in mind, which people generally have a problem with, that is there is a price to war. On Nov 29 1947 the UN declared a partition plan and pre state Israeli leadership accepted that then and the Arabs rejected it and declared war on us. On May 14 1948 when the state was declared, that war continued and we were invaded by Arab bombings from all sides. There is a price to that – the Arabs, it’s been historically proven, documented that the Arabs were told to leave their homes in most cases, not all, but mostly because the Arab bombings would be able to clean up the Jewish remains that were still here because their goal at that point was to basically delete whatever was left of Israel from the map. And they did leave, and afterwards of course they lost their homes because Israel won the war. But do they have the right to go back? No I don’t believe they do.

Should people be treated equally? Yes, ok, I believe that everybody and anybody should have the right to education, health, to welfare and whatever else people need to be able to live, there’s no reason why not. Of course there are certain conditions, people that you’re trying to give to, don’t give you back bullets and bombs and rockets. If you’re trying to give something to somebody as a gift then you turn and punch me in the nose, then I’m going to be very wary of giving you another gift and unfortunately that’s what happens. We have that experience when we give, what we’ve given, I’ll just use the example of Gaza, what we gave them - we gave them all of Gaza - we got back in a thousand rockets.

To put some of your comments in context, what is your feeling about Operation Cast Led particularly the use of white phosphorous against hospitals for example?
You’re talking about Gaza? Listen, again, there is a price to war, ok. Israel was attacked for years and did nothing. I think that was wrong. I think if Israel had hit back a lot earlier we could have hit back without the force that we used during the last war, during the last military incident that we had. But we didn’t, unfortunately. I think it would have been a lot less painful for both sides if Israel had hit back earlier. So people have to understand that there’s a price. There are many people who say, about the number of Israelis killed during what’s called the second intifada [he calls it something else] and how many Arabs were killed. It’s pretty clear Arafat, instead of accepting Barak’s proposals at Camp David... [person who asked the question says he didn’t ask him that – Wilder replies that it’s the same thing]. Look, I can only try to take partial responsibility for the things that I deal with, I don’t make decisions for the Israeli army, or for the Israeli military, the Secretary of Defence, the Prime Minister... I feel, I trust they do whatever they have to do in order to protect the state of Israel and I’m trying to do the same.

Did you or any members of your immediate family serve in the Israeli army in a combat capacity?
Yes. I wasn’t in a combat capacity, my profile didn’t let me. I have a son who served in a combat unit, and a son who is presently serving in a combat unit in Hebron.

What do you see as the future here, the next couple of years, the next twenty or thirty years here in Hebron?
I’ll answer you honestly. My experience has taught me – I’ve been doing this for a long time - that it’s very dangerous to make predictions. Things change so rapidly and there are so many different factors involved, that to try and make an accurate prediction is impossible. If you’d asked me in 1990, whether something like Gaza could have happened, I would have said no. If you’d have asked me after Netanyahu was elected do I think that he’s going to give a percentage of Hebron to Arabs [not certain he said to Arabs – recording not very clear], I would have said no. It goes in both directions. I can tell you what I’d hope for, what I’d like to see, I don’t know what’s going to be here tomorrow, and I say that from a personal point of view and a more general point of view. Just giving you an example, when I think about me, or my family, or anyone that lives in Hebron, where am I going to be tomorrow, then I get classified information from the military here that they that they found a live and let testament of some Arab militia who said he was going to finish himself off and before that he was going to go attack some Jews in Hebron. I don’t know what’s going to happen I have no idea. What I’d like to happen, look, there’s a general impression that people like us are against peace. It’s not true, everyone wants peace. I don’t like the fact that I’ve got a son who’s wondering around in Jenin with weapons and they’re gonna shoot him and he’s gonna shoot back at them. But I believe in survival, I believe in survival first of all of the Jewish people and the State of Israel. If there could be found some idyllique way that everybody should hold it together and live happily ever after, that would be wonderful. Do I see that happening in the future? No unfortunately I don’t.

If Israel loses the next war and all the Jews were kicked out of Israel, would that be the price of war as well?
I certainly hope there isn’t another war and I certainly hope we don’t lose it and I don’t see the Jews getting kicked out. Wars of that magnitude, we’re dealing with things like the Iranian nuclear threat and what happens if Israel gets hit by a nuclear bomb and of course we basically couldn’t survive that. Is that a price of war? Of course it’s a price of war. When I talked about the price of war, I’m mostly talking about when a country or a people or whatever also initiate a war. Of course when you fight back there’s a price and everyone in Israel knows that when people go to war, there are people that don’t come back. And no one’s looking for that. Is that the price? Yes. It is worth the price? If you’re dealing with the survival of the Jewish people and the state of Israel, then we have no choice. Today, the scope of the war – what I believe is still a war of independence here, is to destroy the state of Israel, ie the Jewish presence in Israel. Today, there is a military effort being made to destroy the state of Israel, a concerted effort made to delete the state of Israel as a Jewish state, from the map. The factors that do that – Ahmadinejad bombing Israel, to destroy Israel, the fact that there are going to be Arabs killed too, he doesn’t care about that. He’s not gonna point his bombs, like in Egypt, when the Egyptians refused, he’s not gonna be able to do that with his bombs, but he doesn’t care about that. He’s willing to – I can’t say I know this for fact, but I do recall having read that the reason why Anwar Sadat decided to make peace with Israel was because he realised he could wipe Israel out and it would cost him a half a million people and was too high a price to pay. He was willing to pay a high price, but that was too high. Ahmadinejad doesn’t care how many Arabs he kills, he’s willing to destroy the Jewish state, and employ his staff to go into the next stage, which I won’t have time to talk about now...

Given that you support the continuation of the state of Israel, if the state of Israel and other countries agreed on a two state solution, and that settlers were asked to leave Hebron, would you agree to leave?
No [without hesitation]. Let’s put it this way. There are a lot of hypothetical possibilities to be dealt with. If I try to make plans for everything that might happen I wouldn’t have time to do anything else. And probably none of them would happen. We don’t have any plans to leave here, this is our home. Ask me what happens if... they send in a hundred thousand troops to help carry us out... Do I think people are fighting with weapons against the Israeli army at the moment, no. Can I guarantee everyone no I can’t, I don’t have control of everybody, I try to keep control of myself, I try to keep control of my family. The experience shows in the past 20/30 years that the state of Israel has started throwing people out of their homes because they have opened fire on Israeli soldiers. If they bring a hundred thousand people to carry us out there’s not a lot we can do. We can come back. Do people have any intentions of leaving? No. What we believe to be the state of Israel... Look, this question is dealing with something I have no control over, what I do have to say to the Defence Minister, and we do express ourselves, is that it’s obvious that there’s disagreement, it’s also something that’s widely accepted throughout the entire world, something that’s called civil disobedience. In the States, in states across the world, there are times when their civil disobedience is much much much more than anything we face in Israel. If someone’s gonna say to me ‘look we want to throw you out of your house’ and I say I’m not ready to leave, you know, if you want me out of here you’re going to have to pick me up and throw me out...

It seems like you’ve failed at representing your agenda at least in the majority of Israel and the majority population of the world. You seem radical, extremist, not moderate. So I wonder where you’ve failed? You feel that this story, not all Israelis see what you see, so where did you go wrong?
Look, success and failure are very relative. If you’re asking me, do I think we’ve failed? No, I don’t think we’ve failed. The fact that I live here today, as far as I’m concerned is a success. The fact that there are things we haven’t succeeded to do, there are ups and there are downs, we’ve been exiled from Israel for the last 2000 years, Hebron for the last 700 years. It’s very difficult to get everything. There are problems and there are issues we have to deal with, sometimes you’re able to achieve what you want, sometimes it takes long to achieve what you want. I think that most of the goals you’re trying to achieve, you eventually will achieve. I don’t believe that God brought us back after 2000 years to throw us out again. I know it sounds weird but I think our presence today in Israel everywhere – in Hebron, in Tel Aviv, in Haifa or Be’er Sheba is a miracle, it’s also a miracle, because if anybody here had been behind the fences in Auschwitz in 1944 and someone came and poked you on the shoulder and on one side there’s chimneys and smoke and the other side of that there’s fences, and somebody says ‘you know something, don’t worry about it, everything’s going to be ok, in another 40 years we’re going to have a Jewish state and there are going to be people that come and invade us, and we’re going to win’, then the guy would look at you and say ‘you’re nuts, you’re out of your mind, you need to wake up! This is the fence and we can’t get out and there’s the smoke and that’s it’. And we’re here today. And if that’s not a miracle, nothing is. 1967 was a miracle, 1973 was a larger miracle and – I don’t have time now – but I can give you miracles that happen here in Hebron one after the other after the other. You know, it’s tangible, you can touch it. Do I think that we have problems? Of course we have problems. There are things we haven’t succeeded, we haven’t succeeded perhaps in explaining ourselves well enough. But in order to be able to express yourself you have to have a form in which to express yourself. We know where the media is, the Israeli media and the world media and that’s one of the ways I ask you also... And I do thank you very much for this opportunity because in most cases groups like this that come in aren’t interested in even hearing what the other side have to say and I think it’s very praiseworthy that despite differences of opinion that are huge there’s a willingness at least to allow people to hear a little bit of another side and I think that’s important and significant and so I thank you for that. But do I think I’ve failed. It’s difficult but whether I call that failure, no.

Denied entry at Ben Gurion Airport

These are not my words, but those of a group from the UK who were coming to Israel as tourists arriving at Ben Gurion recently. Some members of the group were pulled aside, interrogated for hours, denied the right to use the phone and then deported. Their whole experience, the way they were treated, the questions they were asked and the racist comments made by officials show how Israel is increasing its policy of denying entry to internationals under the guise of security and particularly to Muslim tourists. There is also a very detailed account of the same experience with a few photos at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/reway2007/4104895983/

12 November 2009, Ben Gurion Airport , Tel Aviv

My recollection of events concurs with that which has already been recorded in terms of the general order of events. I just need to add that within minutes of getting off the plane, as I walked along with all the other passengers towards immigration, an official picked me out of the crowd and asked to see my passport and asked me why I had come. She gave me back my passport and I continued to the immigration desk. As soon as I handed over my passport I was told to wait to one side and then sent over to the waiting area for questioning.

Regarding my interrogation, it went along the following lines, to the best of my memory, with one woman asking all the questions, and another beside her recording things and working in front of a PC.

Official: Why are you here? What is the purpose of your visit?

Me: to visit the Holy sites, as a pilgrim, as a tourist.

Official: Where will you be visiting?

Me: Jerusalem , Bethlehem , Hebron.

Official: What will you be doing?

Me: Visiting the different sites.

Official: What? All this time? What is there to see?

Me: listing various sites – e.g. Al-Aqsa,

Official: Then what? Is that it? One week and just visiting these sites? What is there? It is boring?

You are a Muslim, right? Have you been Hajj (pilgrimage), how many times? It is nice, yes? Mecca, Medina. Why don’t you go there instead? It is boring here, so what you pray in al-Aqsa, then what?

She continued: Where else are you going? Gaza? West Bank? Maybe you want to go to Gaza, see the damage there?

She repeated many of the questions and said at one stage that: “you are a Muslim, right? So you must tell the truth”.

She asked me about the others on the trip. Did I know them all? I replied that I did, except for the 2 who were the work friends of another colleague. I responded that I had a licensed guide and tour company, that I had booked into the Capitol Hotel for the whole stay, that they could check out the tour company and the driver/guide was waiting outside. I told her my plan and she went through each day. I showed her my itinerary from my previous visit just under 12 months ago.

She asked me about my work. I explained that I was a community worker, and I arrange sporting and social activities, and this was one of them. She looked through my trip folder and took down the names and details of every contact there. She asked me who I knew. She saw the correspondence that I had with Sheikh Bukhari and Eliyahu (a Jew) and asked who they were. I explained that the Sheik runs the Uzbek Cultural Centre. She asked what that had do with anything. I explained that they were people I knew and that where we come from there are many different cultures and we are interested in learning about different people. She enquired who was ‘Jane’. I said that this was someone in England. She commented that I was well organised. I said that I had to be. It was my responsibility for all 9 of us to have a good experience, time was limited and such a trip must be organised properly.

She asked me about how much money I had. I took out what I had in my pockets, and hand luggage, and showed her that which was my personal money, and that which was the group travel money, tour operators money, as well as some money which people had given me to distribute in different ways (charity for poor people/donation to the mosque). Most of it was labelled clearly.

During the questioning the other lady had my phone and was going through all the contacts. Her general attitude was sarcastic, abrupt and arrogant. I have been interrogated on my previous visits in 1997 and 2008, so I expected some questioning. However, on those occasions they generally asked the questions in a decent fact-finding manner, and did not treat me like a criminal. I left this interview feeling deeply offended.

About 2am in the morning we asked to use the phone to call the British Embassy but they refused to let us use a phone. One other group member and I used our own phones and made calls (very costly!). I called the driver and guide who was waiting on the other side for over 7 hours and told them to return and explained that we were returning to the UK. For years I have been involved in local strategies to prevent extremism and encourage respect and understanding between different people. The ‘security’ reasoning that they gave for our deportation was highly insulting and derogatory and implies that we are up to no good.

“We live like monkeys”, Weds 28 October 09

The story of the families living on the street outside their house that they were evicted from on 2 August, continues to get worse. The two families - Hanoun and Al Ghawi were both evicted to make room for Israeli Jewish settler families to move in when the courts ruled that the houses should be ‘returned’ to Jewish ownership.

The Al Ghawi family was given an order by the police to dismantle the tents they were living in by last Sunday. Today about 80 police and soldiers arrived to pull the tents down. They arrived while the women were making breakfast in the tent. The police surrounded the tent and ordered the women to take their belongings out. Then they tore it down. The children were screaming and the women crying. An eye witness who had been there the whole time said that the soldiers were laughing as they pulled the tent down.

When the police left, the family used a piece of the torn tent to cover the tree for a makeshift shelter and to hold it in place with a pole. Within a few minutes the police came back and tore that down too. Now the family live under the tree with no shelter. Winter is coming, yesterday it rained hard in Jerusalem and the temperature has plummeted.

Last week there were a series of attacks and provocations by the settlers towards the Al Ghawi family. On Shabbat last Friday the settlers came at sunset to sing and dance outside the tent. Someone told me that the Palestinian women took their pots and pans and also started banging them! The previous Tuesday one of the settlers came to the tent and told the family to leave - he told them that it was his house. A fight broke out, the police arrived and arrested one of the Al Ghawi men. He was detained for 48 hours and has been ordered not to go within 1km of his house for 15 days. Now he sleeps in his car down the road. “It’s 2010” he said, “and a lot of us live like monkeys. I just want to go back to my home”.

Another man from the Al Ghawi family was suspected of having a heart attack. He was taken to hospital and when he returned a few days later, the police came to arrest him also. None of the settlers were detained or arrested.

Both the Hanoun and Al Ghawi families have been living in their homes since 1956 when as refugees after the 1948 Nakba (catastrophe), they were given the houses by UNRWA. It’s been a very long story for both the families, with lawyers involved and previous periods of evictions from the houses. They have papers that date back many years that prove this particular land is Arab land. The Municipality of Jerusalem ordered the destruction and confiscation of the tent that had provided shelter to the family since their eviction in early August. Twenty five other families are in similar situations. I spoke to one man who has had his court case postponed from last June until January 2010, for the judge to consider key documents. His family has also been living in the house since 1956 and he will find out in January if he is to face the same fate as the Al Ghawi and Hanoun families.

A few days have passed since I wrote this. Today is Tuesday 3 November. This morning following a court dismissal another family were forced out of a section of their home. 40 settlers accompanied by large private security forces summoned by the settlers, forcefully evicted 30 people from the Al-Kurd family out of their home. The family's belongings were thrown onto the street while the settlers invaded the Al-Kurd home. Later on police forces arrived to protect the settlers and arrested an international activist. The court permitted the settlers to enter the house and take over this section as a part of a forced agreement between the settlers and the family 17 years ago which recognises the settlers ownership of the land due to Jewish ownership prior to 1948. This decision of the court is discriminatory by nature as the Palestinian residents of the neighbourhood are all refugees from the 1948 war but can never reclaim their lands because they are Palestinian.

There is a protest vigil tomorrow but it feels so hopeless…

Qalandiya checkpoint - surely one of the most depressing places on earth

A woman has been waiting from 5am to pass Qalandiya checkpoint. She has a special permit allowing her to pass every Friday, the holiest day of the week, during Ramadan. She applied and paid for this permit because she wanted to pray at Al Aqsa mosque during Ramadan and passing Qalandiya checkpoint is the only way into Jerusalem. Last Friday the soldiers allowed her to pass. Today they are preventing her from passing. She has been told they are only letting women over 45 pass. They give her no other explanation. She refuses to leave though, says you never know, the soldiers may change their minds.

Men and women are separated at Qalandiya. On the man’s side, I talk to a young man from Qalqilya, north west of the West Bank, a good distance from this checkpoint. He also has a permit for Fridays in Ramadan. The soldiers tore it up. He has a young son at home and says he wouldn’t have come all this way if he’d known they wouldn’t let him pass. ‘What was the point in them giving me a permit if they don’t let me pass?’ he asked.

The soldiers say they are only letting men over 50 pass. One man is 49 and 11 months. He is told to go home.

One man won’t talk to me. He said there is no point, no one can help us, it’s useless.

Another man tells me that yesterday he came to the checkpoint to ask about passing today. The soldier told him to come, that it would be fine, he could pass. Today he is not allowed through.

I learn from a woman from Machsom (Checkpoint) Watch, a group of over 400 Israeli women who monitor different checkpoints across the country, that yesterday all the special passes were cancelled because of the Jewish holiday Rosh Hashana – New Year, starting this evening. Palestinians weren’t told about this. Today they are just told they cannot pass with the permit. No reason is given. I wondered if any of the soldiers felt the perverse irony of preventing Palestinians from marking their holy day because Israelis are marking theirs...

At 8.30 suddenly all Palestinians working in Aterot, a Jewish Industrial zone, are given permission to pass even if they are under 50. We are told the Jewish employers need their workers.

At 10.30 they start to let men over 50 through. Most have now been at Qalandiya for at least three or four hours. Some for longer. The sun is out in force, it is swelteringly hot. People are fasting so they can’t drink any water and there is no shade.

One of the soldiers is relentlessly shouting ‘ahoga’ – ‘back, back’. There is nowhere for people to go. From time to time they rush at the crowd forcing everyone to move back. They take people’s ID from them and instead of giving it back to them after they’ve looked at it, they walk away with it, forcing the person it belongs to, to run after them. Only they can’t get the other side of the barrier, so they can’t run after them. All they can do is push through the crowds of people trying to keep an eye on the soldier who’s taken it and wait for him or her to walk back to return it, which hardly ever happens. Meanwhile everyone is being told to move back or pushed back by force, and the soldier with the ID has disappeared from sight. This is often where the Machsom Watch women or other observers come in, helping get back people’s ID, without which the already excessive limitations placed on Palestinians become even worse.

For many men, their livelihoods often depend on their permits, they determine whether people can get to their place of work or not and so whether they can afford to feed their families. So it is vital that they don’t have their permit taken away from them. This gives soldiers immense power and forces many Palestinian men into resigned submission. Women usually move around less and many don’t work so their permits have less importance. Not being afraid to lose their permit means they can be braver, more dignified and more powerful in their resistance. As the Israeli soldiers look through Palestinians rather than at them, Palestinian women do the same, looking but not seeing.

A Palestinian man working for the UN agency UNRWA is under 50. He is not allowed to pass either. A health practitioner – a doctor or nurse, I’m not sure which, is not allowed through to go to work.

Unbelievably this is only the first stage of passing through Qalandiya. For men and women, there is another stopping point just about 10 metres away from the first, where they must show their ID again. Even if people have been allowed to pass the first, there is no guarantee they will pass the second.

Then comes the main area of Qalandiya, a three or four minute walk from these initial areas. It is a massive indoor cage with iron turnstiles and security conveyor belts which scan people’s bags. Today the queue wasn’t so long because they were refusing to let so many through the initial stage. There were about 15 people in front of me. As I approached the turnstile I heard a screeching voice from inside, which turned out to be a female soldier behind a window shouting orders ‘yalla yalla’ ‘come on come on’ to those both putting their bags in the machine, and standing directly in front of her at the window. As I waited at the turnstile a young woman was turned back because she wasn’t 45. She leant against the wall to steady herself and cried.

It is unbearable to watch the dismissive and remorseless way that soldiers turn Palestinians away. Hardly any speak Arabic, except for words of command – come, go, shut up, hurry up...

When it was our turn to pass they demanded to see my friend’s camera because they said, she had been taking photos. There are no signs forbidding the use of cameras at the checkpoint but it took a third party intervening to finally force the soldier to give my friend back her passport and her camera and let us through. It was a relief to be on the other side.

We spent four hours at Qalandiya. Some of the women we spoke to were planning to stay all day until the evening when they would face the direction of Al Aqsa mosque, and as a political statement and symbolic act of resistance, they would set down their mats and pray.

Anata Checkpoint

Whenever I go into Jerusalem, which is most days, I have to pass the checkpoint in Anata. I always go by bus, the number 54, it picks me up in Anata and drops me at Damascus Gate in East Jerusalem. Each time as I approach the checkpoint my heart starts to beat and my pulse starts to race... it’s not a good experience. Usually there is not much traffic as I travel during the day not in rush hour. When I have travelled at the more busy time of day the bus can sit in the same place maybe for up to half an hour. At the checkpoint a soldier with his or her gun poised, gets on the bus to check everyone’s ID. To pass people must have a blue ID, this means they have the right to travel into Jerusalem. If they have a green ID they cannot pass. I have experienced elderly and obviously sick people trying to get to hospital in Jerusalem being forced off the bus and told to go home. Usually people have the passes and are allowed through.

Usually for some reason the soldier that gets on the bus at this checkpoint is female. She moves from one of the bus to the other taking people’s ID out of their hands, looking at it, never at them and usually returning it, except when it’s a West Bank green ID, then she takes it with her while she moves up the bus – un-necessarily as she is going to make the person leave the bus anyway, and then returns it once they are off the bus. The person I saw her do this to was elderly – they could hardly walk, the soldier didn’t need to hold onto the ID. She did this because she could and in this situation, under this Occupation, at every checkpoint the soldiers play with their power because they can. The soldier always has the same look on their face. Emptiness and disgust at the same time, like they are not seeing human beings in front of them. He or she doesn’t look up, or engage with anyone, just silently and deliberately moves from person to person – the only reason he or she will speak is if someone is sleeping, to demand their ID, or to ask a question about their ID or to tell them to get off the bus and go home. They always speak in Hebrew, never in Arabic. Someone told me that a soldier told him that he should speak in Hebrew because ‘this is Israel’. He was in the Occupied Territories at the time trying to pass a checkpoint. No he said, this is not Israel, this is Palestine.

I can’t express how much I hate passing this checkpoint, and yet I know that this, in comparison to others such as Qalandiya, is nothing. Though I know I have a British passport, an in date visa, and they will always let me pass, still I find it one of the most humiliating experiences I have ever had.

Guns and humans go together hand in hand here. Soldiers, as well as carrying them on duty, on the checkpoints, in the old city (particularly during Ramadan there was an increased presence of soldiers in the Muslim quarter in the old City), also carry them casually slung over their shoulders off duty, walking on the streets, getting on the bus to go home, sitting in a cafe, walking with their friends. Settlers are also allowed to carry guns and they do so very visibly. I was sitting having a coffee a while ago in West Jerusalem. I looked up and at the entrance of the same cafe was a man, a Jewish orthodox man in his fifties I would say, with one handgun in a holster strapped to the back of his belt and a large rifle slung over his shoulders. This is not an unusual sight here, I have seen the same thing many other times. To my left were two Israeli men having a coffee in the same cafe. One had a similar rifle over his shoulder which he held with such carelessness that I moved my chair because the direction it was pointing in frightened me. Palestinian police on the other hand, aren’t allowed to carry guns.

I see so many guns that I am no longer afraid of them, even though every time a soldier gets on the bus I do watch their gun and the direction it points in. For all of them it seems like an extra appendage, like it’s part of them... Today the soldier who checked our ID’s – a male this time – actually held the gun stiffly poised in front of him while he walked up the bus, as if he might need to use it. The angriest reaction I have ever heard from Palestinians in all the times I have passed through this checkpoint, is a loud tut. That was when the soldiers made the elderly woman get off the bus.

I am treated in much the same way as Palestinians at this checkpoint, presumably because I have crossed the line. The soldiers look at me with the same disdain, the same disgust and handle my passport in the same way they handle Palestinians ID.

Earlier today a Palestinian friend told me that both Palestinians and Israelis are suffering under the Occupation. I have heard this many times but I wanted to know specifically what he meant. He told me that each time an Israeli is told to lift his arms at a checkpoint to pass a security check, he suffers. He agreed that the two minute experience of an Israeli security check is different to the three or four hours Palestinians often have to wait to cross Qalandiya checkpoint for example when passing from Ramallah to Jerusalem, but still he said, Israelis are suffering.

Passing through the Anata checkpoint isn’t a physical act of violence, not so far. But the experience is a violent one – mentally, emotionally and spiritually. Every time I leave the checkpoint I feel violated and angry. I always watch the faces of the soldiers as they move up and down the bus, hoping to see something other than emptiness and disgust in their eyes. But I never see it, male or female soldier, it is always the same. As the bus drives away from the checkpoint, I always think the same thing – where is the compassion of these people and their humanity? And then I think of the 450 Palestinian villages that were erased in 1948 and I wonder if it was destroyed with them.

“This is not a human being...”

A few nights ago I visited Sheikh Jarrah, the place in East Jerusalem that I wrote about just after I arrived where several Palestinian families were evicted from their homes and living on the streets. I went to visit the families and sat with them for a few hours.

When I visited, they had spent 27 days living on the street just in front of the house they had lived in for over 55 years. Three brothers lived in the houses – it had been one house originally and turned into three to accommodate all of their families.

At 5am on Monday 3 August 500 soldiers surrounded the houses (as well as others in the same district), exploded open the doors and stormed the houses destroying everything in their path. They broke the doors, the windows, smashed the furniture and threw the rest out in the garden – photos of parents who had passed away, things that their children had made at school, all were thrown away. “Everything we had worked so hard to bring, they destroyed”. The soldiers wouldn’t let a woman in her late 60’s take her medicine for a recent operation on her eye. The soldiers raided the fridge and laughed as they took a child’s chocolate.

The brother I spoke to was in his late sixties. He had lived in the house for 55 years, his brothers had been born there. Two weeks earlier they had received a paper from the court ordering them to be out of the house and giving them 10 days - between 1-10 August to leave. On the second day the army arrived to throw them out.

By 8am the same day, a family of 15 Jewish settlers had moved into the house.

The following day, one of the settlers brought some of the broken glass to a skip in front of the house, right next to where the family are living, watching them smugly as they tipped the rubbish as if to say they are the victorious ones, that they have won. Every day the settlers enter the house from the front in full view of the family they have forced out. The other day one of the settler children, a boy, stood on the roof top of the house praying, holding the Torah in one hand, a gun in the other.

Soon after the family was evicted, the settler family took them to court to try to get them removed. They made claims that they had erected tents in front of the house, were throwing stones, making noise and were too close to the house. There are no stones in the area and they live in the cold open air, not in tents. When they were evicted they were told they mustn’t come within 20 metres of the house. Where they sit, where they lay their mattresses, is at least 40-50 metres from the house. Every day they sit doing nothing except receiving visitors, which are regular and even high profile - the day before Jimmy Carter and Desmond Tutu had visited them. Otherwise most days there are journalists who come to talk to them and note down their story. But still they live on the streets. The Court didn’t force them to move from where they are living, but told them not to throw the stones they aren’t throwing and not to bother the settlers.

I asked them what they would do. “Even if the Government gives us a house”, they said, “we will stay here to let everyone know this is OUR house. All our memories are here, my father, my mother died in this house. These trees are like my sons”. The lemon trees that they planted in the front garden many years ago are starting to turn brown because they are not being watered or looked after.

Now the men sleep on the street in front of the house. The women and children stay in a nearby hotel – there were 6 children living in the house before they were evicted, one young woman is studying psychology at university so she needs a base to work from.

“Where is your brain, where is your heart, where are your feelings to throw our children outside and put your children inside? This is not a human being. Don’t you have any feelings?” I think I asked the family what they most wanted to say to the settlers.

The only reason they were evicted was because they weren’t Jewish.

The Jewish family is now living in an entirely Palestinian neighbourhood, apart from the other settlers who have also moved in recently to Palestinian homes. The same night – or morning, the soldiers also destroyed a tent which a family was using to shelter in after they were also evicted from their home a while ago. Others are awaiting eviction. The ‘Arabs’ that they most hate (and think most hate them) are their surrounding neighbours and they live not only with security cameras on the outside, but security guards on the inside. They have probably been given a large amount of money by the Government to live in these neighbourhoods, in these homes. But how much money does it take to numb their consciences? What is the price of watching another’s child live on the street while you live in their rooms, sleep in their beds? How is it possible for human beings to be this cruel?

From Ramallah to East Jerusalem

F worked for 14 years in Jerusalem before the wall was built. He travelled to and from Ramallah where his family live every day, it took fifteen maybe twenty minutes. He took a road which brought him directly to East Jerusalem. Since the wall his story is very different.

In order to work in Jerusalem Palestinians need a permit. Unless they have one, they will not be allowed through the checkpoint at Qalandiya, the check point between Ramallah and East Jerusalem. Qalandiya is one of the largest Israeli military checkpoints in the occupied West Bank. It is not located on a border, but between Palestinian towns and neighbourhoods.

F’s boss – who he has worked for over the last 14 years applied for a permit for him. It costs $1500 for a six month permit and on top of that 800 NIS – around £130 (new Israeli sheckles) each month.

Every day he crossed through Qalandiya checkpoint, every day he was taken into a tiny room – he showed us photos – and held there for any amount of time from 5 minutes to three hours. Inside the room where he was usually left alone, there was a constant high pitched sound – he covered his ears with a napkin and played with his phone in an attempt to drown out the noise. Often the officers (often female) would knock on the window, tell him to take the napkin away from his ears and stop playing with his phone. When he didn’t they came in and did it for him. They told him he was crazy – he asked what they wanted him to do while he was sitting there waiting for them to release him so he could carry on his way. There are no cameras in these rooms so the IDF can do anything they like unobserved and unrecorded.

After one month – he had five months left to go on his (legal) permit, without any explanation they took the permit away from him and told him to go home.

Without a permit at this time which was about a year ago, there were only a few ways into East Jerusalem. One was through the underground sewage canal. When F needed to travel to Ramallah he would return this way. Sometime he would leave Ramallah at five in the morning and not arrive until midnight. He could spend fifteen minutes or all day underground waiting for the army to leave the exit point of the sewage system. Sometimes he was alone, other times he could be with up to 100 people.

Then the army closed this exit point permanently so they had to find another way, which was over the wall. At this point the wall in this area was around 6 metres high. F would climb to the top of a building which was around the same height and balance a plank of wood between the roof and the wall and walk over. When the soldiers saw them doing this they shot at them – one day ten jeeps arrived to look for him in the building. He hid for two hours until they left.

Then the height of the wall was extended, from 6 metres to around 14 and it became much more difficult to jump over.

A year later he tried again to get a permit. His boss paid another $1500 and 800 NIS per month. Again each day he was taken into the room and left there with the sound. At Qalandiya checkpoint there are five different ‘lanes’. After around 20 days as he got to the front of one of these lanes, they closed the access point. ‘Mohamed’ the female IDF soldier called out – his name isn’t Mohamed but such is the disrespect of the Israeli army – and ordered him to enter the room or he wouldn’t be allowed to pass. Inside the room were four female IDF soldiers. Once the door was closed they start to touch him, tell him he is beautiful. One signalled to her breasts, told him ‘silicon, silicon, touch, touch’. He was afraid that they would put him in unwillingly in a compromising position, perhaps take photos and blackmail him – this often happens and people are forced to find out ‘inside information’ and give it to the army. If they don’t they know to expect the worst.

He told them to open the door, demanded to see their boss – they said he wasn’t working as it was Shabbat. So he started to shout and beat the door. She called him ‘mastul’ – ‘crazy’ in Hebrew and let him go.

The following days, the same female IDF soldier denied him entry through the checkpoint, told him he couldn’t pass. She brought her boss – F told him what had happened in the small room but the officer in charge didn’t believe him. Instead he threatened that if F made problems here he wouldn’t ever pass to go to work.

After that, F looked tried to make sure he avoided the lane where this particular IDF soldier was. Still every day he was held in the checkpoint room for between 5 minutes and three hours.

A month and a half into his second permit, they took him into the small room and this time told him he couldn’t pass because the Shabak – the border police didn’t want him to. Again they took his permit from him and sent him home.

Now he stays in Jerusalem, in the shop he works in 24/7. He can’t even move around the Old City because the IDF might stop him arbitrarily and demand to see the permit he doesn’t have. If that happens he faces three years in jail. But he says ‘here I’m in jail, there I’m in jail. The only difference is that here I take money. There I don’t.’

He hasn’t been back to Ramallah for a month, hasn’t seen his family (as he’s telling us this story he remembers he hasn’t called his mother today – he calls her every day – and rushes off to call her) but soon he will return for Eid to be with his family and give money to the women of the family as is customary during Eid. We asked how he’ll get back to Jerusalem but he won’t tell us. It’s a secret...’ he said with a smile.

Two weeks in...

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.