Wednesday, November 27

MCC Palestine Update #66

MCC Palestine Update #66

November 27, 2002

Recent visits to the Applied Research Institute-Jerusalem (ARIJ), a Mennonite Central Committee partner organization since the early 1990s, proved sobering. [MCC has joined with the Canadian Food Grains Bank for the past three years to provide a food security grant to ARIJ to test seed varieties best suited for rain fed farming conditions.] The director of ARIJ, Dr. Jad Ishaq, has been examining GIS satellite images of the West Bank to analyze Israeli colonial expansion (through the construction of illegal Israeli "settlements," which Jad insists should more accurately be called "colonies'). For Jad, the "facts on the ground" point in one direction: Israel is pre-empting any chances of a durable peace agreement based on a vision of two viable states, one Israeli and one Palestinian, living side by side.

Since Ariel Sharon became Israel's Prime Minister in March 2001, the growth of existing Israeli colonies and the construction of new ones have skyrocketed. ARIJ has identified 24 new colonies in the West Bank, the expansion of 45 more, and the establishing of 113 new "outposts," i.e., caravans placed on hilltops which later develop into a full-fledged colony. The placement of new colonies and outposts is strategic: first, Jerusalem is being progressively encircled by rings of Israeli colonies (extending south of Bethlehem to the Gush Etzion block of settlements, northwards to Ramallah to the colonies of Givat Ze'ev and Psagot, and eastwards towards Jericho to Ma'aleh Adumim) which break up the continguity of Palestinian neighborhoods in East Jerusalem and which separate East Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank; second, the "separation" fence which cuts through the north of West Bank is isolating Qalqilayah and Tulkarem from each other, from their neighboring villages and from the rest of the West Bank ;finally, new settlements and outposts thrust out eastward from the large colony of Ariel in the north of the West Bank towards the extensive "closed military zone" which runs north-south to the west of the Jordan River. These various developments leave Palestinian population centers separated from one another and will create various isolated "cantons" (what Jad and many other observers call "Bantustans," referring back to the "homelands" created by the apartheid-era governmentin South Africa) within the West Bank--the canton of Bethlehem, for example, or of Ramallah, of Nablus/Jenin, of Hebron, etc.

Ariel Sharon has over the past week faced criticism from his challenger for the Likud leadership, Binyamin Netanyahu, for his alleged willingness to make the "painful compromise" of accepting a "Palestinian state." That Sharon has indeed voiced his readiness to accept a Palestinian state is a fact; it's also a fact that the "state" Sharon envisions is for the 35 to at most 40% of the West Bank, a state which would have no territorial contiguity, little control over vital natural resources such as water, and which would thus be economically unviable. Israeli colonial expansion, therefore, appears to be putting the nails in the coffin of any plans for a viable two-state solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Against the daily reality of new bypass roads being built, new 25-foot high guard walls with watchtowers being built, and more colonies constructed, talk of US and "Quartet" (US-UN-European Union-Russia) "roadmaps" for the creation of a Palestinian State by 2005 appear naive at best and dangerous at worst. Naïve, because it seems clear that Israeli colonial expansion which has already happened has possibly undermined the viability of any Palestinian state. Dangerous in that Israel will attempt to present a willingness to accept a Palestinian "state" in the discontiguous 35-40% of the West Bank as a "painful compromise."

How should advocates for justice, peace, and real security for Palestinians and Israelis respond to this emerging reality? I would suggest first that we begin to free ourselves from the conceptual bind of seeing "statehood" (be it Palestinian and Israeli) as an end in itself. Various Christian bodies--denominations, church-related NGOs, etc.--have, over the years, called for an end to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip and for the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside the State of Israel. What to say, however, if Israeli actions (colonial expansion) have undermined a viable two-state solution?

Advocates for a just and lasting peace, I believe, are ultimately not concerned with the question of whether or not a Palestinian state comes into being. After all, Israel (and the US, and perhaps the rest of the international community) might eagerly back the creation of a Palestinian state comprising discontiguous Bantustans, a state which would not bring justice and freedom for Palestinians and which would not bring stability and security for either Palestinians or Israelis.

Statehood is simply not an end in itself. What is an end in itself is the flourishing and well being of all who inhabit "Mandate Palestine," i.e., present-day Israel, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip. Many churches (not to mention the Palestinian leadership) believed for the past three decades that this flourishing and well-being could be secured with the creation of a viable Palestinian state comprising the West Bank/East Jerusalem/Gaza Strip. If facts on the ground have undermined such a solution, perhaps made it impossible, then those who care about the future flourishing, security, and well-being of Palestinians and Israelis must dream of new ways for Palestinians and Israelis to be able to live side by side in justice, freedom and equality.

Jad and others have observed that if a viable two-state solution can't be achieved, then the struggle for Palestinians becomes one of action against an apartheid reality in the occupied territories and for equal citizenship in a bi-national state, in which Palestinians and Israelis are all equal citizens before the law, in all of Mandate Palestine. The vision of one, bi-national state as a solution to the Palestinian/Israeli conflict must not, therefore, be dismissed out of hand by advocates of a just peace. For the churches and church- related NGOs to point in this direction in their advocacy efforts will be difficult. First, because it would be difficult to move beyond the language of "two states" to which many have become wedded. Second, because advocacy for one, bi-national state will be perceived as being against the State of Israel and thus as anti- Zionist. If Zionism necessarily means the creation and preservation of a "Jewish demographic majority" at the expense of the rights and well-being of Palestinians, then advocacy for one, binational state is indeed anti-Zionist. Other Zionism’s might be possible, however; for example, the "cultural Zionism" of an Ahad Ha'am or a Judah Magnes (figures from the first half of the twentieth century), a Zionism which does not depend on sovereign control and demographic majority, might become meaningful once more.

Perhaps the unexpected will occur, Israel will dismantle its colonies in the occupied territories, and a viable Palestinian state will emerge next to the State of Israel. If this happens, then we will have cause for rejoicing. We must, however, soberly confront the possibility that the day of the two-state solution has already been eclipsed and start doing thinking through the theological and advocacy implications of such a possibility.

To see two detailed reports prepared with input from ARIJ, see the following URLs:

http://www.poica.org/casestudies/Separation%20wall%20Campaign/index.htm and http://www.nad-plo.org/eye/news50.html

Below you will find two pieces, both from the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz. The first, by Amira Hass, explores what the proposed creation of "territorial contiguity" between the Kiryat Arba colony to the east of Hebron and the Israeli colonies inside Hebron's Old City will mean for the thousands of Palestinian residents of the Old City. The second, by former deputy mayor of Jerusalem Meron Benvenisti, examines the inexorable logic of colonial expansion in the occupied territories.

--Alain Epp Weaver


1. The shuttered houses on Holy Days
Amira Hass
Ha'aretz, November 2002

The one and only meaning to the creation of "territorial contiguity" from Kiryat Arba to the Tomb of the Patriarchs, is expulsion. The expulsion of thousands more Palestinian residents of Hebron, people who were unlucky enough to find that their homes, shops and gardens are in the area meant for "contiguity." The IDF will protect the Jewish construction and dozens if not hundreds of Israelis - contractors, engineers, architects, carpenters - will join the work, and police will protect them. Thousands of Israelis will thus become active partners in the expulsion. They'll go home every night to their worried families in Jerusalem and Kfar Sava.

If one of them is killed in a Palestinian ambush, the response will be even more "territorial contiguity." There won't be any need to load people onto trucks. They simply won't be able to stay in their homes, let their children risk of going to school every day on the same route where their Jewish "neighbors" are building, striding the streets with their rifles like masters of the land if not the universe, speeding along streets that for security reasons are closed to Palestinian traffic. They'll lose ever more days at work when they try leaving their homes or try coming home and are faced by a noisy laughing gang of Jewish teens of both sexes, stoning them with rocks, kicking at them and spitting at them, while a policeman or a few soldiers stand idly by.

The Palestinians living in the "territorial contiguity" will go through what happened to the Palestinians of the old city of Hebron, but at an accelerated rate. It's an open secret that many of the residents of the old city have left their homes in recent years. They simply couldn't take life with the unceasing harassment from a handful of Jewish citizens of Israel who were allowed to behave that way due to the laxity or sympathy of soldiers and officers, the apathy or sympathy of police and the indifference of the Israeli public.

Dozens of shop owners in the old city have stopped opening, whether because of the unending days and nights of curfew imposed on Hebron and its ancient heart, or because the "neighbors" scare off the shoppers, or because the streets where the shops are located are closed to protect the security of the Jewish neighbors. When the curfew is lifted, and the market is reopened for a few hours, there is the illusion of life.

But last Saturday, on the day after the gun battle between armed Palestinians and soldiers, police, and armed Israeli guards from Kiryat Arba, under the full curfew imposed on Palestinian Hebron, it was possible to discern how empty the old city has become. An elderly woman and her son peeked frightened through a barred and netted window. Behind a tightly shut iron door, one could hear the murmurings of the inhabitants.

Someone, in the chilling silence, quickly opened and closed an iron door. But from one of the rooftops in the old city the abandonment could easily be seen: wide open wooden window shutters lazily flapping in the breeze and behind them black holes - empty rooms. Dried up plants, clotheslines bare of laundry - these were the signs of an empty place. Some of the Palestinian houses are already empty in Wadi Nasara, where the gun battle took place opposite the southern nook of Kiryat Arba.

The "Worshipers Way" for the Palestinians has become the path of the stone throwers and the shooters in the air, and the lack of response from the authorities for years. Fridays and Saturdays and other Jewish holidays when the worshipers walk the way, are the cursed days for the residents of Wadi Nasara and the old city. That's when they lock themselves in their homes and shutter their windows, blocking their ears when the window shatters or their plant pots are overturned and they know there's no point calling the police.

The settlements were built before the terrorism and after it. They were built whether the Palestinians expressed their opposition or not. A lengthy curfew was imposed on Palestinian Hebron after Baruch Goldstein murdered worshipers at the Ibrahimi Mosque/Tomb of the Patriarchs; a curfew was imposed on them when a Palestinian murdered a Jewish baby and a curfew is imposed when armed Palestinians fight armed Israelis. Jewish zealots in Hebron and throughout the West Bank harass Palestinians before attacks and after attacks.

Now they don't even hide the fact their "settlement enterprise" is part of their Transfer plans, which everywhere else in the West is known as "ethnic cleansing." Are those Jewish zealots and their lobbyists really the heirs of the Jewish Diaspora?

From inside Hebron they actually appear to be of a different heritage, scions of nationalist, anti-Semitic movements who sent pogromchiks at the head of mobs who spread fear and were full of greed for the Jewish homes, to gradually implement the plan of "cleansing the homeland of its kikes." Hebron, on Shabbat, was reminiscent of ancestral tales from Sochba, a town in northeast Romania, where on Holy Sundays, the Jews would shutter themselves up in their homes.


2. The never-ending enterprise
Meron Benvenisti
Ha'aretz, November 2002

The response to the bloody ambush in Hebron was instinctive: After all, establishing "Jewish points of presence" along a line of territorial contiguity between Jewish areas that were built in their day in the wake of previous incidents, has been "an appropriate Zionist response" ever since the days of Tel Hai and the "stockade and tower."

After more than 80 years of "appropriate responses," no wonder it has become second nature. Everyone knows their role in the sound-and-light show underway in Hebron for the 800th time - the number of Jewish "points of presence" that "have gone up on the land" since the start of the Zionist enterprise.

The government, responsible for the never-ending Zionist revolution,ordered the army - Zionism's main executive arm - to demolish houses and uproot trees so as to create empty areas in which to go ahead with Jewish construction. The housing minister "promotes" plans to expropriate Palestinian property through legal processes with "full compensation." Architects, who of course don't have a political view, only a professional one, are already planning hundreds of apartments. The zealots are making Palestinian lives intolerable, as the army and police stand by, ignoring the harassment.

The audience remains mostly apathetic, and only a minority expresses opposition to the efforts to use the old-fashioned honorable terms of pioneering Zionism to glorify looting that will only intensify and perpetuate the conflict. But even that minority doesn't dare confront the basic fault, inherent in the current project of occupying the new physical space, as in all its predecessors: either security, settlement or community needs are being served, but rather the urge to cover the frightening, hostile land with asphalt and concrete.

If anyone dares confront this Zionist pretention on it merits - and not only the harm to the Palestinians or the immorality of ethnic cleansing and persecution of the foreigner - then out of the deep will rise questions best kept deep and latent in the heart of the consensus: How is it possible that for three generations an entire country has been one big temporary construction project that never arrives at a permanent reality, with a defined topography, stable borders, and a "normal" routine of life?

The common answer, which blames the hostility of the enemy, only discloses the conceptual basis for those responsible for the construction site: Its purpose is to be an instrument in the existential struggle, which does not end, also because continuing the battle for the physical space serves powerful economic and political interests. Standards of living are a marginal goal, enjoyed by only a few, while an immigrant mentality feeds an insatiable appetite for grabbing land, both for the individual and for the collective.

For 35 years, Israel has made a supreme effort to take control of the physical space of the West Bank, which is perceived as an "outback" in which the Zionist revolution can be fulfilled. But after investing tens of billions and settling hundreds of thousands, the entire uilt-up area of all the settlements is no more than 2 percent of the land in the West Bank. True, nearly half the West Bank is defined as "state land," but this formal definition does not make it controlled by Jews.

No wonder the struggle over the physical space is not measured any longer with the establishment of settlements and houses, through the denial of Palestinian use of the territory in this space -from legal limitations, and through to uprooting crops and preventing olive harvests, prohibitions on vehicular traffic, sieges and closures.

The enormous gap in the balance of forces should seemingly have tilted in favor of Israel, but the struggle is going to end in a tie in the short run, and in a Palestinian victory in the long run, because the physical space is filling up, running out, and has ceased functioning as the critical element. Instead, demography rules.

"The appropriate Zionist response," of which expanding the Jewish settlement in Hebron is but the latest expression, will yet boomerang against its perpetrators. The number of Palestinians born in Hebron in one week is more than all the Jews who live in the city. When will someone in an Israeli government get up and declare a glorious end to the Zionist enterprise?

Wednesday, November 20

MCC Palestine Update #65

MCC Palestine Update #65

November 20, 2002

On Saturday I sent out a prayer request asking people to pray for the friends and families of those 12 Israelis killed in Hebron this past Friday evening. I take it as a given that Christians are called to mourn and grieve when any of God's beloved children is killed. I would therefore reiterate my prayer request. I would at the same time suggest that the way in which the Friday attack was initially described by spokespeople for the State of Israel demonstrates the deceptive use of language, particularly the discourse of "terrorism."

Shortly after Friday night's attack, Israeli officials were describing it as a "massacre" of worshippers on their way home from prayer. This description of Friday's events was passed on during Friday's and Saturday's news bulletins. By Saturday, however, a different picture of Friday's events was emerging. The 12 Israeli dead (three Palestinians who carried out the attack were also killed) consisted of soldiers, Border Police officers, and armed members of the security team of the Kiryat Arba settlement. The attack was thus not on civilian worshippers returning home from prayers at Hebron's Tomb of the Patriarchs but on armed military and paramilitary personnel. Amos Harel, military correspondent of the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz, presented the following analysis (Nov. 17, 2002): "Those killed Friday were killed in combat. All of the victims were armed fighters, who were more or less trained. They fell victim to a well-planned ambush that included both machine-gun fire and grenades, which trapped them in a compromising situation they found hard to overcome. There is a vast difference between what happened on Friday night and the horrific massacres carried out by Palestinian terrorists in
civilian settlements."

This incident should highlight the ambiguous (at best) use of the word "terrorism." Israel classifies all Palestinian violence as "terrorism," be it an attack on children in their home in Kibbutz Metzer or a military ambush on military targets in Hebron. From a Christian pacifist perspective, both attacks are wrong, are sinful. But if "terrorism" is to cover all forms of lethal violence, be it against civilian or military targets, then it clearly has lost any descriptive usefulness and is being used instead to delegitimize all violence carried out by one side (the Palestinian side) while legitimizing the violence carried out by the other (Israeli) side.

One should also note the irony of Israeli officials describing Friday night's attack as a "massacre." Israeli officials roundly objected when in April Palestinians characterized the killing of Palestinians in Jenin as a "massacre." The generally accepted figures of the death toll in Jenin are that a little over 50 people died, half of them civilians and half of them armed Palestinian fighters. In Friday night's attack, all of the victims were armed military or paramilitary personnel.

Again, I do not mean by the sentences above to suggest that, from a Christian perspective, some violence (namely that against soldiers) can sometimes be justified. For followers of the crucified and risen Lamb, violence simply cannot be justified. Christians can and should, however, draw attention to deceptive use of language, language which legitimizes the violence of the stronger party.

Below you will find two pieces. The first is a letter sent from prison by Yigal Bronner, a "refusenik" who has been imprisoned because of his refusal to serve in the occupied territories. The second, from Palestine Report, looks at stories of how Israeli soldiers controlling the entrance in and out of the West Bank city of Qalqilya are demanding bribes (or "presents") before they let people pass.

-- Alain Epp Weaver


1. Letter from Yigal Bronner

Dear friends,

I have been jailed by the Israeli Military for refusing to take part in the occupation of Palestine. I have been sentenced for 28 days in military prison. the reasons which led me to say no to the humiliation, dispossession and starvation of an entire people are perhaps obvious to some of you. Nonetheless, I have explained my motivations in the form of a letter to my military superiors, and this statement is at the bottom of the letter and can also be found at http://www.yesh-gvul.org/yigal-english.html or at http://www.yesh-gvul.org/yigal.html or at http://www.seruv.org.il/signers/24_1_Heb.htm (Hebrew-version).

Please do not hesitate to send my statement to your friends as well.

Shalom, Yigal

In Response to the General By Yigal Bronner

GENERAL, YOUR TANK IS A POWERFUL VEHICLE
It smashes down forests and crushes a hundred men. But it has one defect:
It needs a driver.
(Bertolt Brecht)

Dear General,

In your letter to me, you wrote that "given the ongoing war in Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip, and in view of the military needs, I am called upon to "participate in army operations" in the West Bank.

I am writing to tell you that I do not intend to heed your call.

During the 1980s, Ariel Sharon erected dozens of settler colonies in the heart of the occupied territories, a strategy whose ultimate goal was the subjugation of the Palestinian people and the expropriation of their land. Today, these colonies control nearly half of the occupied territories and are strangling Palestinian cities and villages as well as obstructing -- if not altogether prohibiting – the movement of their residents. Sharon is now prime minister, and in the past year he has been advancing towards the definitive stage of the initiative he began twenty years ago. Indeed, Sharon gave his order to his lackey, the Defense Minister, and from there it trickled down the chain of command.

The Chief of Staff has announced that the Palestinians constitute a cancerous threat and has commanded that chemotherapy be applied against them. The brigadier has imposed curfews without time limits, and the colonel has ordered the destruction of Palestinian fields. The division commander has placed tanks on the hills between their houses, and has not allowed ambulances to evacuate their wounded. The lieutenant colonel announced that the open-fire regulations have been amended to an indiscriminate order "fire!" The tank commander, in turn, spotted a number of people and ordered his artilleryman to launch a missile.

I am that artilleryman. I am the small screw in the perfect war machine. I am the last and smallest link in the chain of command. I am supposed to simply follow orders -- to reduce my existence down to stimulus and reaction, to hear the sound of "fire" and pull the trigger, to bring the overall plan to completion. And I am supposed to do all this with the simplicity and naturalness of a robot, who -- at most -- feels the shaking tremor of the tank as the missile is launched towards the target.

But as Bertolt Brecht wrote:

“General, man is very useful.
He can fly and he can kill.
But he has one defect: He can think.”

And indeed, general, whoever you may be-- colonel, brigadier, chief of staff, defense minister, prime minister, or all of the above-- I can think. Perhaps I am not capable of much more than that. I confess that I am not an especially gifted or courageous soldier; I am not the best shot, and my technical skills are minimal. I am not even very athletic, and my uniform does not sit comfortably on my body. But I am capable of thinking.

I can see where you are leading me. I understand that we will kill, destroy, get hurt and die, and that there is no end in sight. I know that the "ongoing war" of which you speak, will go on and on. I can see that if the "military needs" lead us to lay siege to, hunt down, and starve a hole people, then something about these "needs" is terribly wrong.

I am therefore forced to disobey your call. I will not pull the
trigger.

I do not delude myself, of course. You will shoo me away. You will find another artilleryman -- one who is more obedient and talented than I. There is no dearth of such soldiers. Your tank will continue to roll; a gadfly like me cannot stop a rolling tank, surely not a column of tanks, and definitely not the entire march of folly. But a gadfly can buzz, annoy, nudge, and at times even bite.

Eventually other artillerymen, drivers, and commanders, who will observe the senseless killings and endless cycle of violence will also begin to think and buzz. We are already hundreds strong. And at the end of the day, our buzzing will turn into a deafening roar, a roar that will echo in your ears and in those of your children. Our protest will be recorded in the history books, for all generations to see.

So general, before you shoo me away, perhaps you too should begin to think.

Sincerely,

Yigal Bronner


2. Forced bribes at Israeli military checkpoints
Sa'id Muwafi
Published at http://www.palestinereport.org, November 6, 2002.

MUHAMMED HUSSEIN was unable to convince Israeli soldiers stationed at the military checkpoint east of Qalqilya City to let him cross and deliver his load of vegetables on the other side. At least, not until he submitted to their demand that he pay a bribe in return for crossing.

"There is no way I could have crossed the checkpoint other than by agreeing to give the soldiers a cell phone," said Hussein angrily. He had waited for hours inside his truck for permission to cross, to no avail.

The residents of Qalqilya, and particularly truck drivers, suffer daily from arbitrary measures enforced by Israeli soldiers. The soldiers prevent residents from crossing the checkpoint and transporting merchandise without handing over a bribe. Adding insult to injury, the soldiers call these bribes "presents" in attempt to disguise the true nature of the disgraceful and immoral act.

Another truck driver, who preferred to remain anonymous, said that the soldiers stipulated he bring them a large can of olive oil in order to cross the checkpoint every day. "What can we do?" he asked. "We cannot transport our products except through this checkpoint, and this is exactly where soldiers from the world's 'strongest' and most corrupt army are stationed."

The occupying Israeli army placed a tight military siege on Qalqilya city two years ago, and restricts residents' movement to the city's eastern entrance. The Israeli forces also prevent trucks from driving on the main roads. Truck drivers must therefore unload their goods on one side of the checkpoint and then other trucks with Israeli license plates transport their goods to markets outside the city.

Isra' Muhammad, a resident of Qalqilya, said that Israeli soldiers held her up at the checkpoint for two hours. She was returning home after a visit to Jordan, and the soldiers finally let her cross after she surrendered several packs of cigarettes she had brought for one of her brothers, she said.

Qalqilya mayor Ma'ruf Zahran has received numerous complaints about Israeli soldiers blackmailing local residents and requesting bribes in return for allowing them to cross the checkpoint. He has submitted a number of grievances to international human rights organizations, requesting that they intervene to stop these actions.

A number of residents who have been forced to pay bribes do not want to file cases because they are afraid of the Israeli soldiers.

Zahran is worried about Qalqilya residents' increased suffering from the effects of the Israeli siege. "The Israeli forces are aiming to tighten the siege on the city and escalate attacks on civilian institutions to force the residents of Qalqilya, which lies only three kilometers from the Green Line, to migrate," says Zahran.

The Israeli siege has decreased the city's gross income by 90 percent, reports Zahran. Qalqilya's streets are always half empty, a sore reminder of the city's economic recession on the city. The economic situation has had a negative effect on residents' abilities to procure even the basic 2002.(c)Palestine necessities of life.

Translated by Jennifer Peterson from Al Ayyam on November 3

Friday, November 1

MCC Palestine Update #64

MCC Palestine Update #64

November 1, 2002

This update simply comprises of two news pieces which I wanted to pass on before two weeks' worth of visitors and MCC regional meetings. The first, by Ha'aretz journalist Amira Hass, looks at the plight of frustrated and harassed olive farmers in the northern West Bank. The second, from Palestine Report, provides glimpses into the lives of taxi and truck drivers plying the makeshift dirt roads throughout the West Bank. Regular updates will resume in the second half of November.

--Alain Epp Weaver


1.It's the pits
Amira Hass
Ha'aretz, October 27, 2002

Humiliated farmers, angry landowners, human rights activists and army personnel: A confrontation in an olive grove Four frightened farmers emerged from the old Renault that screeched to a halt in the center of the path. "The settlers didn't let us get to our grove," they told their fellow villagers of Akrabeh, who were picking olives along the sides of the path. It was Monday afternoon, four days after the majority of the residents of the neighboring village of Yanun deserted their homes, unable to bear the harassment of the settlers any longer.

The car's passengers turned down the proposal to join two television crews, one foreign and one Israeli, and return to the site where, they said, "an armed settler in an off-road vehicle and another three" people had threatened them with their rifles and taken their car key - returning it only after ordering them to leave.

The reporters continued driving on the path, which winds its way toward Nablus between fields and hills planted with olive and almond trees. In the middle of the path was an off-road vehicle with an Israeli license plate (number 01-478-69), and astride it was a young bearded Israeli wearing a khaki hat and with a rifle slung over his shoulder. In the field next to the path, another young man sat on a tractor (Israeli license plate 57-000-37) that was hitched to a plow. Two young men, both wearing large skullcaps and one of them armed with a rifle, walked alongside this vehicle.

"No photographs," one of the drivers snapped. "I say no pictures. This is my private land and you will not photograph my house." He refused to say whether it was he who had blocked the Akrabeh residents from getting to their olive grove. "I don't answer you. I don't talk to you," he said. "This field is mine all my life - no, for 2,000, 3,000, 5,000 years. Since Hashem [God] created the world." He and his armed friend produced wireless radios and began talking into them.

In short order, activists of the Ta'ayush Arab Jewish Partnership group, Rabbis for Human Rights, foreign nationals in the Solidarity movement, and a few of the grove owners in the area arrived. They stopped their convoy of cars opposite the off-road vehicle and its armed driver. The activists and the farmers began to speak about the right of the tillers of the land to harvest their crops. The driver of the off-road vehicle listened and then told the Palestinians: "You are dead people."

In the meantime, another off-road vehicle (Israeli license plate 12-452-76) and another few Israelis wearing skullcaps arrived in the field. An Israel Defense Forces jeep also pulled up, parking across the width of the path, and an officer with the rank of captain emerged from it. He huddled with the driver of the off-road vehicle, and spoke with representatives of the Ta'ayush group and of the Palestinian fellahin, who complained that they were unable to get to their olive groves.

"Why is he plowing my land and you say nothing to him, but you do not let me harvest olives?" one of the Akrabeh group - the father of a youngster who was wounded by gunfire on October 6 - said bitterly. On October 6, a few young people had gone to their grove to pick olives. A group of armed Israeli civilians showed up and, from a distance, opened fire; one of the Palestinians, Hani Beni Maniyeh, 24, was killed. The police are investigating allegations that Israelis murdered him.

Awaiting the verdict The field that was being worked by the Israeli tractor is owned by the Bushnak family, from Nablus. It has leased the field for decades to residents of Akrabeh and Yanun. In the past two years, the farmers say, Israelis have prevented them from planting wheat in this plot, as they have traditionally done.

The origins of the Bushnak families that live in Palestine are in Bosnia. They were Muslim soldiers who were brought here to reinforce the Turkish army at the end of the 19th century and settled in various places in the country, including Yanun. Although they were not originally from one family, they adopted a common surname that attests to their extraction. When they moved to Nablus from Yanun, they leased their land to the residents of Akrabeh, who gradually began to leave their village and settle in the wadi, the plateau and the hill of Yanun. Payment for leasing the land could be made in the form of wheat, olive oil or cash.

About three-quarters of Yanun's 16,000 dunams (4,000 acres) of land is leased.

"We have a law that a leaser is forbidden to remove the tiller of the land," says a Yanun resident, who on Monday was one of those awaiting the verdict as to whether they would be able to harvest the olive crop.

The army captain explained to Ha'aretz: "There are places where they can harvest the crop and places where they cannot. Those are army orders - not demands of settlers - in order to prevent them from approaching a settlement and perpetrating a terrorist attack."

The settlement of Itamar is northwest of Akrabeh and Yanun. Over the years, its residents expanded their homes onto hilltops in the area. A few mobile homes on each of these hills, along with observation towers and water reservoirs, surround Yanun from the east, the north and the west. The groves of Akrabeh and Yanun abut on the settlement's ever- expanding boundaries.

The captain related that his soldiers had told the olive harvesters that they were prohibited from working the groves "on the left" (that is, the many hundreds of trees on the north side of the path). Those "on the right" can be harvested. "We are letting them harvest in most places," the captain continued, explaining the policy. "That is also in the army's interest. There is a great deal of humanity here. You can ask. They are even guarded." And what about the Israelis on the off-read vehicle and the tractor, who blocked the Palestinians from getting to the right of the path? "That is a different matter, a matter for the police," the captain said.

In the meantime, another jeep arrived, bringing a major, who wanted to talk to the Palestinians and their supporters. Rabbi Arik Ascherman, from Rabbis for Human Rights, was sent to negotiate with him. He returned with a proposal: "If we work on the south side, they will separate between us and the settlers," he said. "Their duty is to protect us if we work on this side." And one more condition: The "boundary" demarcated by the off-road vehicle can be crossed only on foot.

‘Softened version’

The villagers decided to take advantage of the presence of the Ta'ayush group and harvest their crops, even though they thought the terms were humiliating and discriminatory. The closure is causing economic bankruptcy and these days, every liter of oil than can be extracted from the olives is worth its weight in gold. "The only reason the army is letting us work is that you are here," someone remarked. "If you weren't here, the army would tell us to call the police and in the end, it does what the settlers want."

"You were witnesses to a softened version of what we have been going through for the past five years," Abd al-Latif Bani Jaber, the head of the Yanun village council, said afterward. He sat at the entrance of one of the homes whose owners left. He walked past the abandoned houses on the deserted streets with the Ta'ayush activists - who had come to stay over - and related the history of the abandonment of the small village, which consists of three groups of buildings on the plain and the Yanun hill.

"In the past few months, some of the residents left the village and moved to Akrabeh. They couldn't take the fear anymore. We were 150 residents, which gradually decreased to 100, then 87. Last Friday, only eight families were still here." The occupants of the homes closest to the hills and the mobile homes were the first to leave. At first Bani Jaber and other villagers filed complaints to the police about assaults (at the Civil Administration base in Hawarah). "Causing damage to private land, uprooting trees" is recorded under "confirmation of the filing of a complaint" in February 1998; "building a road on land owned by you," the police wrote in July 1998. However, in time, "we saw that there was no point to complaining. No one came to our aid," Bani Jaber says.

Armed Israelis showed up outside houses in the village, preventing the residents from getting to their crops and intimidating them. Sheep sometimes disappeared. One Saturday last June, Bani Jaber was sitting with his wife and children at the entrance to their home. "Those who attacked us in the past are used to us locking ourselves in our houses. That day they came down from the hill and told me to get inside. I said I will sit here wherever I want." He and a few neighbors threw stones at the Israelis in order to scare them off. More Israelis showed up and some of them fired in the air, he said.

Dozens of young people from Akrabeh rushed to the neighboring village to help. The army and the Civil Administration were also summoned. The IDF Spokesman confirmed at the time that there had been an "incident" and that the security forces had separated the "combatants."

In the middle of the night on April 17, someone set fire to the building that housed the village's power generator. The United Nations Development Program financed the installation of a generator to supply electricity to the village and to pump water from the local well into two large tanks that were placed on a cliff at the edge of the village, from which pipes were laid to the houses.

The repair will cost $17,000, but a new generator has not yet arrived. According to one of the residents, it was made clear to the villagers that the new generator would also be torched. The upshot is that since April, the village has had neither electricity nor running water. At the end of July, a group of Israelis toppled the tanks, which in any event were empty.

Since April, the villagers have been going down to the spring and filling jerricans with water, which they store in a concrete reservoir that they built. Nine days ago, two days before the abandonment of the village, they were astounded to discover three Israelis swimming in their drinking water. In the past few weeks, Israelis have harassed fellahin from Akrabeh and from the villages north of Itamar.

"It is known in the village that the assailants operate on Saturdays, in a different place each week," Bani Jaber said. "`When does Saturday come?,' our children ask their parents in fright. People thought that we were next on the list, so last Friday those who were still here decided to leave."

The Nimr family - the father, who is a teacher, his wife and their eight children - left their home together with most of the village residents that Friday, taking their sheep. Two days later, the mother returned with three of her children - her grown-up son and daughter and a three- year-old boy. "We came back when we heard that people came to protect us," she said. "We felt a bit of security." The mother, Umm Nizar, had to reassure the little boy that the Hebrew speakers around him "are not settlers." He watched with frightened eyes and wouldn't say anything.

Umm Nizar said that four Israelis, two of them armed, had surrounded the house a few days before the family left, had fired in the air and demanded that she open the door. "It is a continuing saga. They come over and over," she said. "Whenever there is noise outside, the boy says `the settlers came.'" He doesn't say "Jew," which is the word used for the army. "The army is normal, we are not afraid of them," she said.

Two brothers, Faiq and Ralub Bani Jaber, both around 70, live in a stone house that was built during the period of Jordanian rule. They and their children, totaling about 25 people, refused to leave. Ralub Bani Jaber summed up: "When I saw my neighbors leaving, I felt death."


2. Road warriors
Atef Saad
Published at http://www.palestinereport.org, October 23, 2002.

Also in this week's Palestine Report: Everyone is worried about transfer, but Palestinians inside are already quietly on the move, PR reports. The full magazine is available upon subscription.

RA'AF DARAGHMEH climbed out of the ditch where his truck had buried its nose. Fine white clay covered the twenty-five-year-old from head to foot.

"My truck got stuck after the tire blew out. It was shot out by Israeli tank fire preventing us from going on," Daraghmeh explained as he dusted the dirt from his face and hair.

Without warning, a tank and military jeep carrying four soldiers had rumbled onto the scene, Daraghmeh recounted. The soldiers disembarked, brandishing their guns, and chaos broke out. Drivers traversing the stretch of road abandoned their lorries of merchandise, fruit and flour and raced for cover behind the nearest tree or gully. But Daraghmeh was not able to escape the random gunfire and his truck lurched to a halt between a rock and a ditch.

The truck was carrying three tons of straw and had already made the difficult three and a half hour journey from Tubas to Nablus - a trip that once took just forty minutes. Daraghmeh found shelter between two boulders until the tank completed its "security operation" and departed. Timidly, the drivers ventured out to inspect the damage, and the lucky ones with usable tires went on their way.

But Daraghmeh's truck was immovable, and it took a tire repairman, two new wheels, and the strength of five men to finally budge it from its hole. "I was forced to sell my load for the first price I was offered -half of what I should have gotten," Daraghmeh says. "I spent two nights in the truck because I was afraid to leave it until an armored patrol fired into the air, warning me to get out of the area. I tried to convince them that I couldn't leave my truck stuck like this and they replied with a shower of bullets. And so I left my truck and retraced my steps to Tubas."

The next day, Daraghmeh tried to return to the area, but again the army headed him off. "The day after that, the road - if you can still call it that - was filled with ditches dug by the tanks." Finally, twelve days later, Daraghmeh succeeded in pulling his vehicle out of the ditch. The cost of the required repairs was roughly equal to the value of the straw that the Palestinian had hauled.

Napoleonic measures Incredibly, Daraghmeh's travails are not atypical among the hundreds of Palestinian drivers trying to deliver goods on now nearly impassable West Bank roads. Because the Israeli army has blocked the modern network of highways connecting Nablus to other West Bank population centers, truck drivers are forced to use paths forged by animals. Nasir Yousef, president of the public transportation workers' syndicate in the West Bank, says that the Israeli army is taking the advice of French general Napoleon: an invading army must control the roads.

Before the army clamped down on the traffic routes in late September 2000, the Nablus department of transportation had recorded nearly 14,000 licensed trucks and taxis in operation in the areas of Nablus and Salfit. "Only a few dozen of these are left now, and they work under dangerous circumstances," says Yousef. "Taxis can be destroyed or their drivers wounded, or their vehicles may be severely damaged on the rough roads they are forced to travel." With the exception of a few dozen trucks employed by international humanitarian organizations and carrying permits to cross Israeli checkpoints, most trucks and taxis are simply "out of order."

The measures have decimated the transportation sector and cemented the fracturing of Palestinian communities. A report by the Ministry of Transportation indicates that from the start of the Intifada to September 28 this year, the industry had lost nearly $2 billion and declined to a mere ten percent of its previous capacity. Of the nearly 9,000 taxis in all of the West Bank, only forty percent are now running. While buses used to make a decent day's work of $250, they now average $38 a working day.

Bullets for bread Inside the cities, public taxi drivers aren't faring much better. In Nablus, the twenty-four hour curfew has reigned for over 100 days on end. Even when the curfew is lifted, the city remains divided in half, the split enforced by a makeshift military checkpoint of a Merkava tank and two military jeeps, located just across from the destroyed Palestinian Authority headquarters. During the extended curfews, taxis play a deadly game of cat and mouse with Israeli military patrols that tour the streets and enforce the stillness.

Taxi drivers are always on the lookout for roaming tanks, because if caught unawares they can be lucky to escape with their hide. Unfortunate drivers or those who receive incorrect information can be chased down, sometimes with live gunfire. Occasionally these encounters turn tragic, as in the case of 12-year-old Ibrahim Al Madani, who was shot in the head by an army patrol chasing a taxi. The child was visiting his uncle's home in the Askar Refugee Camp, and remains in a coma today.

"Under such circumstances drivers find themselves with only two choices," says Yousef. "They can either stay in their homes under house arrest and without any freedom to move, work or earn money, or they can risk driving their cars through the city streets in the hopes that they come across passengers."

To navigate the dangerous streets, the drivers in their distinctive yellow cars swap information on the movements of armored patrols. They also benefit from the boys found lingering at the entrances to streets and alleys.

A few days in early September, the Israeli army seemed to ease its grip on the movements of students and teachers on their way to school. The city exhaled slowly. But it wasn't long before the armored patrols "changed their minds" and the strict curfew was reinstated. In just a few days, four children between the ages of 10 and 17 were killed in Nablus, Balata, and Al Ayn refugee camp. Another child lies in a coma at the local Rafidiya hospital.

Hosni Dweikat, 32, drives a shared taxi and was "caught" by a military patrol as he was "breaking" curfew orders. His punishment, meted out by the Israeli soldiers, was to have his keys confiscated and to sit for six hours in the sun.

"Aren't you afraid that they will catch you?" I asked Dweikat when I encountered him on the very same street one day later. He didn't hesitate. "What do you mean? I can't die of worry at home. I am responsible for a family of five. Who will support them?"

A matter of life Making these risky rounds with the taxi drivers, it is easy to see how local merchants have adjusted, too. New businesses have sprung up anywhere there is traffic and passersby. Cafes, sweet shops, mechanics, clothing stands and tiny movable groceries line any remaining thoroughfare, tempting the travelers. At the Ayn Al Faria junction, nearly all of the merchants once had full businesses in the curfewed city of Nablus. They, too, are trying to survive.

Fifty-three-year-old Atef Ashour is one of those who has given up. He sold his old truck for lack of work. "I have driven trucks for more than thirty years and I don't remember ever going through circumstances like this in the past," he says. "Truck drivers find work even in the worst of times. We transport food, vegetables, medicine and other things that people can't go without." Ashour worked all through the Intifada of the eighties, he says, but now he can't afford to maintain his truck. "Trucks and taxis are built to move. Without work, they die."

Several weeks ago, the Nablus curfew was lifted for five hours and truck driver Mahmoud Marzouq was asked to deliver shoes and baby towels to a Hebron merchant who was waiting at a nearby crossroads to pick up the merchandise. The Al Bazan intersection is some fifteen minutes from Nablus, but Marzouq and six other drivers were forced to take rough back roads that locals have dubbed "Tora Bora," after the vast intimidating Afghani mountains pictured on television over the last year.

On this road, the trip to Al Bazan takes three hours. But, as luck would have it, not far from Beit Fureik, the six trucks were stopped in their tracks by an Israeli military patrol.

"They didn't speak to us," says Marzouq. "The soldiers just opened fire on my front tires. My colleague's truck stopped when they shot out his back tire, and it flattened immediately. The goods he was carrying, pants and shirts, fell to the ground. The soldiers ordered us to remove our clothes to make sure that we weren't wearing explosives belts. Then they confiscated our keys and identification cards and left."

"We spent the night in our damaged trucks, and the next day began to look for a tire mechanic," continued one of the six drivers. "Then the patrol came back and took us to the army camp in Hawareh where an officer questioned us, asking 'Are you breaking the curfew?' We immediately admitted to doing so, and then he asked us, 'Why are you breaking the curfew when you know it will cost you dearly?'"

Marzouq picks up the story, saying, "We told him that we have gone without work and income for six months." The officer let the truck drivers off with a warning. Next time, he said, each would be fined the equivalent of $1,000 and their vehicles impounded, not counting the $60 a day for storage every day the car remains in dock. Released for now, the group finally found mechanics in Beit Fureik who brought them new tires - at a fee of $250 a pair.

Would they do it again? "By god," says Marzouq, "I don't have even a sack of rice, and I can't find anyone who will give me a loan. No one has surplus money to loan to those who need it." Over the last three months, Marzuq the father of two has only hauled four deliveries. "We are only living because we are not dead," he says.

Published 23/10/02