Routine resistance

You meet people here in Palestine who ask: what’s happened to the Palestinian resistance movement? In her book on nonviolent resistance to the occupation, Palestinian Quaker Jean Zaru argues that this is a movement that is, if not growing, at least not gone away. Very early one morning last week, I had the chance to witness what she meant at Qualqilya checkpoint, on the border between the West Bank and Israel. Unlike others I had seen before at the roadside, this one is entirely pedestrian. First, let me quote what Jean Zaru says.

‘The word sumoud in Arabic might best be translated as ‘steadfastness’. It plays an incredibly important part in Palestinian culture and self-identity….To practice sumoud means to remain steadast on one’s land and, more generally, to remain steadfast in service to one’s homeland and to the struggle for freedom. For example, given the current grave circumstances, just waking up every morning with the determination to carry on with one’s daily routine and to hold fast to one’s humanity in spite of the challenges and dangers to movement – walking through military checkpoints to get to work, driving your children past army tanks to get to school, taking your herd to graze despite physical ad verbal abuse of Israeli settlers – is to practice sumoud or to be samid or samida.’

At Qualqilya checkpoint in the pre-dawn dark, crowds of people (almost entirely men) arrive with lunch bags to queue, leaving their trucks and cars in the park near the lamplit tents selling coffee and falafels. There are three stages. First is the line along the wire to the turnstile into the shed. Once through, there’s the snaking line from turnstile to permit check. After that comes the metal detection machine.

The turnstile opens at 4.30am. Queuing starts an hour before. On busy mornings, the whole procedure can take as much as an hour and a half. And all that people can do is wait, shuffle along, and wait again – all the time in the knowledge that something may get stuck or go wrong in the stages that follow, either to themselves or the ones in front – with the serious risk of missing the transport at the other side. And day after day, they submit themselves to this frustrating ordeal in order to go to work.

The morning I was there, we counted 2,700 people going through the turnstile as dawn rose in the two hours after we arrived at 4.30am. Outwardly, none of them were protesting. No-one was losing their temper. On other mornings, other things do happen. People lose patience and push. But last Tuesday morning, nearly three thousand Palestinians were nonviolently resisting the temptation to give in to despair and rage and simply getting on with what they had to get on with.

Jean Zaru (2008) Occupied with nonviolence: a Palestinian woman speaks. Fortress Press (p71-72)

Playing with stones

It’s been a week of discussions, meetings and travel - our ‘mid-term orientation’, focusing on Israel. The twenty-four of us that add up to the 31st group of Ecumenical Accompaniers here, gathered together again in Jerusalem, after our first six weeks of work. We were there to review and to learn something of the Israeli Jewish experience.

There are, as usual, contrasts. On Monday morning we listened to Bob Lang, public relations man at the Efrat Settlement, a wealthy Jewish-only suburb of Jerusalem. Pointing across the hills ahead, he told us: ‘We as Jews have a history. If you take out the Jewish history book, the Bible, 90% of the places here are Jewish.’ Proud to have a protecting army, and proud of a heritage with this claim to the land, this speaker had no problems knowing where his loyalties lay. (It's strange to think that, the same day as Bob was talking to us of his settlement's plans for growth, President Obama was telling the Israeli Prime Minister to freeze settlement building at their meeting in Washington, headlined in the world's media the following day.)


Two days later, Ruth Hillier, an Israeli Jew herself told us of a different view - of the struggle her family had had to get her son released from conscription to the Israeli army.. As a pacifist, he could not accept the three-year conscription. Mother of six children, two of whom had already done military service, Ruth went on to found New Profile, the organization which provides advice and support to other families like hers and which a couple of weeks ago was in the news charged with ‘inciting refusal’ among Israeli youth.

Back home in Tulkarem, I take a walk up the street. Ruth had told us of what she called the militarization of the society. ‘The soldier is conditioned to think that his gun is his best friend’, she had said. ‘He takes his gun into his home. The army doesn’t have a place to leave it before he goes home. We see armed soldiers in the mall, in the bank, in the grocery store, at the seaside’.

And sure enough, at the end of the street, three armed soldiers are lounging on the corner. (But this is Palestine, not Israel? Oh yes, of course, this is also the occupation.)

After these and many other confusions, I was glad to have a couple of hours with our women’s conversation group at the refugee camp today. Last week we’d been exchanging notes about children’s games. This week, we had agreed that I would write down in English how two of them are played, if we could work it out between us. The two we chose were: ‘five stones’ and what in English we call ‘hopscotch’.

Turns out, from the group, that this game, known in Arabic as ‘jump’, has two variations. In Jordan, the first round entails jumping – with two feet. In Palestine, it’s hopping, from the word go. As some of you will know, this makes a difference when you come back to pick up your stone. Any player who wobbles or puts her foot on the line is out.

As to five stones, well, Sefiyeh was the one with the nifty snatching skills. (Throw one stone up and snatch the others: first one at a time, then two at a time, and so on). The clatter of stones on the table and the noisy laughter as we checked and disagreed on the best way to play – these were the sounds of a welcome peace.

Numbers add up

Palestinians have to put up with a lot when it comes to getting from A to B. First there is the separation barrier itself. Then there are the checkpoints and gates at which they have to wait before being allowed to get on with their journey.

But there are other things that make for stress and uncertainty in everyday life. One is the issue of the permit. As well as having to have an ID card, Palestinians have to have permits for getting about – and, apart from making sure you have the right one for that day’s journey, you also have to make sure it is still in date. But what if you have the right permit and having got to the gate or checkpoint, you discover that it is closed? Or what if the soldiers at the checkpoint tell you that your permit isn’t valid that day? A close look at how the system works, and it turns out that rules and regulations change from day to day – with no warning. Palestinians know this.

Thanks to statistics and published reports, international bodies can know this too and make public the abuse of human rights that is entailed. From a detailed study on the matter based on careful analysis, for example, a research team from the World Bank concluded:
‘Permit requirements are rarely published and are highly changeable’.
On the one hand, they reported periods of time when entry through checkpoints was refused to men between the ages of 16 and 35 – which these men only learn about when stopped at the checkpoint by the soldiers. During Israeli public holidays, too, the report documents closures across the West Bank with access to school, family, healthcare, work - all stopped.

For working life this is bad. For family life it’s not much good either. In conversation with people in Tulkarem, we find there is a kind of resigned humour about this. Last Friday two of us got into conversation with Durgam, a shopkeeper. This is what he said.
"We used to go to the hills and make a barbecue. I don’t want to do that now. There are soldiers. There are the settlers. (His voice tailed off, he shrugged and bent down to pick up Fouad, his little boy.) I want my son to play football. I want him to be free. The Israelis make this impossible. Money is not the problem. It’s that we are all nervous. When is it going to end?"
The case for the barrier to be put up in the first place was as a means to protect Israelis from terrorist attack. As the World Bank report recalls, part of the agreement that it should be built was a commitment to maintain usual access for Palestinians to their communities and work. Instead, what their study showed, seven years on, is that today
‘freedom of movement and for Palestinians access within the West Bank is the exception rather than the norm….

One of our jobs as Ecumenical Accompaniers is to listen to experiences like Durgam’s. Another is to stand by checkpoints and gates and write down times and numbers, to send them on for the use of studies like this. Standing by a roadside counting cars and lorries, checking timing and watching soldiers can sometimes seem a futile thing to be doing in the long struggle for peace here in Palestine. The day after talking to Durgam, two of us were doing this counting when we saw two other women, further down the road. We met Hanna and Sara and talked. They are Israeli women, members of Machsom Watch, and have been doing this work for over five years. As the cars and trucks crawled past, Hanna told us how they saw it:
"It's very important, the perseverance. Even if you don't change much. It's a kind of protest against the situation. It's the least we can do."
The numbers add up. Next week, so as not to duplicate scarce resources for doing the counting, we have changed our rota time. Meanwhile, it was good to feel part of a bigger monitoring movement.

World Bank Technical Team (2007) Movement and access restrictions in the West Bank: uncertainty and inefficiency in the Palestine Economy. http://domino.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF/db942872b9eae454852560f6005a76fb/3de751bf0a424afc852572d60043df42!OpenDocument.

Wall glimpse

The Separation Barrier in the West Bank has been the subject of protest by international human rights organizations for some years. In 2004 the International Court of Justice gave an advisory opinion in which it deemed the construction of the barrier on occupied land (ie inside the West Bank and not on the Green Line) as illegal. One Friday afternoon recently, my team and I went with Samar Assad, our friend and guide, to see what it has done to the lives of people in Nazlat Isla, a town north of Tulkarem.

When we arrived, we parked in a street with a dead end. On either side were houses in poor repair; in front, a vast, grey, concrete wall. Low down, there were a few words written in Arabic. Samar read them aloud and translated: ‘Ihna shaab el-ard. ‘We own the land’. On the ground beneath, bright geraniums grew.

A few yards from this, by their front door, children watched us. The family knew Samar and invited us in. We, four women, sat on the floor with a grand/mother, her two daughters and granddaughter while her daughter-in-law brought in the tray of tea glasses. I asked Samar to tell the grandmother how we had admired the flowers outside. The grandmother smiled. ‘They plant the Wall and I plant flowers,’ she said.

Started (in this northern region) in 2002 with a planned route of over 700 kilometers, the wall now snakes and loops through the entire West Bank and is nearly complete. In the words of the UN, it consists of ‘a complex series of concrete walls, electronic fences, observation towers, trenches, patrols and razor wire, used to control Palestinian vehicular and pedestrian movement.’*
In the last few weeks, our team has begun to be familiar with these towers, patrols, fences and wire. But not until that afternoon in Nazlat Isa had I seen, at close quarters, the panels of concrete. The effect is flat, grey and very high (eight metres, to be exact). There is no way to climb them. There is no gap to see through them.

Five years ago, as the last panel was fixed in place, the ‘separation barrier’ cut through this town’s main market street for ever. According to the Israeli government, its ‘sole purpose’ is security and a ‘response to suicide bombers who enter into Israel’. * Its effect has been to restrict the rights and freedoms of an entire population - and by no means all Israelis agree with it. Some are part of active protest. The Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem uses measured language:
‘Israel has the right and duty to protect its citizens from attacks. However, the building of the Separation Barrier as a means to prevent attacks inside Israel is the most extreme solution that causes the greatest harm to the local population. Israel preferred this solution over alternate options that would cause less harm to the Palestinians.’
(www.btselem.org/english/Separation_Barrier/index.asp)

Looking back, I still feel humbled at the grandmother’s resistance to despair. In the face of the wall they are written on, the words ‘we own the land’ seem pathetic, yet the flowers turned them into a defiant claim.

However, that glimpse of the barrier has been one of the grimmest things I have seen here yet.

Notes
*International court of justice: www.icj-cij.org and follow links; or check www.stopthewall.org and click on ‘international law’
*UNOCHA (2008): West Bank: access and closure – update
*Israeli Seam Zone authority www.seamzone.mod.gov.il

Times and places

This is a time when two different national events are happening here: Israel’s ‘independence day’ and Palestine’s Nakbah: the first, a cause of celebration, the second, of mourning. The two dates are days apart, and the events they commemorate took place in this land sixty-one years ago. How do visitors make sense of such an apparent contradiction?

ALTERNATIVE TOURISM
'Palestine and Palestinians' is what it says it is: ‘more than an ordinary tourist guidebook’. It gives art, archaeology, religion and history: but it gives politics, too. In starting to read about the region some months ago, this is where, for instance, I first got some idea of what the ‘Nakbah’ means: the catastrophe for Palestine that was war launched by Israel on 4 April 1948, when thousands became refugees and hundreds were massacred - culminating in Israel’s declaration as an independent state on 14 May the same year. The Alternative Tourism Group who published it, was founded in 1995 and runs a ‘critical and experiential programme’ of guided tours round Palestine and Israel. (1). In the first month of being here, I have come to realize that alternative tourism is a growing industry.

Well-known by now for its passionate and active campaigns against the demolitions of Palestinian homes, the Israeli Campaign Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) in 2008 developed its own programme of tours of Israel-Palestine. (2) To many, Jerusalem is the holy city, a place of pilgrimage. In March, our group spent half a day with Angela Godfrey-Goldstein of ICAHD as our guide to its more secular reality: the huge development of Israeli settlements outside it. The biggest of these, built in 1976, is Ma’ale Admumim. Today, some 30,000 Israelis live there. The rows and rows of vast white apartment blocks felt a shock to the eyes after the stone of the old city. Angela’s seminar on the changing map of settlements like this took place against this backdrop. We were tourists all right – coach and cameras to prove it – but this was a different kind of tour.

To Abu Hassan, a former journalist now running his own alternative tourism business, the correct word for ‘settlements’ is ‘colonies’. Choosing to spend two of my days off in Jerusalem a month after seeing Ma’ale Admumim, I picked his trip to Hebron to find out more. With five others in a minibus it was another half-day of reading the landscape, this time south of Jerusalem. It’s just twenty miles door to door but as Hassan told us, actual travel time varies according to how many checkpoints are active that day, entailing anything from none to six stops, potentially adding two hours to anyone’s journey. As he drove, we looked out at the red-roofed ‘colonies’ to left and right, realizing as we looked that these were Israeli-only enclaves, linked by Israeli-only roads.

WALLS AND WATCHTOWERS
On the way, we passed the town of Bethlehem. There it was; and round it, this grey ribbon of concrete: the wall. Through the windows we could see, too, the olive groves between the wall and our road. ‘Those belong to the people inside the wall’, Hassan pointed out. ‘Since the wall went up, they can’t get to them’.

Once in Hebron, the moment I will remember most is one that took place in someone’s home. Hassan took us up the stone staircase and we emerged on the roof. There, father and son offered a tray of tea as we looked. Gradually, we realized how many watchtowers we could see, manned by Israei soldiers, surrounding these houses. From the youngest daughter some of us bought shell bracelets for a few shekels and behind her, we saw the shape of another watchtower, with its searchlights and army camouflage net and the silhouette of the watching soldier. Like all the rest of the military in Hebron, he was there to ‘protect’ the settlers in the town from the Palestinian inhabitants – including this family.

Reports from Ecumenical Accompaniers also offer guidance to life here on the West Bank. As well as telling stories of this life, they provide visitors with background information:
‘Hebron was the first city settlers moved to after the Israeli occupation of the West Bank in 1967 and is today the only city in the Occupied West Bank (except East Jerusalem) where Jewish settlers live in the heart of the city. At any one time there are at least 500 Israeli soldiers to protect the approximately 600 settlers living inside the centre of Hebron.’ (3)

Dates and numbers give a sense of time and place. Tourist for one day, I glimpsed the sheer size of this town. With a population, Abu Hassan told us, of some hundred thousand, it is equal to the main town near my own home - Gloucester. On the way back I wondered how it was that its few hundred settlers needed the ‘security’ of armed soldiers to feel protected from the family who gave us tea on their roof.

NOTES
(1)
‘What made this country so famous from old times until our day is its rich history…. as the home of the three monotheistic world religions; Christianity, Islam and Judaism…. and because of the never-ending wars that this country experienced and still experiences.
We in Palestine and in the Alternative Tourism Group (ATG) would like to invite you all to come here, to learn about history, religions, conflicts, culture, traditions etc. In this place, one can have a life experience that can never be found elsewhere.’ www.atg.ps
(2)
‘Do you want to learn about the real story behind the headlines? Do you want to understand the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis by getting beyond the political rhetoric to the facts on the ground? Do you want to develop a framework for understanding the tensions in the Holy Land and the greater Middle East? If yes, consider taking an alternative tour with ICAHD.’ (www.icahd.org)
(3) 23.03.09 Living literally under occupation, by: Sam Jones, EA in Hebron
www.eappi.org (follow links to Eye Witness – EA Reports)