Monday, June 22, 2009

This is the occupation


Across the West Bank, Israeli soldiers at checkpoints stop Palestinian drivers to show them their permits. If these permits are said to be out of date or wrong, many such drivers then have to wait for the soldiers to make phone calls. Some are eventually let through. Others are told to go back. The reason is not always clear. It can often be expressed as a new rule that nobody had thought to tell them about. As many Palestinians will tell you: this is the occupation.

All this happens a lot less often to Israeli drivers – except at checkpoints like the one at Anabta on the Nablus road into Tulkarem – both designated (following the Oslo agreements) as Area A (that is, under the control of the Palestinian Authority in terms of both civil and security matters). After the second Palestinian uprising broke out in late 2000, Israel made it illegal for Israeli citizens to enter Area A, so Israeli drivers are not supposed to come here. If they do so, they are committing an offence.

When we arrived this last Saturday afternoon(as always, at rush hour time), a huge queue of vehicles were backing up. The heat was oppressive.

The cause of the jam became clear. The soldiers had stopped two white vans and were questioning their passengers. As we got closer, we saw that the passengers - like us - were wearing a uniform. It turned out to be that of the Israeli 'Physicians for Human Rights', returning from a day's voluntary work running a clinic in a nearby Palestinian village.

We joined them and learned more. They had driven there on a different road, without a checkpoint. Why were they being stopped? they wondered.
(‘It may be forbidden to enter “Area A”, as one says, ‘but why is it forbidden to leave?’ ‘We’ve had a very successful day’, says another, ‘but this is a very unsuccessful ending. Who knows? We might be indicted for illegal entry!’)
In twenty years of doing this work, the coordinator told us, this had never happened before.

The group of some 25 professionals included an endochrinologist, a gynaecologist, an orthopaedic surgeon, a paediatric dermatologist and a nurse. I got talking to Yosefa Sartiel. She is a retired GP (‘family physician’), living near Tel Aviv.

‘When I retired seven years ago, I decided to become active. At first I thought of Machsom Watch*. Then my partner said, ‘You have medical skills, why not this?’ I was nervous at first. But I’ve been coming ever since. I usually go in one day a month.

'I felt I could not stand by. Here we are living side by side, but the difference is so huge between what is obtainable to us and what is obtainable to the Palestinians. Our occupation prevents them from getting to a doctor. It is difficult for them to get a cat scan here. It’s difficult to get medication.’

Cases she had seen that day included a little boy aged 3 and a half, brought in by his father in need of an operation on his leg, and a child with a kidney problem. Both needed to see specialists. For both, she was able to give attention and a referral letter on official paper, marked urgent.

Hassan Matani, a general surgeon, told me he had seen 200 people that day and made some small surgical operations (cysts, warts, ingrown toenails). ‘I do this as a general commitment to people living under occupation. I have an affinity with them as I am a Palestinian, living in Israel. Their suffering is my suffering.’

While the soldiers wait for replies to their phone calls at the checkpoint booths, the doctors and nurses were kept by the roadside waiting to travel home for over an hour and a half. They were irritated, but they were also amused. Some of them are less than twenty minutes from home. One remembers the tray of Palestinian pastries they had been given by some patients at the clinic and starts passing them round. Another jokes, ‘This Is the occupation.’ And this time it’s affecting Israelis, too – even those on human rights work.

Eventually, an Israeli police jeep arrives. The policeman, looking somewhat embarrassed, says if they provide ID numbers he should be able to let them through. Then he gets another phone call. Turns out he can let them through, anyway.



Notes

* more on Machsom Watch in: Numbers add up, 13 May on this blog.

Physicians for Human Rights – Israel: www.phr.il

My team colleague Maria gave me a link to a profile of one of the volunteers in this group, that had been published only three weeks ago in an in rview by Mat Heywood. Pnina Feiler, an 86-year-old nurse and volunteer told him:
“Today, the real importance of our work with the clinics is not only the humanitarian or medical help we offer – in truth there is very little we can do in comparison to the demand. The significance is the fact that we come as citizens of Israel, showing our solidarity with [the Palestinian's] suffering, and against the occupation.”
4 June 2009, Guardian Weekly, http://www.guardianweekly.co.uk/?page=editorial&id=1101&catID=3

Monday, June 15, 2009

Children get together

How can Israeli and Palestinian children meet? The separation barrier and system of checkpoints seems to make it impossible. If they never meet, how will they ever overcome stereotypes of each other? With large and growing populations of children and young people* this seems an important question to ask. And last week, I learned of one project that has been working to answer it.





For just two summer months, this football pitch lies sleeping in the sun - a brief respite from the energy that tears up and down it the rest of the year: every day, from 3 in the afternoon until 9 or 10 in the evening.

For Chaim Nadler, this is the fulfilment of a dream: a mixed Arab and Israeli soccer club. Ten years ago, he gave up his job at the local plastics factory and threw himself full-time into setting up this, the Barkai Center for Soccer and Coexistence, here in Israel, a few miles past the border with the West Bank. Today, it has a membership of some 400 children aged between 10 and 15 years old, who show up three or four times a week for football practice and training.

The Center is in Menashe, a regional municipality consisting of a lot of small communities, including ten kibbutzes, and three Arabic villages – including Meiser, where I spent last Saturday with Said Arda, its head of youth and development and his wife Jutta, three children, and assorted pets. With a population of 800, Meiser is a place where people know each other and where Said grew up with his six brothers. In terms of football, Said and Jutta’s three sons are all goalkeepers – and active members of the club.

Officially designated an Arab Israeli, Said sees himself as Palestinian. As the crow flies, Meiser is just eight kilometers from Tulkarem, where he has relatives. But of course, with the occupation, crows aren’t a lot of use. The old road is closed, and what used to be a journey of ten minutes is now a drive of over an hour, involving two checkpoints.

Said took me to meet Chaim, one of the ‘crazy people like me’, in his words, working to make opportunities for children and young people to mix. As he put it: “What I love about this project so much is that it is sport, but it is also education. The idea is that the children should be human first, before they are good soccer players.’






Chaim explained: ‘This is not a philanthropic organization. We look for professional people and have to pay for them. (Costs of the club include: fees for the coaches, maintenance of the field, water and electricity for the office and hut and travel to matches - and a social facilitator.) ‘We think it is very important to get the connections between Arab and Jewish children, educating in more than just sports and teaching them how to cooperate with each other, using games and talk. We take them on visits, to a mosque and to a synagogue, as well as playing football.’

The Barkai Center for soccer has also just begun another initiative: this time, to bring Palestinian children from Jenin, in the West Bank to play football together with local Israeli kids. It took months to get the paperwork. At last, in April, the first trip came: a busload of 40 children. They met, talked, ate, and - in mixed teams - played a lot of football. For a second meeting in June, another group made the same journey, and had the same get-together.

Said and Chaim both feel proud of the Center’s achievements – but both are aware of the road still to travel. As Chaim said: ‘It’s not equal, of course, not balanced. I don’t want the children from here to make a favour out of meeting the other side. We need to work to make the traveling to Israel less exciting for the kids fron Jenin, so as to give the meetings themselves more value.’

Just outside Meiser, Said stopped the car to show me a stretch of the wall, a feature of every view wherever you travel in the West Bank.


Here, we were on the Israeli side of it, and it looked no less insuperable. (His son Adam, 1m 80 tall, stood against it for proportion purposes.)

On this day, however, I was learning about one small project on the ground that is finding a way to overcome its division of despair.



Footnotes:
*In Palestine, 45.7% of the population is under the age of 15. (Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics Demographic and Socioeconomic Status of the Palestinian People at the end of 2006 , PCBS, Ramallah, Palestine). I haven't been able to find out the figures for Israel yet.

Chaim recalled work with the University of Brighton with similar aims, five years ago, when the Football Association hosted a training week for Jewish and Muslim Israeli community sports leaders at the University of Brighton, followed by a meeting in Northern Israel. For a brief account, see www.fa.com (click on international relations).

Tuesday, June 9, 2009

Settlements must go

‘The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements. This construction violates previous agreements and undermines efforts to achieve peace. It is time for these settlements to stop.’












Last Thursday in Jerusalem was a baking hot day. In the early afternoon, I was walking along Jaffa Road carrying a parcel to the post office. Passing the open door of a cafĂ©, I caught the unmistakeable voice of America’s President, giving his speech in Cairo. It gave me a good excuse to cool off in the shade of the doorway and watch the live broadcast on the flatscreen television inside.

As the papers reported later, he spoke of seven issues. The topic of ‘Israelis, Palestinians and the Arab world’ was the second; and once again, just as in his meeting with Israel’s President Netanyahu a few weeks ago, this business of settlements was a central topic.

But what is a settlement?

Settlements are housing developments, built on land in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, with the support of the Israeli government. With very few exceptions, only Israeli citizens or those of Jewish descent entitled to Israeli citizenship are allowed to live there. In other words, although this is housing built on Palestinian land, Palestinians are expected to keep out.

At the last count, there are 149 settlements in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. They vary in numbers of residents from 300 to 30,000. In the last two months I have now visited two of the bigger kind, seen a small one from the distance of a few hundred metres, and glimpsed, from a distance, many more of various sizes, usually on the top of hills. ((This picture shows the small one, just a few hundred metres from the village of Shufa.) This means that thousands of Israelis are living in Palestine, enclosed in special areas – to which special roads are built that only they can use. The first settlements were built in 1967. The numbers have been growing ever since. And those that already exist are getting bigger.

To become a settler, you are likely either to be following a religious conviction that the West Bank is the ‘land of Israel’ and that it is your duty to live there – or you come from one of the poorer neighbourhoods in Jerusalem and are attracted by the fact that this offers you cheaper housing than the equivalent in Israel. In this case you may be an ultra-orthodox or a secular Jew. Either way, your everyday life will bring you into very little contact with Palestinians. You may be hardly aware of the village down the road, since the road you take avoids bringing you anywhere near it.

Settlements by an occupying power on occupied land are illegal according to the 1949 Geneva Convention. So Obama’s call for them to ‘stop’ is not new. But it is said in plain words. (And some of the settlers don’t like it. Reports come in of new settler violence; setting fire to Palestinians’ crops being just one example. Human rights organizations see it as a pattern.)

What must it be like to be a Palestinian who helps to build a settlement? That’s something to consider. A couple of weeks ago there was a picture in the newspaper Haaretz. It showed a Palestinian worker on his knees at prayer. The location: a building site in the settlement of Efrat (the same settlement I wrote about a few weeks ago). The building work is part of what Israel terms the ‘natural growth’ of residents’ growing families. The map of the West Bank changes, with those areas designated as settlements getting bigger and the bits in between getting smaller, and with them, this man’s human rights of freedom of movement, equality and dignity.

As Obama also said, Palestinians ‘endure the daily humiliations - large and small - that come with occupation. So let there be no doubt: the situation for the Palestinian people is intolerable.’ If a just peace is to come here, then settlement building, and the injustice it perpetuates, must end.

Sources:
UNOCHA (2007) The humanitarian impact on Palestinians of Israeli settlements and other infrastructure in the West Bank. United Nations www.ochaopt@un.org
Yesh Din, Settler terror infrastructure in the West Bank Background Briefing, Yesh Din -- Volunteers for Human Rights, June 2, 2009
Ha’aretz newspaper, Thursday 28 May 09, pA2