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)

Prison protest

Outside the Red Cross building in Tulkarem every Tuesday morning, members of the Prisoners’ Families Club gather for their weekly protest at the detention of their sons. Here in the north of the West Bank, I have learned that it is common to find people with family members with prison experience. Last week, as he was chatting to us in the street, our taxi driver waved at his cousin the other side of the road. ‘He just got released a month ago’, he told us. ‘He’s 36 years old now; he went in at the age of 17’. At lunch, a couple of days later, one man recalled his teenage sentence of seven months for throwing stones at Israeli tanks.

When asked what the charge might be, the reply is often ‘resisting the occupation’, said with the irony of those who have to live with it. At the Tuesday event, Malak and her friend Nadia did not speak of the charges, simply of the sentences: fourteen months for Malak's son, twenty years for Nadia's. Only half-joking, Malak asked me: ‘Can you end this occupation?’ to which Nadia added: ‘Put pressure on the British government!’

Estimates vary on the exact figure of Palestinian prisoners held now in Israeli's detention centres, but it is most often given as 10,000. Of these, and a concern to human rights organizations, 560 are currently held without charge or trial for up to six months at a time under the system of administrative detention. (These sentences can be – and often are - renewed several times).

Conditions in Israeli prisons are reportedly 'appalling'. After the collapse of talks in March to agree the prisoner exchange of the jailed Israeli corporal for Palestinian prisoners, there are now plans by the Israeli government to make these conditions worse – with the intention of convincing Hamas to release the corporal. Family visits are to be reduced, there will be fewer chances of studying, and access to TV, radio and newspapers is to be cut. .

On national Prisoners' day in April, families all over Palestine carried portraits of their children in processions and vigils like the one in the Tulkarem. On Tuesday, there were journalists and photographers from the local media, recording interviews.

They come regularly to film and report, apparently. It's not always easy to know the effects of media attention - but in this case, one that their mothers hope for is that on prison television screens their sons can see that they are not forgotten: as long as they still have any access to TV, that is.

One thing's for sure: Malak and Nadia will be back next Tuesday.

Access to your own land

Every farmer in this part of the West Bank has t0 show a permit to an Israeli soldier at a gate before they can reach their land. Most of these permits are for three months. Each time a farmer renews his permit, he has to produce the deeds that show his entitlement to it, his own ID and his security clearance. Renewals can take up to four months to arrive.
At the locked gates for the villages and olive groves of Attila and Deir al-Gushun outside the town of Tulkarem, those farmers with permits wait every morning until the Israeli soldiers arrive. Our job, as Ecumenical Accomaniers, is to witness the situation, record the numbers and waiting times and send logs on to other organisations gathering data for human rights monitoring. The thirty or forty farmers that we have met and waited with (together with their donkeys and tractors) are a lot less impatient than drivers on their way to work in the routine traffic jams in Britain.
Maybe it is because they are the ones with permits. For every one putting up with the frustration of having young men with guns guarding the road to their own land, there may be another five at home still waiting for the next permit to arrive.

Sunday in Ramallah

Arriving early is a good idea when y0u are new to Ramallah. On a Sunday morning before 9, there is already much to see. My two hours' journey from Tulkarem had been (with 6 other passengers) in Palestine's favourite mode of transport: the yellow minibus 'service'. I had come to attend
Quaker Meeting.
Inside the Friends' Meeting House, an hour later, I was welcomed by two others already seated and noticed the cool stone, painted benches, windows open to the sounds of traffic outside - and this splash of colour on the wall.
After meeting, I studied it more closely. The collective work of a group of American Quakers, it is a quilt, donated to Ramallah's meeting house two years ago after the building had been renovated. Kathy Bergen, te Program Coordinator for the Friends International Center there, had plates of Easter biscuits and coffee to offer us all after the meeting. Kathy is the author of an article on the effects of occupation for Palestinians published in an issue of 'Cornerstone' that had helped my learning in November, while I was preparing to come to this country.
On my journey back through the sunlit hills and olive groves to Tulkarem an hour later, the armed soldiers at the three checkpoints on the way there was one reminder of just one of these effects.