Over and out…

Hi

I am not stating the death of this blog but I am taking a step back from it. I think I was a dash overzealous to think I would continue to publish stories from my time in the West Bank that concluded over a month ago while there are such serious events unfolding in the Gaza Strip. Go read about the people who are living there and writing about it!

I have some longer opinion/literary journalistic pieces I am beating away at that will be posted here and my Flickr page will continually have some new photos of the West Bank going up there – so pop in there or subscribe to my RSS.

Stay tuned – but only in a passive way
Thanks for reading up to this point
Over and out

House Demolitions in the Occupied Territory

Check out the document link below.

The Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions estimates that some 19,000 Palestinian homes have been demolished in the Occupied Territories since 1967, based on information gleaned from the Israeli Ministry of Interior, the Jerusalem Municipality, the Civil Administration, OCHA and other UN sources, Palestinian human rights groups, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and other sources.

Interesting read. And considering that I was witness to a house demolition in the Arab neighbourhood of Silwan, near the old city of Jerusalem on Wednesday, these kind of documents bring home the unjust policies of the Israeli government. It is hard to get your head around it sometimes. 

Have a read: http://www.scribd.com/doc/7581116/ICAHD-House-Demolition-Statistics-in-Palestine

Everything is debatable – I have to keep telling myself that.

Meet the new neighbours

We here in Palestine are always very welcoming of the new additions to the community. We are particularly appreciative of those who take such an interest in keeping the town safe; take the law into their own hands, stand up to their fears and say NO to crime. They bring armoured personnel carriers and mount machine guns on the balcony of their home, ready to spring into action at the first hint of trouble. So let’s shout a big, hearty welcome, to our new neighbours!

FACTS:
Husan village, west of Bethlehem
3 storey home close to Road 60, just off the main road of Husan
Accusations of stone throwing at cars by settlers of Betar Illit who use the road
IDF responds to accusations
2 personnel carriers, 1 jeep
Some 20 soldiers
02:00 on Saturday morning
Family of the home gets evacuated
An Israeli flag in a Palestinian village
It gets nasty
The international support is called in
We arrive
It stays nasty
The family has an army in their home which they are traumatised by
The soldiers harass the community from their new base
And the story continues…

Another day, another occupation

An Nu’man – a small report

Check out the following report that a colleague, Niina Karling and myself bashed together. It is on a West Bank village, An Nu’man, south of Jerusalem that has some particular legal and social problems. It was written as part of the requirements to the program we are working with here, in Palestine. There are accompanying photographs but they will not be available in this version.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/7512824/An-Numan-Decreasing-options-and-increasing-hardships

(I don’t think that WordPress supports Scribd embedding – so I couldn’t make a nice little picture for this document)

Graff’ glance

On a thick, metal security door in the cement wall of Bethlehem.

 

Soldiers roll into town

I had just finished eating and the soldiers rolled into town. Two jeeps the caller said, by the internet café. Leave the dishes for later I thought. Don’t forget your shoes. Passport too. They weren’t by the internet café but on the road out of town. There were three of us that walked up to the first jeep parked diagonally across the road. I was the only one that stayed to talk. I said hi, asked why they were here, they said none of my business, I said it was actually as I lived here. But the conversation was left at that. I kept walking. The other jeep was about 25 meters down the road parked the same way. There was a jeep in the middle too with a man in civilian clothing in the back. I couldn’t get a good look but he looked top secret like. So three jeeps; about ten soldiers. I stopped in the middle, in between it all. To be honest I knew they were just doing their thing, I didn’t really care why they were here, they were just here and I was here too. So here we were looking at each other. A friend of mine who I saw on the way out of town was trying to get out of town in a taxi, but in one going through the checkpoint. A little stupid I thought but I didn’t push it. They pulled him out of the taxi and took his ID. He was standing on the side of the road, looking worried. Ok, I thought. I asked him what was happening. He said they took his ID. He was looking worried. I asked the soldier if they were looking for anyone in specific. He said they wanted to kill someone. I said, oh, good for you, and walked away. I’m not sure whether he was surprised at my reaction or that he said it – probably the former. I saw they returned my friends ID when I looked back and he happily walked away. 

Big eye sore

Part of the wall completely surrounding Qalqilya, West Bank.

The red and green gate

We arrived before it was open and the people weren’t there and the gate was closed; the light was red. It was cold but we had expected the people to be there already. Jerusalem was shot up late last week and people died in bullets and since then the gate was closed; we thought there would be more people because this was the first day it was open. Our taxi driver told us the evening before that the gates had opened so we were expecting a rush to get into Israel. We considered going back home, it was four in the morning, unexpectedly cold and we weren’t sure if people were still going to come if they weren’t here yet. We decided to stay and before 15 minutes the gates had opened and people started ticking through the green-coloured turnstiles in regular pace. It looked good. It looked better than last week when already the turnstile was red and all the people were delayed and the line backed up and further backed up so before long hundreds had gathered outside the little red light that said in no uncertain terms, “No entry”.

Letter to the NYTimes

Concerning your editorial of 8 March 2008, “Talk, but No Peace”

It is becoming increasingly frustrating to hear about the so-called two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from your newspaper. The viability of this has been dead for some time. Very few serious analysts, journalists and even officials of the UN believe this is possible. Speak to politicians off record and you will often hear the same. If there is any kind of wish for a two-state solution, Israel prime minister, Ehud Olmert, would forbid further development of settlements in West Bank and rather look at possible trade agreements and resource sharing with the PA. With such a number of settlements, criss-crossing of roads, plotting and division of land according to the Oslo agreements 1993, the West Bank is a very divided territory. If the two-state solution was a serious proposition from either party, Mr. Olmert and Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, would have very different issues on the table. Stop talking about the possibility of a two state solution; the facts, and the facts on the ground, do not make this possible. You know better.

Read the original NYTimes editorial piece here (registration required)

Young Fidel Castro

I walked onto the veranda just one story up and already there were five of them sitting in a rough circle smoking cigarettes and speaking in their guttural, beautiful language. I felt like I had been beckoned. A real secretive, underground meeting – I was someone who was called in the night, came alone, and didn’t tell anyone where I was going. For just that moment I was one of them. I could help, I could do something for them, even be directly involved.

 

Tank girl

 

This young girl was with her father and several other demonstrators at the entrance to the West Bank town of Azzun on 21 February. The people were protesting the constant erection of barricades and road blocks on many roads in the West Bank. Although these barriers are considered illegal by both international and Israeli law, they are commonplace. The road block just in front of the girl looks something like this (photo taken from UNRWA).

Such blockades really bother me as it unnecessarily restricts the movement of Palestinians in their own land. There is no strategic purpose to do such things other then simply screwing the people around.

Demolished childhood

This was a demonstration I attended along with members of EAPPI and ISM on 21 Febraury 2008. Local as well as international media were present, along with a further collection of representatives from other organisations active in the West Bank. The short story is that this playground was built by donors and international donor money from such sources as USAID but due to technical and legal problems, the Israeli government had deemed the area an illegal development for reasons such as lack of a building permit and that it is built on Israeli land; in other words, Area C. They have already demolished half of the playground that lies between the towns Azzun and Jayyous.

Click here to learn more about the division of land in the West Bank in the name of Area A, B or C as a result of the Oslo Accords in 1993.

The even shorter story is that without a stop order from the Israeli supreme court, bulldozers will finish the job on 15 March 2008. This of course is not a desirable prospect for the local communities and so the protest was organised. Why exactly the Israelis would care about a children’s playground I have no idea; especially when it is in dispute whether the playground does indeed lie in the Area B or Area C, depending on who’s map you look at.

   

   

 

 

The love taxi

Since making my journey into the West Bank I just had to giggle while riding in a taxi in Qalqiliya. Here I was, supposedly in the land of the terrorist, in a city deemed by the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) as hostile and completely surrounded by the Wall, listening to a happy, chatty driver and his stuffed, cute animals.

See a satellite image of the city here.