Report 2: Multiple and Shifting Realities in the West Bank

Wednesday, July 19: Bethlehem

Visiting Israel and Palestine is like a dream: you have to keep asking yourself, “is this real?” You hear the news “bomb goes off in Tel Aviv and the West Bank has been closed”, but then we go to the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem and you wonder if you are living in the same world. The pilgrimage scene is overwhelmingly spiritual. It brings a sense of peace, quiet, and holiness to the place and even within. In fact, you forget the tension, the stress-related smoking, and the angry intonations seen and heard on the streets of Jerusalem.  Then you step outside the Church of the Nativity and see the empty plaza, devoid of tourists. This is by no means because there is a lack of spirituality, but because the Israeli government has told tour guides not to take people to the West Bank. This discouragement has caused a once-bustling tourist destination to be just shy of dead. Not all the shops are open and many businesses like hotels are shut down for indefinite periods of time.

Following our Church of the Nativity visit, we met with Sami Awad at Holy Land Trust. This is an organization dedicated to teaching nonviolence from an organic Palestinian perspective. While the organization uses the example of Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi, they also build on a long-standing Palestinian tradition of nonviolence which includes the nonviolent strategies used in the first Intifada. Holy Land Trust does incredible work and has run countless nonviolence trainings throughout the West Bank for villages that have requested them. What really gave me hope was Sami’s recent encounter with Hamas. Hamas asked Holy Land Trust to do a training session in nonviolence for their people in Salfit, the smallest of the 10 districts in the West Bank. This will be a pilot program. If it works, Hamas is likely to initiate similar programs in the other districts, showing their willingness to explore becoming involved in the nonviolent movement.  This news gives me hope. If these “terrorists” (as they are usually called in the U.S.) are able to respect the modes of nonviolent struggle, then who can’t?

Today the most jarring and indescribable experience I had was not visiting the Church of the Nativity, the Holy Land Trust, Wi’am (the Palestinian Conflict Resolution Center) or Dheisheh Refugee Camp, but my homestay with Samer, his wife, and four daughters. Samer is an alternative tour guide. He takes Israelis and foreigners on tours of the West Bank, using only the transportation Palestinians use. He challenges them to see and begin to comprehend the realities of what it means to be a Palestinian living under occupation.

The first thing I noticed after sitting down at the dinner table was the anger with which my Palestinian hosts spoke to one another. I was surprised because I hadn’t remembered the Arabic language being so harsh, but rather beautiful—an art form all of its own. The anger comes from the tension, anxiety, and fear that they live in every minute of the day. Samer said “in 37 years I have not had one good day”. At 37 years old, Samer has lived his whole life under Israeli occupation.

While we were watching the news, Samer’s 6-year-old daughter came up to me and starting saying “pow, pow” while making guns out of her two little hands. I thought she was referring to the news, but what I found out later was that she was reacting to guns she had seen and heard in her own daily life. What kind of a world do they live in when a young child can be so calm about such terrible things?

--Cecilia Laverty

Thursday, July 20: Qalandia ‘Terminal’

So many times one hears of the ‘timeless’ conflict in the Middle East…how the conflict here between the Israelis and Palestinians has been going on ‘forever.’ Yet in just our few days here, we have heard how this conflict has not gone on forever, but that it is a more recent phenomenon. In addition, we have seen and heard how relationships between Israelis and Palestinians have changed significantly at key points like 1948, 1967, 1987, 1993, and 2000. For example, we have heard how before 1948, Jews, Muslims, and Christians lived together in this land all as Palestinians, as neighbors.  We also have heard how before the Oslo Accords, Israelis used to travel and shop in the West Bank more often and Palestinians could travel to Jerusalem.

I was reminded this morning of how quickly things change in this ancient land as we drove north from Jerusalem to Ramallah via the Qalandia terminal, or ‘border crossing’. When I first lived in Ramallah from 1998-2000 there was no Qalandia checkpoint, and certainly no terminal or border crossing. There was one checkpoint further south in a-Ram that soldiers stood at that was simply a small shed by the road where Israeli soldiers would selectively stop vehicles to check for IDs. But most of the time traffic went right on through. During the course of the Intifada that broke out in late 2000, a checkpoint was constructed at Qalandia. In the visits I made between 2003 and 2005 the checkpoint gradually became more permanent, more of a structure, always changing its form and shape and process so as to keep people always unsure of what the crossing would be like.

Last year, as the construction of the wall rapidly neared completion in the Jerusalem to Ramallah area, the Qalandia checkpoint underwent additional change. An entire hill was cleared to make space for a new ‘terminal’—an ‘international border crossing’ even though there are two neighborhoods of Jerusalem (according to Israel’s post-1967 municipal boundaries) north of, and cut off by, the checkpoint. Furthermore—this ‘international border crossing’ separates Palestinians north of the wall from Palestinians south of the wall—not Israelis from Palestinians. 

The dump trucks, drills and cranes worked around the clock. I was not prepared to see the new, finished terminal and its new roads today, however. Rather than continuing straight on the road between Jerusalem, a-Ram, and Ramallah,  you suddenly veer off to the right as the wall blocks your way, forcing you on to the road that used to lead to Jericho to the East, and to Atarot and a new Israeli highway to the West. Now there is no junction, just an eastward curve and a new road that circles back around to the West to a fancy new traffic circle, and on to Ramallah. I could barely recognize the place; the landscape has been changed, dramatically altered by the wall and its surrounding infrastructure of roads and outbuildings. 

We were not stopped, we were not checked, as we were in a big fancy tour bus. To our right we saw the neat, shiny white terminal, all walled off around from the outside so as to hide what was happening inside. The pedestrians, the buses, the vendors that all used to populate the space of the checkpoint were all missing. The stores on the road that leads up to the checkpoint were deserted or closed up. There were few people to be seen. I wondered if fewer are visible because of the traffic flow that has been designed to ‘sterilize’ the whole process? Have people decided simply not to try to cross as they cannot get permits and it is not worth the hassle to go and try? Is the new system simply more efficient?

Talking over lunch with a Birzeit University student who travels each day from East Jerusalem to Birzeit (a village outside of Ramallah) and crosses through Qalandia, I learned that the new system is not more efficient…but not less efficient. Although it looks new and different, she said, the process was the same: one never knows what to expect. Every day there are changes, and every day might bring a road closure or a different policy for where buses can or cannot stop to let people off.

Another speaker at Birzeit shared how under Oslo and with the Fateh-led Palestinian Authority there was an “abnormal stability” that normalized the occupation. The checkpoint regime—made up of both ‘permanent’ and roaming ‘flying’ checkpoints--are a ‘normal’ instability that works in tandem with other policies to create an environment in which planning and human security are virtually impossible.

--Maia Carter

©2003 Fellowship of Reconciliation