Stories of Oppression and Resistance

On the first day of the Olive Picking Program, we went to the village of Al-Walaja. I have written about this village before, as they have a dramatic story of displacement due to Israel annexing their lands after the war of 1967. But today we stopped on the outskirts of the village at the home of Omar, his wife and three children. As Omar has legal title to his land since before '67, Israel cannot just remove him, though he is a big thorn in their side. His house and small plot planted with olives sits on the proposed path of the Wall. He refuses to accept the blank check Israel has offered him to buy him out. So, Israel has built a little paved road and tunnel that will go under the wall and up to Omar's entrance, so that the family will be able to dive under the wall when they want to go anywhere. Of course there is a gate at the entrance to the little tunnel in case Israel wants to keep Omar at home, or from reaching his home, for any reason.

After a while of picking olives with my group of 30 internationals and Omar's relatives , I sought out Omar to ask him some questions. How did Israel's war on Gaza affect the West Bank? Omar thinks that the war got the disillusioned youth engaged in a good way as they turned out for demonstrations and started to boycott Israeli goods. Everyone collected blankets and other items to send to Gaza. The demand from the street was not only against Israel's aggression, but also that the Palestinian Authority unify Palestine and end the separation between the West Bank and Gaza caused by the divide between the two major parties, Fateh and Hamas. They also voiced impatience with the Palestinian Authority for its delay in going to the U.N. and International Court of Justice to end the occupation of the West Bank and seige of Gaza.

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In the afternoon our program included a tour of Bethlehem. Our guide Iyad talked about how the Wall was not built for security, but to take land. The Wall, which Palestinians call the Apartheid Wall and Israelis call the Separation Barrier, is onlly 60% finished, so how does that protect Israel? Further, it is not on the 1967 Green Line border with Israel, which is 472 km long. The unfinished Wall is already 770 km long, because it reaches its greedy fingers way into the West Bank, separating Palestinians from Palestinians, and separating Palestinians from their own agricultural fields. In the process, it swallows a large swath of land, uprootiing trees on the way. Just outside Bethlehem city limits, a new segment of the Wall is going to take the beautifully terraced grape vineyards and olive orchards of the Cremisan Monastery and Winery, plus the property of 55 Palestinian families, and put them on the Israeli side of the Wall. Because of the Wall and the Israeli settlements, Bethlehem City is surrounded, cut off from 87% of its territory. What this means in human terms -for the residents of Bethlehem and its adjacent suburbs of Beit Jala and Beit Sahour -- is harder to describe.

You can't leave Bethlehem without going through a checkpoint, and you can't return without passing a huge red and white roadsign that says to Israelis that they are in mortal danger if they cross into your city. If you are a worker with a permit to work in Jerusalem, your sister city just a few miles North of here, it means arriving at the largest, most fortified checkpoint at 3 or 4 a.m. in order to get through in time to reach your workplace by 7 or 8 a.m.. All checkpoints are a humiliating experience. If you want to go to a wedding, a doctors appointment, your university or a cultural event outside of Bethlehem limits, you cannot be sure how long it will take to get there in terms of hours, or whether you will get there at all. If one of the checkpoints is closed, no reason is provided; you must turn back. The same applies for the return home. And since you are not allowed to go to Jerusalem without a permit, you must drive around it if you want to go anywhere to the North. This is an extra 20 miles on a dangerous road. And, and, and. Everyone can tell you a similar story of how their life is made miserable, frightening or expensive by the presence of barriers and soldiers.

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On Monday, we got a tour of the Old City with a young Palestinian tour guide, whose knowlege spoke well of the two years of training he had received. Daoud gave us a lot of geo-political history, including how the city got divided along religious or ethnic lines during British rule, as part of the process of colonization. I learned that some of the places that are flying the Israeli flag inside the ancient Muslim Quarter are "security settlements" -- not residences, but army guardposts used to spy on the city's inhabitants, and to encourage more Jews to move in and eventually take over.

I was startled to learn that for the last 4 months the threat of a Jewish assault on the Al Aqsa Mosque has taken a stride forward. The settler movement, backed by the Israeli government, intends to occupy the entire acre where the mosque and its lovely gardens are, destroy the mosque and the guilded Dome of the Rock building (from whence Mohammed ascended to heaven), and "rebuild" the Jewish temple there. New regulations, enforced by Israeli soldiers, prohibit Muslims from entering Al Aqsa until after 11:00 A.M. Before 11:00 only Jews and foreigners are allowed entry . In other words Muslims are forbidden to visit the second most holy place in their religion, even Muslims who live right next door to it, while tourists and Jews are ushered in by Israeli soldiers who are posted at all six of the entrances to the compound. The icing on this poisonous cake is that there is a campaign in the United States to raise money to build the new Jewish temple.