Week1 (Tubas, Jordan Valley, Nablus, Ramallah) / Week 2 (Beit Surik, Jerusalem)

Week 1 - The Hackney delegation flew into Amman, Jordan. Not only were the flights cheaper but we were going straight to Tubas in the north of Palestine.

Saturday 5^th November

We left Amman at 8.30 in the morning and were accompanied by the receptionist from our hotel and we were driven by a Palestinian Jordanian taxi driver who was originally from Jordan, who like all taxi drivers was willing to share his thoughts with us about politics.  On the Jordan side, there was a long queue of cars full of Palestinians – perhaps 50 cars, loaded with people and goods, we were told by our driver that the Palestinians were not allowed to cross on the Sabbath.  When we got to the head of their queue, their cars were being turned back to Amman.  Being foreigners, we were allowed to cross the border on the Sabbath.  We went straight to Jordanian passport control, had our luggage x-rayed and got the requisite stamps, before proceeding a dusty forlorn bus stop.  We waited about 1 ½ hours at the bus stop for the shuttle bus to cross no-mans land (no sign of a bridge per-se).  We boarded the rickety bus, whose back window was totally shattered, our passports were checked twice before we got to the Israeli terminal, this check involved all of us traipsing off and on the bus.  The road had an eerie feel – a feeling as if lots of unseen eyes were watching us – including armed soldiers at the side of the road.  As we approached the terminal there were about 6 fully loaded buses – bundles of luggage on the roofs, two or three of these were on the road just before the terminal and another 3 or 4 were parked off the road.  We were told later by Palestinian women that these were mainly pilgrims returning from Mecca via Aqaba and that they may be held up for days awaiting processing by the Israeli system.  I personally spoke to someone who had been at the checkpoint since 8am the following morning.

When we left the bus, our passports were checked again and we handed our luggage in for ‘security checks’.  At the next passport check our hand luggage was x-rayed and some people’s shoes and coats also went under, others went through an unfamiliar machine, like an x-ray which apparently sprayed them with a mysterious substance. We were not asked to go through this machine.   We then entered a large hall and joined another queue to get our entry visas into Israel.  When we reached the counter after 10 minutes, and were told it was a queue for Palestinians.  The woman in charge of this counter was talking to a massive screen behind her, this was obviously a two-way mirror behind her to enable observation of the whole area.  She was shouting at elderly people in the queue, ‘Yalla Yalla’ (Come on!) and generally dealing with people in a disrespectful manner. 

We then joined another queue and waited for about 1 ½ hours even though there were perhaps only 10-12 people in front of us in the queue.  There was a distinct lack of signs about the places we should queue.  We were asked a variety of questions: where are you going, staying and how long we wanted to stay.  David was given a three month visa (he is a journalist), Dot one month, Wendy two weeks, Mike one week.  The form we filled in was rather detailed, it enquired about our email addresses and home phone numbers.  The Israelis had a separate short queue for processing and we got the distinct impression that the Israelis were deliberately trying to make the process as difficult and frustrating as possible for anyone wanting to cross. 

We then passed into a large hall, which was very chaotic, and it was unclear where we were supposed to be queuing.  There was a large open area which tour groups could pass through immediately (the group of 20 American pilgrims with a letter from a Jerusalem patriarch were allowed through a long time before us, their experienced American tour leader had said that she thought the Israelis deliberately discouraged travellers from using the Allenby crossing because they thought it meant you may have Palestinian sympathies).  We individually joined a kind of 3- lane scrum, which funnelled at the very far end into a one-lane squeeze, this gave us the impression that we were being herded in like cattle.  It took us between 10-40 minutes to pass through the scrum as we all came into this hall at different times.  Many of the Palestinians were pushing 5-10 gallon jerry cans full of water, we wondered for a long time about this until someone mentioned that it was water from the Holy Well at Zamzam in Mecca.

Once through the final passport check we were confronted with a large hall scattered with luggage.  When we eventually found our bags, David was horrified to find that all his money had been taken.  So much for security! When he complained to the Israeli border police, he was met with a shrug : ‘What do you want us to do about it?’.  As Dot got through first, she was waiting for about an hour in the luggage hall while we passed through.  There were two young officials who pulled out Palestinians, apparently at random, and searched their luggage.  Another young official, sat in an office chair, and facing people as they walked towards the exit, called Palestinians over with a hand signal and demanded to see their luggage.  She didn’t search it, but just seemed to poke it, while talking to them in a rude manner.

The chaos, the delays, the rudeness, the total lack of hospitality and the ironic lack of security with regards to our luggage, emphasised the fact that we were not welcome here.

The money changing facility at the border was left to the entrepreneurial talents of the guy running the small and inadequate snack shop at the end of our ordeal.  We had arrived at the Jordanian border point at 9am, and finally exited the other side at 3.30.  This all happened on a Saturday, we were told that some Palestinians had been there since Wednesday.

We travelled on to Jericho and from there to Tubas, avoiding checkpoints as much as possible on the way.  Fathy, our guide, welcomed us to his home with a lovely traditional dinner, maqlubeh, a dish of rice, chicken and cauliflower. 

Sunday 6^th November

Today we set off from Tubas for Tulkarem in the morning, and despite having an experienced local guide and taxi driver who knew where the checkpoints and road blocks are we came across a road block at the top of a steep hill.  It was basically a large pile of rubble, torn from the side of the chalky hill, which had appeared in the last 3 days, and which was a surprise to everyone.  We could climb on top of it, but obviously our taxi had no way of passing.  Our guide told us that occasionally roadblocks would be removed by the Palestinians, but only if there were no houses nearby where the residents might face retribution.  ‘They are just sending us a text message’ said our guide ‘to show us that they can control us.’

We took a detour of about 15 minutes down through the narrow and badly paved streets of the village, before regaining our place in the road 20 metres on the other side of the roadblock.  We made our way into Tulkarem directly to the wall.  We met a farmer there called Fayiz Taneeb, who had had 45% of his land confiscated for the building of the wall, and for the two factories that surrounded him on the other sides of his farm.  His farm, once 32 dunums, is now reduced to 17 dunums.  One of these factories, built in 1985, produced unknown chemical products, was known to be emitting toxic waste into the air, the land and polluting water channels with toxic effluent.  It is owned by Israelis, built on – and polluting – confiscated Palestinian land. 

He told us that the wind blew for most of the year from West to East, so the fumes from the factory went directly into nearby populated areas of Tulkarem, and had apparently led to illness among the population, particularly children.  For forty days of the year, the winds blow in the opposite direction, from the factory into Israel.  Israeli farmers on the other side of the wall had complained to the factory owners that the pollution had left a toxic dust on their flowers and killed the crop, thus they took the factory to a court complaining about the pollution, the court said that the factory was in the West Bank and that they had no authority to close it.  Apparently, the Israeli farmers, not satisfied with this explanation, decided to confront the factory owner with their guns, they reached an amicable agreement to close the factory during the 40 days when the wind blows towards Israel.  

Fayez operates an organic farm – why? I asked him, ‘because, above all things, I think the person is the most important, and because I have read about people that have died, or become sick and unable to move, because of the chemicals on the food they have eaten.  This food, I eat it, and I give it to my children, and the people in the town, so I want it to be good.  Even though, I get less money because it is organic.’  I asked him why, because in the UK organic food is twice as expensive as ordinary vegetables.  Because the people don’t want to buy it if it is smaller than usual, or there is a ‘dooda’ (maggot) in it.

I didn’t see any maggots on Fayez’s farm, only an ordered and spotless greenhouse where the tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers and the most enormous lettuce I have ever seen grew in neat rows.  We asked him why he grew peppers next to the cabbage, and beans next to the lettuce, because we have to maximize the use of the water resources, he said.  He also showed us how he was going to bend his tomato plants round in spirals to make maximum use of the space in the greenhouse. 

You have to be patient to be a farmer, but in Palestine, triply so.  Fayez’s greenhouses had been destroyed three times by the Israeli army.  He told us that his greenhouses had supported 12 families, who worked there, and ate of the produce before they were destroyed.  In fact he had only re-gained access to his land 9 months ago as he was prevented after the outbreak of the second intifada.  He showed us how the Israelis blocked the access to the land, and how he had taken an alternative route 30 metres ahead to detour to the entrance, the Israelis blocked that one as well, so he went a further 30 metres, and then did the same again.  ‘Everything that was on this farm, and came off of it, all the produce, my wife and I carried with our own two hands’, he said.  When workers in the Israeli factory destroyed his irrigation pipes for the first time, he replaced them, and then again, the third time he sat there and waited at the side of the building for them to come back, when they did, he boxed their ears – after that his water pipes remained intact.  If a farmer’s land remains uncultivated for more than 3 years, he told me, it could be confiscated by the Israelis because it is unused.

He also pointed out where, at the time of the intifada, the IDF built a wire fence across the entrance, he and his wife cut a hole in the fence to get access to their land.  He told us how the IDF came and ‘dragged her away by her hands and her legs’, and mended the fence.  She told them ‘by the time that you go back to your camp, I will have come back here and cut another hole’ - that’s exactly what she and Fayez did, and he told us that the army came back every day at first, then once a week, and then once a month, and now they leave them alone – relatively.  He also showed us a bullet hole on the side of the work shed, and told us later how a soldier, on the roof of the factory, had aimed at his head.  He told me, with tears in his eyes, that he always said goodbye to his children in the morning, because he didn’t  know if he was going to come back in the evening.  ‘You don’t know if the IDF won’t just stop you in car, pull you out, and shoot you at the side of the road, and tell the world they have shot someone from Islamic Jihad.’

Israel’s so-called security wall had literally cut Fayez’s land in half, he showed me the rivet hole at the top of his greenhouse where the frame used to continue right up to the wall, he said, and past it.  Now the wall now has 200m of his land, unused, on the Israeli side, and on his side, a road that followed the path of the wall, behind a wire fence which IDF jeeps and trucks could travel down, helping themselves to his pumpkins and gourds, crops that he could no longer harvest because they were behind the fence. 

Fayez was very keen to express to us that the Palestinian are good farmers, skilful and resourceful and that they could compete on an international market, if only they didn’t have one hand tied behind their back.  ‘We have to import everything that we use, the seeds, the plastic sheets of the greenhouses, the wood, the wire, from Israel, and it is expensive.  At the same time, there is no way to sell the products abroad, we have to sell cheap on the West Bank.’ 

On the way, we passed a place where the wall had been built previously, its location would have cut off one of the main aquifers in the West Bank, as well as three villages Nazlat Issa, Baqa al-Gharbiyya and Nazlat XXXXX.  Due to the huge number of demonstrations held there, which were attended by many internationals as well as locals, the route of the wall was adjusted for a few kilometres, incidentally on the night before the decision of the International Court of Justice in the Hague.  I would like to believe that this is an example of protests having some sort of successful result, a heartening thing in an otherwise dire situation.

Baqa el Gharbiya - We then went on to a town divided by the Israeli apartheid wall. The wall literally cut the main street of the town in half, and the resulting economic strangulation had left the place a ghost town.  Perhaps only 4-5% of the shops are open, shops which used to have a healthy trading relationship with Arab villages on the other side of the green line, as people would come to the West Bank villages as products are generally cheaper, and cross the line to work and sell their goods. 

We learnt how a small town, called Baqa, had been cut in half in 1948, into two parts, East Baqa (Baqa al-Sharqiyya) and West Baqa (Baqa al-Gharbiyya), and that since 1967 the Palestinian East side had been economically dependent on the West.  Since the building of the wall in 2002, the Palestinian side had been under total stranglehold and was clearly dying as life there becomes unlivable.  The relationships that have been severed are not only economic but familial.  Fayez explained how he knew someone whose house was right next to the wall on the West side and that his daughters was one of 6 houses (62 people) cut off on the other side.  Since she has had her baby he has to make round trips of perhaps 8 hours via Jerusalem, for something that used to be only a 100 or so metres away.

Fayez told us how, on 21^st August 2003, 160 shops, probably many of them grocers shops had been destroyed to accommodate the wall.  He also mentioned how, in a particularly cruel gesture, a groom’s house had been destroyed on his wedding day.

Every now and then there is a house with wall almost going through it. We learnt that one house’s owners had come to an agreement with the Israeli to save their house.  This often means having an Israeli army post on the roof. Either way, where children used to look out of their windows onto neighbouring houses, or perhaps out to the horizon, now they are faced with a wall.  Hackney PSC left its mark there, as had resistance groups from other countries such as Mexico.  I hope that the graffiti ‘Hackney woz ‘ere’ will stay there for a long time.  We were aware all the time that we were being watched from the installations and checkpoints on the roofs and on the other side of the wall.

We then returned to Fayez’s house for lunch with his family.  I noticed that his teenage daughter had a pendant around her neck with a photo of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the wheelchair bound spiritual leader of Hamas who had been assassinated several years ago despite his offer of peaceful co-existence with Israel.  She was very pleased when she found out that David was a journalist, she said that she wanted to become a journalist herself.  We had a lovely dinner and then talked some more.  At one point Fayez asked me to go into his teenage son’s room to show me what he kept on his walls, alongside his school certificates for academic excellence and sporting medals, was a newspaper clipping depicting the opened skull of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin’s corpse, his brains spilling open.  Fayez told me that his son used to have a picture of the patriotic musician Marcel Khalife on his wall, but after the murder of Yasin, he had torn it up and replaced it with this gory reminder of political reality.  ‘Look at what Sharon is doing to us’ he said, ‘I am afraid that my son will go and blow himself up’.  Fayez had been talking around the dinner table how he believed that the way of Ghandi, non-violent resistance, is the way that Palestinians should follow, and are following, despite the international media’s determination to ignore it. 

We left the house to go for a short walk outside Fayez’s house to watch the sunset, we saw how the wall was surrounding him and snaking through the countryside.  The land around the wall was being turned into a heavy industrial zone, a convenient way of shifting dirty industries away from Israeli population centres.  The bright lights of an Israeli motorway cut through our view – no checkpoints there!  We were all quiet at this time, feeling as if life was surrounded, cut off, as we returned to our taxi, we saw the gouges that Israeli tanks had made outside Fayez’s house.  We returned back to Tubas.

Monday 7^th November

In the morning we had a meeting with the Tubas prisoners association – we were met by a committee, almost all former prisoners themselves and most with family members in detention.  They told us that there are 8,000 prisoners in Israeli jails (1400 before the current intifada), 500 of this 8,000 are children - Israel imprisons children as young as 13 in adult jails, despite international human rights treaties to the contrary.   They also mentioned that women often give birth in jail, and then their babies are used as a tool of oppression, to blackmail them, for example they might not be allowed to feed their child.

One thousand of these prisoners are in a state of serious illness, not least because they receive almost no medical care in prison, and the Red Crescent are denied access.  They told of us of one prisoner, Abu Saquti, who had just been released from prison because of septicaemia, resulting from the wounds he received on arrest.  ‘Asperin is the magic pill they give us, for all illnesses, whether diabetes or cancer.’

Family visits are often denied permission, or permission is granted and when the family arrive at the jail they are arbitrarily not allowed to enter, it might be four years before a family can visit for ‘security reasons’.  ‘Everything is according to their whims’ we were told, ‘they don’t have to listen to anyone, they have their sacred cow – security – of them and their state.  In fact, we can say that Israel is a military with a state, not a state with a military.’  On this basis, they implored us to put more pressure on the British government to end arms sales to Israel: ‘Put pressure on your companies to stop giving Israel weapons, we are killed by your arms’.

The prisoners’ campaign is fighting for some very basic things: medical care, visits and improved conditions.  Some prisoners might not be allowed out of their cell for more than one hour per day, the food is bad, cells are either overcrowded or isolation cells.  There might be 24-30 people in one cell, with one toilet.  People often sleep in tents, on pallets, among the cockroaches and scorpions of the desert. 

The only method that the prisoners have to improve their conditions is the hunger strike, many have died through this.  Sometimes they manage to achieve small gains, and other times fail.  The committee mentioned one prisoner, Ali Ja’afari who had been killed after a force-feeding tube entered his lung.  One representative who had recently been released from Megiddo prison mentioned how they had won the right to t.v. and radio after a hunger strike, but now the t.v. was left on constantly and far too loud – it had been made a form of torture.

The committee also mentioned the 800-1000 Palestinians in administrative detention, that is detention without charge.  Although officially this is only supposed to last 6 months, it is often renewed upon expiry so people can be held indefinitely, up to 7 years. 

‘The problem is that Israel doesn’t recognise us, in the collective memory of the Israelis there is no ‘other’ – they call us the Arabs of ‘Eretz Israel’.  They do not treat us according to the Geneva Convention, we are prisoners of war, not security prisoners.’

That said, they were keen to emphasise that their demands as a group were humanitarian rather than political, particularly access to health care and family visits, improved conditions and an end to child detention.

From there we went on to meet the Mayor of Tubas, the first basketball playing mayor I have ever met, he proudly told us he had been number one in the Palestinian team, and had been a sports teacher and headmaster before becoming a mayor.  He told us that Tubas district is the biggest in the West Bank, it used to have 365,000 dunums of land, since 1967, 52% of that had been stolen by the Israelis.  Not content with that, Israel plans to confiscate more, especially in the Jordan Valley.  In taking this land, Israel has also taken most of the water resources (aquifers), it has closed Palestinian wells and given the rights for digging new wells to an Israeli company.  This obviously affects the ability of the Palestinians to irrigate their land, the main source of income for most.  Roadblocks and checkpoints also prevent the farmers from sending their crops to market, and from allowing their livestock to graze in the Eastern Jordan Valley.  ‘The Israelis even send animals to prison’ said the mayor, ‘it then obliges their owners to pay to release them, fines so high it as if they have been staying in a 4-star hotel.’

The land theft and destruction of the Palestinian economy means that many of the residents of the district cannot afford to pay for the water and electricity services they receive from the municipality but the mayor said that they were committed to giving these essential services to people and wouldn’t deny them just because people couldn’t pay.  So how did the municipality manage to fund itself? Well, they ask rich people to pay more, and ask those who can pay to do so, while providing loans to those who cannot.

Palestinian Red Crescent Society:

Tuesday 8^th November

Wendy and Dot were welcomed by the secretary of the local girls’ school as the head was away. About 500 students aged 16-18 years attend the school.  They learn a wide range of subjects – English, Arabic, history, geography, religion, biology, physics, chemistry and technology – including computer technology.  After a flag ceremony at the start of the day, we watched the girls singing the national anthem and listening to a short speech by one of the girls on rich men in the world – Bill Gates, and the Sultan of Brunai.   A short series of aerobic exercises ended the morning assembly and the girls went to their classrooms – 40 to a class.  The secretary told us the school is very short of resources, and we noted how small and sparsely furnished the head’s office was.

The school for 10 year old boys was in an uncompleted house whilst a new school was being constructed. He explained that there are several schools for different age groups (5-6 (?) levels between 7 and 18.  This is because they believe that age differences are so great that children are better educated separately, according to their age.  He outlined the curriculum, and said that civic education is the only one in which there is any flexibility. The Ministry of Education otherwise controls the syllabus. He gave a strong impression that he would like greater freedom, and that the Ministry was not happy about his trips abroad to conferences.

A sister and brother of the head were killed in 1967 during the war. The head places great hope in the ICJ ruling, which he said is a base from which demands can be made to the UN, to achieve rights for Palestinians.

From Tubas on to Nablus.  One checkpoint – and we walked straight through, without in fact being checked.  The IDF was searching the car of a member of the Palestinian legislature.  Once again the message was clear – selective humiliation.

At the University of al Najah in Nablus the Director of Public Relations greeted us by asking of the Kray brothers lived in Hackney!.  He was startled to hear that in the street opposite where one of the Kray’s used to live there is Nelson Mandela House, a mosque and a Hassidic school.  He told us that most of the student body of 13,000 face great financial difficulties. The University helps with loans and grants where possible but  this of course places a great strain on the University’s finances.  In addition, for many students it is very difficult to attend at all. Checkpoints and roadblocks mean that to reach the University at 10am a student may have to leave home at 5am. Once again – the humiliation faced by the students at the checkpoints was commented on. 

Al Najah has a history as a centre of nationalism and as a result was closed during the first intifada.  Studying continued in people’s homes. More recently 46 students have been killed by the IDF. In 2003 one student fell to his death   - falling over a cliff as he was chased by soldiers who took it into their heads to  go for him as he was walking to the University. Lecturers have also died at the hands of the IDF.   Dr. Salah and his small child were shot dead as he opened his door after a military operation had finished, and all had apparently gone quiet.  The PR Director thought this was in revenge for an Israeli solider who had been killed.  In 2002 the Director’s mother was killed in cold blood.  She had been a peace activist all her adult life.  No charges have been put, and a court case is pending. Information about her case is available on the web.

Israeli soldiers, he suggested, are “monsters”, killing people, including children, in cold blood.  The General Council of the University are documenting cases and seeking to take them up.   The Knesset has ruled that there is to be no compensation for Palestinian families who have lost a member in the depraved activities of the IDF.

He told us that Nablus, which has suffered as a commercial centre as businesses have closed down with the decline of agriculture and the restrictions on road travel, is twinned with Dundee. However, when we met with the Student Council they told us they were not aware of this, and that they have connections with French, rather than British universities. They know about SOAS, and seemed interested in the possibility of twinning with, say, Dundee. The Council told us that their main priorities are concerned with student loans and improving academic conditions. The echoed the financial problems and difficulties of access to the University covered by the PR Director. Most of them have served prison terms.

All five political parties are represented on the Student Council, and while there were only men there to meet us for most of the time, they said this is because the women were in class.  A woman member if the Council did join us, and explained the work of the women’s committee – in particular in the women’s accommodation blocks.