Apartheid
SEEING PALESTINE
For most of our excursions in Palestine our companion was a doughty little bus whose logo appropriately recalled the Good Shepherd. It disdained luxury, offering instead unswerving dependability under the most trying conditions.
Faced with a terrain that would daunt the hardiest four-wheel drive and roads of all gradients and surfaces often evolving into dirt tracks that severely tested its suspension, it was always equal to the challenge. Our bones frequently were
shaken, but never our loyalties, even when, on occasion, we returned from more luxurious, air-conditioned rivals. With its cheerfully unmistakable Christian insignia, and its (mostly) Christian passengers, it was enthusiastically hailed in every town and village we passed through, effectively refuting the fiction that it is Muslim hostility not Israeli policy that continues to drive Christians out of Palestine. Our bus guided us through unfriendly IDF Checkpoints and over a roller-coaster landscape of mountains and deep valleys, through desert and fertile lands. Its unfailing maneuverability helped us see the land close up.
Seeing Palestine is not a simple matter, because Palestine is a palimpsest of violently conflicting narratives that are both written into and concealed within the landscape. Like the ancient monasteries hidden deep in gullies or perched precariously on the mountain cliffs that are only apparent after diligent looking, seeing the realities of Palestine is a matter of looking intently. No area of the world conceals so much, past and present, beneath what it shows. To better understand what it was we were seeing we would spend up to thirteen hours a day over eleven days visiting groups of Palestinians and Israelis, popular committees and activists, Israeli human rights groups like B’Tselem (and one ‘refusenik’),illegal settlements (interviewing a settler), villages, towns and cities, the refugee camps, universities, and arts and theatre groups. This visit organized by the Siraj Centre for Holy Land Studies, based in Beit Sahour close to Bethlehem was as informative as it was enjoyable and I highly recommend those who want to understand the situation of the Palestinians to sign up. They also hold a Summer Camp each year attended by students from all over the world.
In Israel we visited the area of Ein Hod, a Zionist "artists' colony" established on the land of the previous Palestinian village, Ayn Hawd. Ayn Hawd's original and rightful Palestinian residents, deemed "present absentees", are settled only 1.5 kilometers away on the outlying hills and are prevented from returning home. Their village is 'unrecognized', denied water, electricity, or an access road. Like many such communities it was built after its inhabitants were expelled from villages established long before Israel was created and is vulnerable to demolition under discriminatory ‘Planning Laws’. We heard from a group in Haifa how Israeli Palestinians always dread hearing of new planning developments by the government, because these are almost certainly a cover for fresh depredations on Palestinian land and property.Planning is always at the expense of Palestinian citizens. The Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City, for example, was recreated after the eviction of its original inhabitants,1 requiring the state to expropriate one third of the land from its Palestinian owners “under the pretext of catering for ‘public needs’. The use of the term ‘public’ reveals more than anything else the government’s political bias: the ‘public’ on whom expropriations were imposed always comprised Palestinians: the ‘public’ who enjoyed the fruits of the expropriation always exclusively comprised Jews.”2
JERUSALEM
Jerusalem, viewed from a distance, looks as if some indignant heave of the land would send it toppling into the precipitous valleys that surround it, fulfilling the biblical promise: "Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low." The city’s streets following irregularly wherever the difficult terrain dictates, recall the other part of that promise: "and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain". The city reflects the political divisions of the country at large. The Jewish Quarter exists as an act of violence against the Palestinians.
To dispossess a people, steal their land, demolish their buildings and then complacently inhabit the confiscated space in reciprocal view of the victims requires a carefully cultivated myopia apparent at all levels of Israeli discourse. The Chief Architect of the District of Jerusalem, Elinoar Barzacchi, after returning from Europe, enthused, “In Rome I lived in the Old City. In Paris I lived in Montmartre. Here, in the [Jewish] Quarter it looked to me like the most Jerusalemite thing there is, the most authentic, the most multicultural it can be.”3
Eyal Weizmann comments,
“Rather than a multicultural city centre the Jewish Quarter might better be described as an artificial, ethnically homogenous, gated neighbourhood, whose construction was made possible by the forced displacement of its inhabitants. It is a ‘biblical’ theme park, sending out further tentacles of Jewish housing and enclaves and religious study centres into the Muslim Quarter to which it is connected above street level via protected and exclusive roof paths. The separation of this enclave from its surroundings is further enforced by the fact that all entrances and exits to the Jewish Quarter are guarded by border police, providing access, after body and bag scans, only to Jewish residents/settlers, tourists, and the Israeli army and police.”4
The “most Jerusalemite thing there is” is a space emptied of its native people. In the Palestinian section of Jerusalem, always under threat as more and more of its land is confiscated and its buildings seized or demolished, people go to work uncertain if their houses will still be standing when they return. One reason the government gives to justify house demolitions is the lack of a building permit, that costs two thousand dollars and is almost impossible for Palestinians to obtain. As the householder is not permitted to add to his house on his own land he is forced to build illegally as his family grows. Then the Caterpillar bulldozers arrive without notice and, even with a family inside the building, begin destruction. Often, only minutes are given for a family to be made homeless. In a further sadistic twist, the householder is then exorbitantly billed by the municipality for the cost of the demolition. 18,000 houses in Palestine have been demolished in this way since 1967. We met with members of the Israel Committee Against House Demolitions who showed us sites of such demolished houses, mounds of rubble where once a whole family lived and its children played. ICAHD's goal is the Sisyphean task of rebuilding all demolished houses.
The contrast between the Jewish and Palestinian areas of the city is stark. Despite contributing 40% of Jerusalem's taxes Palestinians receive only 7% of municipal expenditure. The result is that while Jewish areas are immaculate, Palestinian areas suffer from mounds of unsanitary, uncollected garbage. Shopkeepers clean the streets of the souq because the municipality refuses to do so. These policies are purely vindictive, to impress upon the populace its impotence under colonial rule. The most blatant example of this oppression is the apartheid Wall.
THE WALL
Recurrent encounters with the Wall were always a shock. A drive down a Jerusalem street would suddenly end in the sheer brute fact of a towering mass of concrete terminating the street’s functions of movement, life and trade. We came upon the Wall everywhere in Palestine; cleaving through towns and villages, streets and houses, overriding farmlands, demolishing buildings and communities, arrogantly indifferent to all it encountered. It is twice the height of the Berlin Wall, and every fifty yards or so is flanked with tall military towers that recall the worst imagery from World War II. Its appearance emphasizes its function as part of the huge penal complex into which Palestine has been transformed. Israel's Ministry of Defense has published new maps showing the Wall annexing further large tracts of Palestinian land, resulting in 46% of the West Bank coming under full Israeli control. The Wall's destructive progress through Palestine has been likened to that of a serpent but that is an injustice. A serpent is a subtle, exotic, living organism, sensitively adaptive to its environment: the Wall reflects the gross banality of domination that can only crush, disfigure and destroy. Like the settlements, the Wall’s violation of
the landscape betrays an actual alienation from it. Did its builders see what they were doing? A ‘love of the land’ could not do this to it.
Apart from omnipresent IDF soldiers, armed settlers and a handful of brave activists, Israelis, with rare exceptions, do not enter the Occupied Land. This seems a matter of inclination as much as of actual prohibition. On the flight from London to Tel Aviv my seating companion, a pleasant Jewish lady from the north of England visiting relatives, was astonished when I told her I would be staying in the Palestinian Territories. She had never been there. She had heard it was ‘once’ a pleasant area to visit - but no longer. She seemed to have no inkling why. One strong disincentive for Israelis entering the West Bank or Gaza is certainly that they then would have to confront the shameful contradictions that vitiate the whole Israeli utopian project. More effective than the physical wall, perhaps, is the mental wall most Israelis have erected to prevent themselves from seeing.
The Checkpoints serve less the cause of security than that of the harassment and disruption of Palestinian life - part of the effort to make life so unbearable that Palestinians will quit their homeland. There are over hundreds of Checkpoints, not there primarily to make entry into Israel difficult (though they do that) but to fragment the occupied territory into multiple, isolated Bantustans, making the Palestinians' own homeland inaccessible to them. This is not 'security' but a particularly ugly cruelty - to divide Palestinians from their families, their workplaces, schools, clinics and hospitals. To make travel even more burdensome, 'flying checkpoints' are set up anywhere without warning so that any road one may be traveling upon suddenly becomes a barrier disrupting the delivery of goods or food or aborting a family's planned visit. We witnessed some of these flying checkpoints set up on roadways with no proximity to any conceivable security site. Their function was plain: like the Wall, to assert and impress upon the natives the power of the colonial occupier. That this power is arbitrarily exercised makes it all the more absolute.
THE SETTLEMENTS
After the experience of the checkpoints and the omnipresent apartheid Wall, the strongest shock was the sight of the settlements; alien fortress growths striding across the hilltops or clamped upon them like the fungi of aggressive sci-fi invaders. An architecture of domination disfigures the natural landscape, implicitly proclaiming its power over a subjugated people. However, this
architecture inadvertently carries an ironic subtext: the settlements do not belong in this landscape; they actually are hostile to it, brutally indifferent to its contours and texture. Their clumsy and intrusive incongruity reflects their origin in Ariel Sharon’s injunction to the colonizers - “to grab as many hilltops as they can…because everything we take now will stay ours. Everything we don’t grab will go to them.”5 They are therefore proclamations of triumphant pillage.
Their hilltop positioning as fortresses (like Crusader castles) reveals a desire not to live within the landscape but to ‘oversee’ and dominate it.
Rapidly constructed, uniform and sterile for all their luxury, settlements like that of e.g. Ma'ale Adumim near Jerusalem lack the texture of historical presence found in Palestinian communities.
