‘Concentration’ in Palestine

I’ve spent most of the past week in occupied Palestine, though with
the occasional trip over the Green Line into Israel. While here, I’ve
had ample opportunity, yet again, to see the devastating effects on the lives
of the Palestinians of the tight and capriciously applied “movement controls”
that the Israeli occupation forces have maintained on the Palestinians here continuously since September 2000 (41 months).

Like the building of the ghastly Apartheid Wall, these movement controls
have been pursued by the Israelis in the name of a still-elusive search for
their own people’s security. We could discuss for a long time whether it is only the search for security, and not–in addition–a desire to pursue and consolidate Israel’s colonial-style land-grab in the occupied territories, that has motivated these measures. However, regardless of the intentions of the men who decided on them and proceeded to plan their implementation, the effect of the movement controls (as of the Apartheid Wall which is just one part of this inhuman broader policy) has been to concentrate the three-million-plus Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza
into a series of scores of disconnected pens.

We could call these pens “strategic
hamlets”, except in some cases they are whole cities. We could call
them Bantustans, except that they are far smaller and have far less potential
for any kind of self-sufficiency even than those ill-starred exercizes in
apartheid-era control and social engineering. We could call them “concentration
areas”– a fine colonial example of domination of another population group,
also pioneered in South Africa: its aim was to cut the restive Boers off
from any connection with productive economic life. (It notably did
not turn most of them into warm, cuddly, peace-seeking people; see ‘Bantustans’
above.) Or, we could call them ghettoes– walled-in ghettoes like the ones in Warsaw,
Theresienstadt, or other places into which, in the first phase of a process that later ended in the horrendously successful project to physically destroy the Jewish and Roma peoples, the Nazis penned their future victims.

I came to Israel/Palestine with one main aim: to go to Gaza to do some consulting
on p.r. issues for a US-based NGO…

In Gaza, this NGO does things like run programs to provide milk and high-energy
biscuits to pre-schoolers facing the effects of chronic malnutrition. They
run pre-natal and infant-care suport programs. They support a wonderful
institution called Atfaluna that provides new horizons for deaf and hearing-impaired
children and adults. It seemed like a good thing for me to be able
to do. Along the way, I would visit with old friends like Raji Sourani,
who runs the Palestinian Human Rights Center in Gaza; Ziad Abu Amr, a member
of Abu Mazen’s recent doomed government; Dr. Haydar Abdel-Shafei, who headed
the Palestinian delelgation to the Madrid peace talks… Definitely,
time to catch up with these extremely decent, visionary people once again.

Except that one section of Israel’s crazy system of “movement controls” would
not let me get into Gaza.

Israel has a new rule that any foreigner seeking to enter Gaza must submit
a request to do so five days ahead of the planned entry. (“Five days?”
said veteran israeli defense Ze’ev Schiff when I told him of this rule. “Why
on earth do they need five days? Two would be plenty!”) So the NGO
submitted my application on February 4. On the afternoon of February
8, a staff member from the NGO called the Erez checkpoint that controls entry to
Gaza to see if the permit had been approved, so I could go down from Jerusalem
the next day. “There is no answer yet.” She called again, many
times per day, throughout February 9, 10, and 11. On February 12, with
time now seriously running out for my ability to get much done in Gaza, I
decided to travel down to Erez and plead there on my own behalf. (It
was an added attraction to me that Ziad Abu Amr, who had received a rare
permit to exit Gaza and visit his children who live in Jerusalem, would be
driving back down to Gaza that day, so I could at least have the 90 minutes
in the car to visit with him, even if I didn’t get the permit.)

I spent four hours waiting at the checkpoint, and still the answer was that
“We have no answer yet.” (In line with what the NGO folks here and
other friends all say, it was never an outright “No.” The effect of
this is to leave you hanging in limbo.)

Asoldier called “Nadav” was, through a disembodied voice on a clunky
white phone at the Erez checkpoint–my only connection with the mysterious
“Captain Joe Levy” who would be the author of any decision to let me enter.
I actually wonder whether either of these people actually exists, or
whether they are merely generic, professional names that are taken on by
the soldiers who are assigned to these positions at any particular time?
Anyway, shortly after 4 p.m., “Nadav” advised me in a friendly fashion
that there would now be no chance of getting an answer any time later that
day, so I might as well go back to Jerusalem.

“I’ll sit here,” I said.

So I did, for another 30 minutes or so. However, I tended to believe
Nadav’s last statement to me; and nightfall would soon be approaching. I
found a ride with some international aid workers leaving Gaza who were going
up to Jerusalem, and left Erez. That was Thursday evening. I
heard nothing about the permit all yesterday (Friday).

Before setting out for Gaza, I had called David Pierce, an old friend of
mine who is the US Consul-general in Jerusalem. I called Ze’ev, also
an old friend. I asked David if he could do anything to help. Ze’ev,
bless him, volunteered to help. Less than an hour after I spoke with David,
one of the people from his office called back to say that since there is
a US travel advisory against US citizens entering Gaza the Embassy in Tel
Aviv could not do anything on my behalf.

For his part, Ze’ev– who really is in many ways the institutional memory
of the IDF, and is extremely well connected with successive generations of
IDF leaders– called me at intervals throughout the day to say he had called
this general in the Defense Ministry, or that general down at Southern Command.
But to no apparent avail.

So my consulting work for the NGO in Gaza never did get done. I did ask
the folks there, Thursday evening, if there would still be any possibility
to do somethng for them in the West Bank, but the time had run out for that,
too– especially since Friday is the day of rest for most Palestinian institutions.

Sometime I would like to write much more about the effects that Israel’s
tight restrictions have had on the ability of aid organizations to deliver
basic relief and development services to the Palestinian communities of the
West Bank and Gaza. Here, though, I’d like to write more about the
stultifying effect that the whole “movement control” regime of which this
is a tiny part has had on the lives of the Palestinians themselves.

In between my attempts to get to Gaza I have spent a few days in and around
Ramallah, a lovely city in the West Bank just ten miles north of Jerusalem.
Ramallah is nearly completely surrounded by a high, razor-wire-topped
fence. Palestinians–and most foreigners– who want to go in and out
of the city have to do so through a nasty little reproduction of the Erez
checkpoint that has been dug into the West Bank hills a little south of the
city, at a place called Kalandia.

At Kalandia, as at Erez, the Palestinians who are the indigenous residents
of this land are not allowed to pass through, in or out, in any motor vehicles.
a large collection of well-armed 19- and 20-year-old Israeli boys in uniforms
are deployed contibuously to to enforce this ban and all the other, often
capriciously applied, aspects of Israel’s movement control regime around
the city. (Other Israeli soldiers make raids into the city on an almost
nightly basis: sometimes just to show their presence by patrolling, sometimes
to raid a home to assassinate or capture a “wanted” man.)

Of course, many Ramallans work, study, or have business contacts or doctors’
offices elsewhere. If they get a permit to exit or enter the city,
they walk, drive, or take a share-taxi to the checkpoint, leave the vehicle
there, walk through the long, filthy cattle-pens that lead to the control-point,
where young soldiers will demand to see their permits. (Sometimes people
can pass into Ramallah without showing their permits and IDs, and sometimes
not. But all those going in the direction of Jerusalem are required
to show permits.)

On Wednesday evening it was very windy and cold, almost dark, and there was
rain in the air as I walked across Kalandia going toward Jerusalem. Each
side of the checkpoint there was a seemingly impossible traffic jam as share-taxis
and private cars struggled to drop/pick up their passengers and turn around
to where they had come from. On the Jerusalem side, this general, angry
chaos was compounded by the presence of many large trucks that were coming
toward the checkpoint from two directions and trying to effect a 90-degree
turn away from it right through the melee of share-taxis seeking fares and
the occasional pedestrian (such as myself) who was forced to dodge between
these trucks in order to find a ride.

I was carrying a heavy back-pack (laptop, books, etc), a large cloth shopping
bag full of my clothes, and my purse. Many other pedestrians were carrying
more than me. One man just ahead of me, carrying a briefcase, muttered
“see how they turn us into slaves” as he exited the checkpoint. When
he almost got rammed by a big heavy truck, his patience seemed almost to
give out. He spit angrily in the direction of the driver and loosed
a quick torrent of Arabic expletives.

When I came back into Ramallah Thursday evening, it was dark, but at least
it was not “rush-hour” and it was not raining. The traffic was slightly
less chaotic. I joined the small stream of Ramallans who had to get
back into their city by walking 200 or more yards along a trash-strewn pathway
between concrete barricades, across a “security zone” that was ringed with
multiple coils of razor-wire.

Yesterday–Friday– I was able to get out of the city again. I traveled
with my friend Anita Abdullah and two mental-health professionals who were
making a small assessment visit to a village northwest of Ramallah called
Deir Ghassaneh. To get there we took a long drive that lopped west
and then north from village to village through the stunningly lovely, early-spring
hills of this portion of the West Bank. The hills are carpeted with
young green grass, which is often studded with the yellow of wildflowers
or the piercing red of poppies. There are strings of Palestinian villages
(a cluster of white rectilinear houses, a soaring minaret) along many of
the ridges here; and many of the hillsides are scored with the curving lines
of literally hundreds of little terraces stacked one of top of the other.
Along the narrow terraces are olive trees or, in many cases, almond
tress gaily wearing their white blossom; or, the occasional pink blossom
of plum trees.

And then, on other ridges, there are the Israeli settlements. Red-roofed
houses squared up alongside each other like the fortified bastinades of
southern France. Security fences around them. Watch towers.

And then, there are the “bypass roads”. These were all built in the
1990s– after the Oslo Accords, and as a direct outgrwoth of them.
These well-made, four-lane highways allow the settlers to completely
bypass the (now increasingly degraded) Palestinian road system, and to whiz
to their jobs in Tel Aviv, or to schools, supermarkets, or Starbucks in other
settlements, in just minutes. The roads have, of course, taken huge
gouges out of Palestinian-owned land. Vehicles bearing green-and-white
Palestinian license tags are, in general, not allowed to use them. (Our
vehicle carried three U.S. passport-holders and one Swiss citizen, which
is why we sometimes took the chance.)

And then– now– there is the Apartheid Wall, in reality, a whole system
of looping-around walls, fences, and other barriers that in most of the area
west and north of Ramallah creates a whole series of separate, closed-in
“concentration areas” for the Palestinians, interspersed with broad areas
left to the settlers that will give them access to all the arable land right
up to the outskirts of many of the villages.

As we drove, we criss-crossed places where broad, golden-colored gashes cutting
right across the land signaled that work was already far advanced on laying
out the route and foundations for the Wall System. Some villages would
be on this side of this wall; some villages– close by– would be cut off
and on the other side. Many villages or groups of villages would be
enclosed completely.

And then, in addition to the (large) Wall System, there are further movement-control
mechanisms that the Israelis seem to plan to maintain even inside the areas
that on the map look as they might be on the “Palestinian” side of things.
For example, we passed close under the settlement of Khalamish– a
growing set of identical red-roofed houses plunked down like the toy houses
of an obsessive-compulsive child, in straight rows on a hillside next to
a military camp. Where the road bends just north of Khalamish there’s
a side-road leading up to a group of five villages further north. A
heavy metal gate, painted yellow, has been placed across this road, and a
fearsome, 70-foot high watch-tower stands beside it. When we came,
the gate was open, and the watch-tower apparently empty. But the friends
who met us nearby told us that frequently the Israelis simply close the gate.
Then, the people from the five villages can’t drive to their jobs in
nearby Bir Zeit or Ramallah. Instead, they have to leave their vehicles
here (as happens at Kalandiya) and walk around the gate carrying whatever
it is they need to take with them.

You can perhaps imagine the effects on farmers from these villages who need
to get their produce to the markets in Bir Zeit or Ramallah. Organizing
and coordinating two sets of pickup trucks, one for each side of the gate,
and the labor needed to haul the produce from one to the other, is complex
and inevitably raises the prices of the goods once they reach the market.

The Israelis assert (and exercize) the right to close all the gates like,
of which there are scores throughout the West Bank, whenever they please.
The capriciousness of this practice further decreases the ability of
the Palestinians to plan their lives in anything like a rational or “normal”
human fashion. So in addition to huge social and economic costs, there
are the added costs of frustration and a slow-burning but everywhere evident
rage.

We visit with the friends in Deir Ghassaneh, who show us the small health
clinic and the kindergarten run there by the Union of Palestinian Medical
relief Committees. They press us to stay to lunch, but we cannot. They
tell us of the terrible difficulties of sustaining life in the village under
the present circumstances. They recall a recent Israeli army assassination
mission into a nearby village, and tel us sadly of the two men from
their village of 1,500 people ho have been killed during the present intifada,
and the three killed here in the first intifada (1987-93). Most of
the fallen men came from the large Barghouthi family, one of whose most politically
prominent members, Marwan Barghouthi, is now in jail inside Israel.

We drive back to Ramallah by a shorter route: east along a bypass road to
Atara. At this point, the bypass road cuts under a pre-existing Palestinian
road that nowadays is carried across the bypass road on a bridge. The
bridge and all the points overlooking the “bypass” road have been swathed
in fencing and razor wire (“to stop stone-throwers,” says Anita). And
over the whole scene towers yet another ugly concrete watch-tower. This
is the infamous northern entrance to Bir Zeit. leaving the bypass road
here, it is an easy drive back into Bir Zeit, and then, skirting the famous
Palestinian university located there, back into Ramallah.

Where I was a part of an interesting lunch party. But I’ll have to
tell you all about that in a later post.