Palestine Trip 3: Barriers

Up here. [EDIT: DEAD LINK – REPRODUCED BELOW] There’s photos and all.

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PREVIOUSLY: PALESTINE TRIP 2

Saturday April 10

CHECKPOINTS

Checkpoints. In the morning we go through one on foot, the main Bethlehem checkpoint. Sarah points at some women as we approach – they are about to cut off the road and go overland to the far side of the checkpoint, bypassing it so they can get to work at Jerusalem. Sometimes they will meet a patrol on this bypass. Sometimes the patrol will just turn them back. Other times it is worse.

We walk around a building that’s essentially a concrete bunker, along a narrow route. Soldiers just waved us through, we all have white skin I guess. Half way around we pause and look back over the rooftops and see something happening on the balcony of a building. It looks like a gang of young Palestinian men beating a Palestinian woman with sticks, but it’s too far away to tell for sure. We eventually turn our backs and press on.

We are picked up in West Jerusalem and driven to the Container checkpoint. It has an ominous reputation. We’re meeting Anjela from Machsom Watch (http://www.machsomwatch.org/), an organisation of Israeli women who monitor the checkpoints and try to make sure Palestinians are treated fairly by those on duty. The stories she tells make it sound like this is a mammoth task. We stay at the Container while she makes sure a Doctor is allowed across to an ambulance waiting on the far side. We are told that ambulances aren’t allowed across checkpoints; patients have to be lifted across. If there is a delay in securing an ambulance to meet the patient, delays can be serious. The sick and injured die at checkpoints because of this, or because they are simply turned back.

But to me, the worst part of the checkpoints is the psychology. Every day, Palestinian men and women are subjected to the whims of teenagers schooled in a paranoid mythology and given absolute power over their ability to move freely.

Hell, you take the best teenagers you can find in New Zealand high schools and make them prefects, and like as not it all goes wrong. Its no leap to see how staffing the occupation with teenagers is breeding indignity.

DIVISIONS

Anjela is also part of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolition (http://www.icahd.org/eng/). She has a very good broad sense of what is going on and going wrong in Israel/Palestine, and she leads us on an improvised tour of the area.

We go through Abu Dis which is being sliced up by the enormous, unforgiving wall. It’s an Arab community and Anjela draws attention to the poverty – the roads are poor, the homes are cramped and small, there is nothing green anywhere. We keep driving, and two minutes later we are in the settlement
of Maale Adumim, on the next hill over. There are enormous, vibrant flowerbeds lining the wide, flat roads. Elegant stepped apartment blocks rise cleanly. There is, incredibly, a swimming pool.

A swimming pool, in the desert.

Anjela talks of the children in the Palestinian communities nearby, who have never seen flowers.

Maale Adumim is not peopled with messianic Greater Israel settlers, according to Anjela. The people there are economic migrants. Settlers get a lot of tax breaks, and very nice digs. (We later learn that one of the
drivers who lives in Beit Sahour keeps an apartment in Maale Adumim as well, so he doesn’t lose his Israel permissions.)

You hear a lot about contrasts. In this case, it is the proximity that is most disturbing. The luxury of the settlement is in sharp contrast to the privation of the established village. The settlement is, of course, built
on seized Palestinian land.

We see the wall-struck town of Abu Dis and its close neighbour, the lush settlement of Maale Adummim.

The landscape nearby Abu Dis and Maale Adumim

MAKING LIGHT

In Greek Orthodox tradition, on Holy Saturday, the patriarch goes into a sanctuary in the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, and God sends him fire. This fire is then shared among the community.
(http://www.holyfire.org/eng/index.htm;
http://www.holylight.gr/agiofos/holyli.html)

I learned that While this is going on, everyone outside squishes up close and gets ready to start shouting and jumping.

We were crammed into an alley outside the church, with hundreds of other people, waiting for news. A great cry of cheers erupted from within, and then the crowd shifted, somehow making space as a series of men came charging out screaming with excitement waving around fire as they went. The crowd thrust candles into the passing flames as more and more people came out, there was shouting and praising God, and many elbows in ribs and shoves in backs and burnt nose hairs. People forced their way out of the church and into the already crowded alleyway and a fight almost broke out between Sarah and a guy who was using an empty pram as a prod to clear his path of little old ladies.

It was insane. It was another sign of how people do religion in Jerusalem.

THE WAILING WALL

We went to the Western Wall as well. The sun smashed down on the enormous wall, fifteen or more metres high and built of mighty sandstone blocks. A direct connection with God, in Judaism. It was impossible not to be moved by the deep respect shown towards this holy site. We couldn’t take photos –
it was the Sabbath, and an old Rabbi was trooping the crowd making sure no-one was breaking custom.
Jean-Guy, being a Jew, invited me down to see things up close, and so off I went. I put on a cardboard kippa and went down. Jean Guy led me into the tunnel at the side of the wall, which was thick with Orthodox Jews in their big hats, praying alone or in groups, reading the Torah, and in one memorable case jumping up and down shaking his hand at the wall. Again, as so many other times, I thought I was in another world. We came out into the sun and Jean-Guy smiled at me and said “What did you think? For me, it was very strange.”

We rejoined the others at the vantage point on the far side. We could see the top of the Dome of the Rock peeking over the Western Wall – the holiest place in one traditions and the second holiest in another, a literal stone-throw apart.

NEXT: PALESTINE TRIP 4