Journey through a fractured landscape
The numbers tell a certain kind of grim story in the landscape of Palestine:
109,000: the number of West Bank settlers, excluding East Jerusalem, in September 1993, the time of the christening of the Oslo accords on the White House lawn.
350,000: the number of those settlers today — a tripling during something called the “peace process.”
40,000+: the population of Maale Adumim, well inside the West Bank, but considered a “suburb” of Jerusalem by Israel.
20,000: the number of settlers in Ariel, where the separation barrier snakes a third of the way inside Palestinian lands to make the settlement part of “greater Israel.”
18: The number of Israeli settlements directly encircling the hoped-for capital of the Palestinian state, East Jerusalem, cutting off the city from the rest of Palestine, but for a piece of land called E-1, which Israel plans to develop.
Roads 60, 443, and myriad other randomly-chosen numbers: smooth-as-glass highways slicing through West Bank Palestinian lands, but for long stretches reserved for almost exclusively for settlers.
Yet the numbers, telling as they may be, can’t begin to evoke the feeling of the transformed Palestinian landscape, nor the profound power imbalance that defines relations between Israel and the Palestinians. Only a road trip through Palestine can do that.
We left Jerusalem on a hot dry morning, the precious yellow license plates of our Palestinian host, a resident of Jerusalem, ensuring access to the exclusive West Bank roads. “For now,” said H., aware that because of his national origin, he could be banned from the road at any time. Our destination was the old city of Hebron, one of the most surreal tableaus of the entire tragedy of Palestine and Israel, where 500-600 Jewish settlers, many from the U.S., are protected by 1500 soldiers in a city of 170,000 Palestinians.
I looked out the open window to the east, feeling immediately the dramatic changes to the landscape in the two years I’d been away. The red-roofed settlement of Efrat now stretched for nearly two miles – this, including the adjacent rows of white trailers, part of an “outpost” that Israel deems technically illegal, but which, by Israel’s design, will soon be absorbed into the settlement. Israeli leaders call settlement expansion “natural growth”; this is how a Palestinian landscape is transformed into a Jewish one. The official population of Efrat is about 10,000, though H. claims it is more than twice that.
In the distance, the 25-foot-high separation barrier marched south with us, and now, suddenly, it reached us at a narrow passage, transformed into a tastefully-etched boundary of beige and tan. Settlers, H. told us, complained that the ugly gray slabs were a distasteful part of their commute to prayer in Jerusalem, or shopping and the beach in Tel Aviv; now, its offensive aspects eliminated for the privileged population, the separation of peoples carries the deceiving look of a simple sound barrier.
Presently the road opened up again, and for a lovely fleeting moment, the landscape of Palestine appeared, unimpeded by barriers, settlements, or checkpoints. Ancient terraced olive groves dotted the landscape, interspersed by vineyards of Hebron grapes, nearly ready. The cries of “Khalili ya anab,” H. told us, would soon ring out in the markets across Palestine: “The Hebron grapes are here!”
Few vendors were calling out 30 minutes later as we walked through the moribund Old City of Hebron, where urban settlement blocks stand brick to brick with Palestinian homes in a contorted geographical designation known as H-2. This agreement was sanctioned by the international community in an agreement signed by the Palestinian Authority as part of the Oslo “peace process.” Israel had insisted that the few hundred settlers be allowed to stay in a neighborhood of tens of thousands of Palestinians, because of a long Jewish presence there. The current settlers say they are honoring the memory of Jews massacred in Hebron by Palestinians in 1929, during riots over Jewish immigration to Palestine. Yet the current settlers, among the most extreme of all Israelis, have little or no connection to the descendants of those massacred, some of whom have denounced the Hebron settlements, pointing out that other Palestinian families sheltered Jews during the massacre, and calling for the settlers’ removal.
Instead, today at least 1500 Israeli soldiers, more than twice the number of settlers they were sent to protect, spend much of their time escorting their charges from one part of the city to another. When the armed escort squads push through the narrow alleys of Old Hebron, life on the Palestinian street freezes; such is the primacy of Israel’s settlement project. Steel screens above the old Arab casbah protect the Palestinian vendors against a stream of trash, bottles, plastic chairs and bags of feces the settlers hurl down from above. This is everyday life.
We walked toward Shuhada street, the once-bustling main street of Palestinian life here. H. stopped; as a Palestinian, he is not allowed to walk there. Now the street was nearly vacant. The doors on some of the shops were welded shut; access to some homes is now possible only by ladder, or, in one case, a rope to a window.
We came upon one of H-2’s 120 military checkpoints and other obstacles ensuring separation between Arab and Jew. As we paused, 50 meters away, a soldier’s voice called out from a loudspeaker, imitating the call to prayer. “Allahu akbar,” he sang in accented Arabic. His mocking laughter followed.
Source: mondoweiss.net