One Day in Occupied Palestine
“It will take a long time, but eventually the tide of justice will turn.”
There is a part of East Jerusalem called Kfar Aqab which is a forest of precarious-looking tower blocks crammed together behind the Apartheid Wall bordering the city of Ramallah.
This is home for 80,000 or so Palestinians who hold Jerusalem residency but can’t finding housing in the ‘real’ East Jerusalem where building permits are routinely denied, and structures Palestinians construct without permits are frequently demolished, even as Israeli settlers with the backing of the Israeli municipality are taking over their neighborhoods.
As a result, Palestinians are forced to move to a lawless no man’s land where they get no services of any kind. If a fire breaks out in Kfar Aqab, there is no point calling for fire trucks from the Jerusalem municipality, since they will not want to pass through the Wall. And there is no point in calling for help from their next-door neighbor, Ramallah, since Israel will not permit its fire trucks to leave the West Bank and enter East Jerusalem.
If someone is killed in a fight in this tightly packed zone, don’t expect the Jerusalem police to intervene. They will say leave the body at the Qalandiya checkpoint.
Our guide Said’s daughter, who teaches school in the East Jerusalem, lives in Kfar Aqab with her husband. He told us she must get up at 3:30 am every morning to wait in line to pass through the Qalandiya checkpoint to get to her school a few miles down the road.
Kfar Aqab’s residents meanwhile fear they are living on borrowed time, and that one day Israel will strip them of their Jerusalem residency status – an easy way of making 80,000 Palestinians disappear from a City that is being steadily Judaized.
After driving through the streets of Kfar Aqab and Ramallah we visited the Om Sleiman farm in the village of Bil’in. The farm is located on village land that had been taken by the Apartheid Wall but was won back by villagers through struggles chronicled in the documentary “Five Broken Cameras.”
Flanked by the Wall and Israeli settlements, the farm is run by Palestinians from Jerusalem and various parts of the West Bank who wanted to restore their connection with the land and create a model of how to grow organic food in a sustainable way.
From Bil’in we drove to Nabi Saleh, another village that has conducted years of popular resistance, in its case against the encroachment of an Israeli settlement that had seized possession of its spring. There, we had a magnificent lunch and spirited conversation with Bassem and Nariman Tamimi.
The well-known image of their blond daughter Ahed standing up to an Israeli soldier was recently posted on the Internet as that of a “brave Ukrainian girl confronting a Russian soldier.” The real story is that after serving time in prison for slapping an Israeli soldier, Ahed has not been able to get a visa from the occupying Israeli government to go to university in either the UK or the US, and now attends Bir Zeit not far from Nabi Saleh. Look out for her forthcoming book, They called me a Lioness, which is due to be published by Random House in December.
Our final visit of the day was to Al Haq, the oldest human rights organization in the Middle East. Along with five other pre-eminent Palestinian civil society organizations, Al Haq was designated as a “terrorist” group by Israel late last year, along with five other human rights organizations.
We talked to Wesam Ahmad, the coordinator of its business and human rights program, who told us that to date, Al Haq’s funding partners have not stopped supporting the organization and that they are continuing their work and trying not to be distracted by anything that could happen.
We heard about Al Haq’s efforts to use international law in pursuit of self-determination. We then had a far-ranging discussion of how “the religious component of the Jewish faith is being exploited for the colonialist project in Palestine,” how Zionism was connected to the broader history of colonialism and how western corporations profited from the Zionist project.
What we see in Palestine is a microcosm of struggles around the world, he said. “It will take a long time, but eventually the tide of justice will turn.”
