The entry to the village of my friend AS, Beit Sourik, is charming: narrow lanes climbing uphill then down, and as we approach his family compound — where several of his brothers live in adjoining houses, surrounded by open land with olive trees that they plant each year to replace the thousands that have been and continue to be cut down by the Israelis as they build the dreaded Wall. We drive past a wedding party led by adorable little girls in white net dresses and patent leather shoes and bows in their hair, walking to a house from where we hear sounds of music punctuated by the shouts of men performing the dabke.
His older brother, his sister who has recently recovered from throat cancer despite the huge challenges – AS recounts his experiences of getting medical treatment for her at an Israeli hospital – as well as his college-going niece in hijab and several nephews of varying ages, all are waiting to greet us at his eldest brother’s house. They give us water and pick fresh apricots from the trees in the yard for us to taste and then we all embark on a meandering walk down the hillside, as AS points out Jerusalem in the distance; it looks like a fortress on the hilltop, surrounded by dusty lands and homes in various states of disrepair, the settler road that serves as the barrier between inside and outside, snaking through in the near distance. As we settle in for a family picnic on a cemented clearing overlooking the valley which used to stretch far beyond the wall that now blocks it, AS and his brother recount the tragedy of the Nakba on whose 69th anniversary we have arrived in this beautiful, troubled land. AS tells us how his nephews must be very careful how far they stray in their play: if they get anywhere close to the road/wall, they risk getting shot. As we walk among terraced patches where his brother has planted olive trees in hard earth, kept alive by water from a family well where they collect rainwater since other sources of water are continuously cut off by the Israelis, we cannot escape knowing that the tank-like vehicle parked across us on the snake-road, is watching us. As AS’ brother tells us in Arabic, which AS translates for us, of the the huge loss of land that their family and the rest of the Beit Sourik villagers have suffered since the creation of the state of Israel, worsened dramatically since the building of the Wall following the shameful Oslo agreement — which most Palestinians I met still blame Arafat for capitulating to. Searching the net for some facts about my friend’s village, I realised that the General Assembly of the UN had decided on 08 December 2003 to request an Advisory Opinion of the Intl Court of Justice at The Hague, regarding legal and moral consequences of the construction of Israel’s variously termed “Separation Wall”, “Barrier Wall” or “Fence” especially regarding its effects and it legitimacy with regard to Beit Sourik, whose residents had brought a case against the state of Israel for its encroachment on their lands via the building of this so-called “security fence.” AS brother tells us as we return the settlers’ gaze with our own appreciative gaze at the beauty of the land, that 19000 dunams of land has gone down to 4,000 over just the past few years, thanks to settlements whose protection and expansion is the real goal of the Wall (The Dunam, according to Wikipedia, is an Ottoman unit of land equivalent to the Greek stremma or English acre that varies considerably in size from place to place). Indeed, according to authors of International Law Reports (vol. 129), an “expansive factual basis was laid before the court” in the case of Beit Sourik, regarding both the scope of the impingement of the residents’ rights due to the construction of the fence on their lands, and Israel’s so-called “security-military needs.” They tell us
The Court examined both positions and “on the basis of the totality of the evidence before it, the scope of the impingement of local residents’ rights was established.”
As these authors of the report further inform us, “this impingement was by no means a light one.” Here are the unambiguous words of the International Court of Justice cited in the report:
The length of the part of the separation fence to which the orders before us apply is approximately forty kilometers. It impinges upon the lives of 35,000 local residents. Four thousand dunams of their lands are taken up by the fence route itself, and thousands of olive trees growing along the route itself are uprooted. The fence cuts off the villages in which the local inhabitants live from more than 30,000 dunams of their lands. The great majority of these lands are cultivated, and they include tens of thousands of olive trees, fruit trees, and other agricultural crops. The licensing regime the military commander wishes to establish cannot prevent or substantially decrease the extent of the severe injury to local farmers. Access to the lands depends upon the possibility of crossing the gates, which are very distant from each other and not always open....
(International Law Reports vol 129, eds. Elihu Lauterpacht, C.J. Greenwood, Andrew Oppenheimer and Karen Lee. Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. 292-298)
And never mind the endless humiliating security checks to which residents are constantly subjected trying to traverse even very short distances within their own villages and towns. In rebuttal of the Israeli High Court’s insistence to find legal justification for continuing to build the wall that has so adversely affected tens of thousands of these Palestinian villagers’ lives, American scholar Norman Finkelstein also points out in his book Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History (U of CA Press, 2008) that the ICJ arrived at its conclusion after reaching the absolute qualitative finding that the wall couldn’t be justified on [Israeli] grounds of military necessity and violated fundamental provisions of international law.
(Finkelstein 268)
Burdened with the now visceral knowledge of what we could see with our own eyes, and despite the watchful gaze of the illegitimate Israeli state from the other side of the snaking wall of ever-increasing Occupation, we manage to enjoy a wonderful meal of Palestinian tabbouleh, humus, manousheh, za’atar, pickled vegetables, labneh and smoked eggplant. “Sorry it’s such a simple affair,” AS apologises, while we gobble the delicious repast unapologetically, “you see that we are in the midst of the hunger strike, and must pay homage to the strikers by at least not cooking lavish meals!” He grins ruefully; then turns to make tea for us with sage leaves plucked from the sage bushes growing nearby, boiling well-water he has drawn up on an open fire that we all hover around as the sun descends in a spectacular blaze; the coziness of the fire that suddenly flares up as the boys throw more sticks on it, is welcome on a rapidly-cooling evening in the hills, once the sun stops teasing us with its warm rays. Night shadows lengthen as we gather up the remains of the day, us oldies walking carefully back uphill to the house to drive back to Ramallah, the young boys riding up as only the young can do, insouciantly splayed out on the hood and in the open boot of the beat-up black Toyota driven uphill by the older brother.
A street in Beit Sourik
Jerusalem in the distance looks like a fortress on a hilltop, surrounded by dusty lands and homes in various states of disrepair, the settler road that serves as the barrier between inside and outside
AS has arranged for one of my colleagues, a well-known postcolonial studies scholar, and myself, to speak to faculty and students at Bir Zeit university the following afternoon, after taking us in the morning to visit Jenin Refugee Camp at my insistence. Being a theatre scholar and performer, having worked with various theatre groups in Pakistan and having written a book about political theatre including theatre of the oppressed in my native country, I was very keen to meet the founders/director of the Jenin Freedom Theater company. I’d been following their work, and supporting them in NY, and knew they had recently visited Karachi for a theatre festival held at NAPA (The National Academy of Performing Arts). AS picked us up at 8 am from our hotel where the three of us colleagues were staying (except for our fourth friend the Palestinian computer scientist who was obviously, staying with her parents); we quickly downed some coffee and a hasty—but quite satisfying-breakfast of cereal, toast and foul before embarking on yet another road trip with my friend. This time we went north and east, passing by the Jalazon refugee camp surrounded by barbed wire, duly noting the nefarious role of US aid in providing security and surveillance to Israeli checkpoints dotting the main road we drive through again at great speed; it seems as if the speed is a way to avoid being stopped…to somehow escape, like the wind, from the clutches of all that security apparatus.
A meal of homemade stuffed zucchinis
AS makes tea for us with sage leaves plucked from the bushes growing nearby, boiling well-water he has drawn up on an open fire that we all hover around as the sun descends in a spectacular blaze
AS points out mixed Muslim and Christian towns en route to Jenin and tells us we are traveling on the Old Nablus road which is one of the few roads used by settlers as well as Palestinians. And we see the normalisation of the settler community as we pass by Ariel, which is now a proper town with its own university. As we approach the Zaatara road block, AS describes to us how it messes with Palestinian travelers as no soldiers can be seen there most of the time, but suddenly shots can ring out at you from a distance, and indeed, last year 10 people were killed here. He points out the settler town of Yizar, some of whose heavily armed residents:
On the evening of the 10th September, broke into the Al Zawiya Secondary School nearby, forced open the door and set the school on fire. Bedouins living close to the school saw the fire and alerted the fire brigade. By the time it was put out, the principal’s office and teachers’ rooms were completely burned. “We lost six computers, four printers, all the teachers’ books and materials, but most of all, the administrative documents and files of the students and about the school situation over the past years. The whole damage is around 140,000 shekels,” the principle Adnan Hussein told ISM. The school was closed for three days after the arson attack.
This act of arson was justified by some machine-gun toting settlers who complained that a student of the school wearing a dreaded red T shirt threw stones at their car!
Still trying to absorb the barrage of distressing information AS kept unleashing on us, we arrive in approximately 2 hours at a large girls school on the outskirts of Jenin, where Palestinian municipal elections were being held, though boycotted by Hamas. The internal dissensions amongst various Palestinian political parties and factions within those, has had its own demoralising effect on the people, never mind the fact that the ruling Fatah faction — also known as the Palestinian Authority— is seen as being in cahoots with the Israelis over security issues and hence as a sell-out, with allegations of corruption against Mahmoud Abbas and his sons sealing the anger against the man who is now in his 12th year of a four-year Presidential term! Here is what Bernard Avishai of the New Yorker in a story published on May 23rd 2017, has to say about the sorry state of affairs that Abbas and his Fatah faction are held responsible for by most Palestinians:
Some P.A. officials have managed the flow of aid to monopolistic enterprises that provide perks and inflated salaries to friends and family— reportedly including Abbas’s son. According to the Times of London, European Union auditors can’t account for nearly two billion pounds in aid distributed between 2008 and 2012. But the World Bank reports that about thirty per cent of Palestinians are categorized as unemployed, and youth unemployment in Gaza is nearly sixty per cent. Abbas has also appeared powerless to prevent new Israeli settlements, military aggression, and the siege on Gaza.
Israel calls it a 'security barrier', while many activists and human rights organisations have described it as apartheid
But as we enter the school premises to meet up with the man, Zacharia, who is to take us into the camp proper to meet with the leaders of the Jenin Freedom Theatre, we all notice a most interesting sight: two tall evergreen trees filled with white birds sitting on every branch outside the school gate. Harbingers of peace? Clearly we all wanted to feel the presence of some hope for peace and a way forward.
Fawzia Afzal-Khan is Professor of English and Director of the Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies Program at Montclair State University in NJ, USA. She was Visiting Professor of the Arts at NYU Abu Dhabi for the spring term of 2017
