November 4, 2003

The Wall

Could three and a half years have passed already? We are facing less than two more months here, astonished that our time in Zababdeh is almost up. After we celebrate Christmas with friends and adopted family here in Zababdeh, we’ll say farewells and head back to the United States. While we know we’ll miss this place and these people terribly, we also know that we won’t miss the frustrations and dangers. We’ll be happy to be able to travel from place to place without delay, fear, and harassment. We’ll be happy not to keep an ear out for tanks or helicopters. We’ll be happy to have predictable electricity, phones, and water. We’ll be happy to have reliable access to banks, hospitals, and shops. We’ll be very happy to get mail again. And, we’ll be really happy to eat some decent pizza and ice cream.

When we get back, we’ll go straight to Elizabeth’s (and Buddy Holly’s) hometown of Lubbock, Texas, where we’ll see family and begin our busy six-month final itineration. From there, we hope to visit the following places (in chronological order): San Antonio, Plano, Waco, Austin, Santa Fe, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Eugene, Portland, Seattle, Billings, Iowa, Wisconsin, Chicago, Lexington, Atlanta, Alabama, Chapel Hill, D.C., Baltimore, Lebanon (Pennsylvania), Philadelphia, New York, Connecticut, Boston. In a few weeks we’ll post our full agenda on our Web page. Please feel free to contact us with questions or requests.

Completing the film, setting our itineration schedule, and packing up the past three and a half years of our lives is keeping us more than busy. This fall, we have not been able to go olive picking, visit many people, take walks in the hills, or write as much as we’d like. We do not anticipate composing many more email updates for some time. Instead, we invite you to visit our daily journal, which we do maintain here. And if another person’s piece of writing strikes a chord, we may pass it along. That is the case with the piece pasted at the end of this letter.

In the past month, we have been in Nablus, Jenin, Tubas, and Jalame for filming. We have been amazed by the perseverance of the people here, particularly in the face of unbelievable difficulties and dangers of simple travel. We have also been astonished and distressed by the progress of the Wall, which we have witnessed as it snakes a route deep into the West Bank, imprisoning local populations in villages and towns like Jalame, Qalqilia, and Tulkarem. In places, we have seen its loops of barbed wire, ditches, and patrol roads. In others, we have seen its watch towers and high concrete walls. Palestinians cannot get out, and fewer and fewer internationals are allowed in to see its reality. It is shocking and disturbing. No good can come of it.

We recommend the following essay by our friend Katherine Maycock. We couldn’t have said it better. Please read it, and note that November 9 is designated as “Stop the Wall Day.” Links with more information are at the end.

Peace be with you all.

Elizabeth and Marthame Sanders

Marthame and Elizabeth Sanders are American Presbyterians working in the Palestinian Christian village of Zababdeh.

The 2003 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 156

Bullet Point 22: The Writing on the Wall

by Katherine Maycock
1 November 2003

Today as I came through the main checkpoint into Bethlehem—newly reinforced with concrete barriers for the start of Ramadan, two old ladies were pushing a supermarket trolley towards the taxi I was heading for. Dressed in traditional embroidered robes, and undaunted by the complaints of the driver who wanted a quick get away with me for a higher price, they started to unload sack after heavy sack and heave them up onto his roof rack. They had not pushed these olives past the young Russian-speaking Israeli soldiers who were looking on, but had come round the checkpoint on a mud track to the side, having picked them in some nearby olive grove since 6:00 a.m. that morning. They could not have slipped their trade round the other side of the checkpoint as it has recently been swathed in six-feet high rounds of new shiny silver barbed wire. This barbed wire is the trademark of “the Wall,” which now comes right up to Bethlehem. It keeps the nearby fortress of Har Homa settlement built on Bethlehem land on the “Israeli” side of the wall as well as Rachel’s Tomb inside Bethlehem, enabling bus loads of Israeli tourists to continue to visit the shrine. The would-be local Christian and Muslim pilgrims to the shrine, meanwhile, remain trapped in the city as they have been for three years, unable to make such a pilgrimage or exit Bethlehem. Gaps in the security apparatus remain however, through which people outside of the 1- to 45-year age bracket, can still risk making a trade. These wrinkled businesswomen smiling through their metal-capped teeth told me they could sell a kilo of olives in Bethlehem market for about £1.

It was slipping through a gate in a completed section of the Wall near Jenin that Hanadi Jaradat, an attractive 29-year-old Palestinian lawyer, was able to blow up herself with 19 other people in a restaurant in Haifa on October 4. Every suicide bombing increases support of the average Israeli citizen for the Wall as they associate it with increased security. Yet most suicide bombers have reportedly come through checkpoints. Hanadi’s murderous act appears to stem from having seen her brother and cousin killed in Jenin during an Israeli army operation there in June. When people want revenge, it seems they will find a way, Wall or no Wall.

The map revealed

On 23 October, the Israeli Ministry of Defense published, for the first time, a map outlining the route of the Wall it is building inside the West Bank to stop Palestinians entering Israel. So far, roughly 180 kilometers have been constructed. When complete, the Wall will run for over 600 kilometers, excluding the Jordan Valley side of the Wall, that is, twice the length of the Green Line (1949 armistice line and boundary of the West Bank). Sometimes a complex series of trenches, barbed wire, electrified fences, and security patrol roads, spanning between 30 and 100 metres, and in other places 8-meter-high concrete blocks, armed concrete turrets, cameras, and infrared sensors, the wall currently winds as much as 20 kilometers inside the West Bank to keep Jewish settlements on the Israeli side of the wall.

The closed zone

The land between the Wall and the Green Line looks set to trap approximately 200,000 Palestinians into what Israel calls a “seam zone” or “closed zone.” New regulations issued on October 2 require all Palestinian residents already in this zone to apply for permits to continue to live in their houses, farm their land, and travel. The permits issued so far have been found to be valid for periods between 4 and 6 months only. Yet Israelis of Jewish descent are permitted to freely settle and work in this area. “The Order effectively grants any Jew in the world the right to freely travel throughout the Closed Zone while denying the same rights to the Christians and Muslims who live on, farm and own the land” (Negotiations Support Unit, Palestinian Authority). And all this inside the Palestinian West Bank, which according to international law is illegally occupied.

This is another case of new Israeli laws that masquerade as necessary and logical regulations to bring about security and order, which actually annex more land, blur the fact of occupation, and continue to impoverish the lives of ordinary people. As I write, life for the Palestinian farmers and residents of the closed zone is grinding to a halt. Many of these people are joining the ranks of those dependent on food aid, unable to farm their land, travel to work or earn an income. Moreover, they are being forced out of this “zone” eastward into ever smaller Palestinian areas in the hope of being able to survive.

Settler opinion

Two Jewish settlers who I met recently defy the widespread belief that all settlers are in favor of the wall. “I would feel safer if the wall doesn’t come...the community will stay more alert without it. It’s a band-aid. It’s a waste of money,” said one who lives in Shilo, a settlement in the heart of the West Bank. Whether the wall encircles Shilo or not, he will stay there with his wife and five children, as he believes it forms a protective block for Jerusalem, and stops Palestinian territory from being contiguous. Another resident who believes that without a settler presence in the West Bank “Zionism has no soul” expressed similar sentiments: “The wall is a psychological security blanket. It’s useless.” At a cost of over a million pounds per kilometer, an expenditure that is being made at the same time as many welfare benefits are being cut in Israel, this is serious criticism.

O Jerusalem...

Last Thursday, a new part of the wall was announced for North Jerusalem. It will come from Qalandia, the large checkpoint between Jerusalem and Ramallah, encircle the large Jewish settlements of Pisgat Ze’ev and Neve Yaacov near where I live and work in East Jerusalem, and enclose all the Palestinian suburbs and villages between it and the Green Line. Unless stopped, 45 kilometers of wall is due to be complete in East Jerusalem by early in the new year. It is already starting to divide 50,000 people from their schools, shops, medical services, and families. It has become a spectator sport for internationals in the early morning hours to watch children and adults climb over concrete blocks in unfinished sections of the wall, or if small enough squeeze through gaps to get to school and work. Two colleagues of mine currently drive a loop of 20 kilometers on settlement roads to avoid climbing over the wall when it is only a distance of 5 kilometers from their homes to the office.

On Saturday 8 November a group of young Israelis will also be watching and demonstrating in East Jerusalem, in protest at the actions of their government. This is because Sunday November 9 has become “International Wall Day” where protests will take place throughout European cities to highlight the devastation and division that is taking place. I don’t often urge my readers to action, but I encourage you to explore the Web links below, and if in London watch the wall come down in Trafalgar Square.

A little bit of math

The wall is the final death knell for the two-state solution. In the 1947 UN partition of the land, the Palestinians were offered 45 percent of the Mandate Palestine. After the war of 1948 when Israel was created, the Palestinians were left with 22 percent (West Bank and Gaza). In the war of 1967 Israel occupied the 22 percent. The Oslo Accords (1993) enshrined a process by which Israel would hand back the 22 percent. Seven years of negotiations produced little tangible result and saw the number of Jewish settlers in the Territories double. The Wall in its current projection including the as yet unveiled plan for the Jordan Valley will leave two Palestinian enclaves on about half of the 22 percent, that is, approximately 10 percent of what was Mandate Palestine. The oft-quoted rhetoric of “viable Palestinian state” will effectively become two seemingly non-viable ghettos in the West Bank plus the prison which is Gaza, already surrounded by a fence. 3.5 million people are currently being rounded up. This is the writing on the wall.

Katharine Maycock
PO Box 1838, Jerusalem,
Israel 91017

This series of emails began when I was an international observer for the Quakers in Bethlehem. I now work for a humanitarian organisation and am based in East Jerusalem. The views expressed here are my own. They may be forwarded freely. Previous bullet points can be found at: http://www.stmaryn16.org.uk/pages/prospect/bullet.

Links

www.seamzone.mod.gov.il - for new Israeli government map of Wall and official explanation of it.

www.nad-plo.org/eye/Military%20Order10203.pdf - for an English translation of the order regarding the Closed Zone.

www.stopthewall.org - for the Palestinian campaign against the Wall, including events for 9th November Wall day.

www.stmaryn16.org.uk/pages/prospect/bullet - for Katherine’s previous “writing on the Wall” - Journal Letter Two.

www.unitedforpeace.org - United for Peace and Justice put together resources for 9th November Wall day in the United States.