PALESTINE REFLECTION: The shape of the future
January 21st, 2009
in:
CPTnet
21 January 2008
PALESTINE REFLECTION: The shape of the future
by Kathleen Kern
Recently, Jim Roynon and I visited an old friend of the team in Ramallah to discuss what shape CPT's future work in Palestine might take. If she were not dealing with the slaughter in Gaza and supporting her colleagues there, she said, she would be visiting villages caught between the unfinished Annexation Wall and the actual 1967 border with Israel, an area known as the "seam line," because they do not know the horrors that await them.
Bir Nabala, she said is "the shape of the future." Entirely surrounded by the Wall, it has only one entrance/exit. The Israeli military permits only residents who live in Bir Nabala to enter the village, so family members cannot visit. Wadi Kana, she said, had fifty to seventy people in 1996. Israel has demolished homes there, fined people for killing snakes (because Israel designated the village a nature preserve) and allowed Israeli hilltop settlements to send their sewage into the village. The villagers have since abandoned their homes. "I wish I could bring people from villages where the wall hasn't been built yet to see Wadi Kana and Bir Nabala," she told us. Â
People in the seam line are not the only losers in the near future. Israel is working on a "convergence" plan that will involve annexing everything west of the wall--which is cutting deep into the West Bank at points--and the Jordan Valley. Israeli-controlled roads will connect the deepest cuts with the Jordan Valley, thus segmenting the West Bank into four Bantustans (for a map, see http://stopthewall.org/maps/1159.shtml.)
As for the twenty percent of remaining settlers, our friend says Israel probably will move them, even those from the huge settlement of Kiryat Arba, near Hebron. She said the evacuation will be gruesome and bloody, given the ideological nature of some of these settlements, and the Israeli government will be able to point to its effort and proclaim to the world the sacrifices it is making, without ever taking the responsibility for setting them up—knowing they were a violation of international law—in the first place.
Years ago, Jeff Halper, head of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, told a delegation I was leading that the dream of a functional democratic Palestinian state was over. Israel was going to expand its roads and its settlements and continue controlling the lives of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. I asked him why he continued his work, knowing that reality, and he said, "I'm in it for the long haul." I guess that is why I continue working with Christian Peacemaker Teams in Palestine. Even though I know that the future I can see is bleak, I choose to believe in the future I cannot see, that I cannot even envision. A future where people in Israel and everywhere else believe that the human rights of Palestinians are as important as their own.
21 January 2008
PALESTINE REFLECTION: The shape of the future
by Kathleen Kern
Recently, Jim Roynon and I visited an old friend of the team in Ramallah to discuss what shape CPT's future work in Palestine might take. If she were not dealing with the slaughter in Gaza and supporting her colleagues there, she said, she would be visiting villages caught between the unfinished Annexation Wall and the actual 1967 border with Israel, an area known as the "seam line," because they do not know the horrors that await them.
Bir Nabala, she said is "the shape of the future." Entirely surrounded by the Wall, it has only one entrance/exit. The Israeli military permits only residents who live in Bir Nabala to enter the village, so family members cannot visit. Wadi Kana, she said, had fifty to seventy people in 1996. Israel has demolished homes there, fined people for killing snakes (because Israel designated the village a nature preserve) and allowed Israeli hilltop settlements to send their sewage into the village. The villagers have since abandoned their homes. "I wish I could bring people from villages where the wall hasn't been built yet to see Wadi Kana and Bir Nabala," she told us. Â
People in the seam line are not the only losers in the near future. Israel is working on a "convergence" plan that will involve annexing everything west of the wall--which is cutting deep into the West Bank at points--and the Jordan Valley. Israeli-controlled roads will connect the deepest cuts with the Jordan Valley, thus segmenting the West Bank into four Bantustans (for a map, see http://stopthewall.org/maps/1159.shtml.)
As for the twenty percent of remaining settlers, our friend says Israel probably will move them, even those from the huge settlement of Kiryat Arba, near Hebron. She said the evacuation will be gruesome and bloody, given the ideological nature of some of these settlements, and the Israeli government will be able to point to its effort and proclaim to the world the sacrifices it is making, without ever taking the responsibility for setting them up—knowing they were a violation of international law—in the first place.
Years ago, Jeff Halper, head of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, told a delegation I was leading that the dream of a functional democratic Palestinian state was over. Israel was going to expand its roads and its settlements and continue controlling the lives of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. I asked him why he continued his work, knowing that reality, and he said, "I'm in it for the long haul." I guess that is why I continue working with Christian Peacemaker Teams in Palestine. Even though I know that the future I can see is bleak, I choose to believe in the future I cannot see, that I cannot even envision. A future where people in Israel and everywhere else believe that the human rights of Palestinians are as important as their own.
