CPTNet
August 2, 2003
HEBRON: Catch Twenty Two
By Jerry Levin

Al No'man is a Palestinian village situated across a wadi and up a high
hill to the north of Beit Sahour, where shepherds of old lay a-watching
their sheep. To the east lies the huge illegal Israeli settlement of Har
Homa. Other smaller Israeli settlements ringing Bethlehem to the east,
south, and west are choking off future growth of this center of Palestinian
life.

As with so many of the larger settlements in the West Bank, Har Homa has
the appearance and characteristics of a medieval fortress town. Its
privileged citizens hunker down behind thick walls intended to shield them
from any outburst of anger by its Palestinian subjects living beneath its
walls.

Tall construction cranes towering above Har Homa rooftops testify to the
additional fact that the "roadmap" is not alive and well in Palestine.
Settlement expansion continues.

In addition, the "separation fence," also known as the "wall of hate," is
snaking its way through the West Bank. The wall is annexing into Israel
tens of thousands of dunams of farmland as it goes, thus removing them from
any future negotiations to determine the borders of a Palestinian State.

The residents of Al No'man lack the power to protect themselves from the
unique consequences of having the wall constructed between them and the
rest of the West Bank. I say unique because sometime ago the village was
annexed into Jerusalem just to the north. But the residents all have West
Bank citizenship even though they will be cut off from the West Bank by the
wall.

West Bankers are not allowed to live in Israel. So, in effect, Al No'man's
residents will be classed as squatters on their own land. Meanwhile, their
children have not been allowed to attend nearby schools in Jerusalem,
because they are not Israeli. So they have been attending school in not so
nearby Beit Sahour. The wall will cut them off from Beit Sahour.

In addition, its citizens continue to suffer the usual Occupation
indignities: home demolitions, settler harassment, no permission to build
on their own land, destruction of crops and water pipes, uprooting of
telephone poles, the tearing up of their roads, and the setting up of
barricades blocking access into and out of the village.

Meanwhile, several kilometers to the south in the Ba'qaa Valley, bordered
on hilltops to the west by Hebron, and more ominously by the Israeli
settlements of Harsina and Kiryat Arba, farmers are caught in a catch 22.
Settlers from both Israeli colonies have been busily ratcheting up their
campaign of carving new roads down from their settlements into Palestinian
farm land below. Then through threats and new wire fences, armed settler
security guards have been forbidding Palestinians from entering their own
vineyards.

When the farmers complain to the Israeli Army, they are told that the
settlers have no right to do that. But then, when the Palestinians try to
enter their vineyards and a confrontation with
armed settler security guards looms, the soldiers stop the Palestinians "in
order to protect them from the settlers."

Barred by the soldiers, the farmers then complain to the "Civil"
Administration, the Army bureaucracy that runs the West Bank. The Civil
Administration agrees with the farmers that the settlers are out of order.
But they are told that is the soldiers' job to keep the settlers in line.

"The Israeli are playing cat and mouse with us," a Palestinian activist
said to me last week.

"The game could go on for a long time, couldn't it?" I asked.

"Not so long," my friend answered, "You see time is running out for us,
especially the farmers. We are in what you call the catch-22. You see, the
settlers use their guns to frighten the farmers from their grapes. Then the
soldiers say that we have the right to be there. But then the soldiers
won't let us go past the settlers 'to save us.' But we don't save the
grapes. And the Civil Administration does nothing.

"And?"

"Well, there is an Israeli rule. It says that if we can't enter our land
for two or three years it can be confiscated."

"Catch 22!"

"Yes, the catch 22."