Al No'man is a Palestinian village situated across a wadi and up a high hill to the north of Beit Sahour that legendary or historic location (take your choice) of the fields where Shepherds, so the carol goes, lay watching their flocks. To the east lies the huge illegal (according to international standards) Israeli settlement of Har Homa.
This blot on the landscape, which has been shrewdly built by Israel on the leveled site of a once beautiful forested Palestinian hill top, is blocking expansion of the burgeoning metropolitan Bethlehem area to the south of it. Other smaller settlements ringing Bethlehem to the east, south, and west are effecting an encirclement, which is choking off future growth of this struggling regional center of Palestinian life.
As with so many of the larger settlements in the West Bank, Har Homa has the appearance and characteristics of an updated medieval fortress town. It is an obscene modern day Carcassone whose privileged citizens hunker down behind thick walls intended to shield them from any outburst of frustration or anger by its serf-like Palestinian subjects living outside and beneath its walls.
These way beneath the salt unfortunates continue to be excluded systematically from sharing the benefits of the constricting contemporary feudal way of life that has been imposed on them by Israel's noblesse oblige winner take all cruel crusader-like chivalry. Palestine clearly is not for the Palestinians but for the Israelis.
Tall construction cranes towering above Har Homa/Carcassone 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 still "snaking" its way through the West Bank. (Ah there, President Bush!). In effect the wall is annexing into Israel tens of thousands of dunams of farmland as it goes, thus removing them unilaterally from any future negotiations that may be launched to determine the borders of a Palestinian State.
In fact the Green Line demarcating the borders of Israel/Palestine at the end of the 1967 war was long ago transmuted by the Israeli press and government spokespeople into something called the Seam Line, which these days is being turned into an Invisible Line outlining nothing. It is relentlessly being superseded by Israel's greedy dash into its modern day Cherokee Strip in order to grab off the fertile Palestinian land and its water lying between the Green, I mean the Seam, I mean the Invisible Line and the series of Palestinian villages (or towns or cities) in which they live.
The wall is clearly intended to be the new Green Line. As a result of its snaky path, which is swallowing up considerable Palestinian territory, the West Bank, when viewed from above, is coming to resemble a Swiss cheese much more than the sovereign state with territorial integrity that it needs to be.
The wall also is another example of the unlevel table top on which the "roadmap" was writ: a cynically conceived slippery slope in which the resultant out of kilter inside and outside the Beltway pressure and onus has been and is on the Palestinians to accomplish much more than Israelis. The continuation of this kind of provocation constitutes a kind of Israeli and friends chutzpah.
It is an outrageous occupational dare constituting a cynical prodding and aggravating of the collective Palestinian patience. If stretched to the breaking point some utterly aggrieved individual might well take up violent and inevitably unproductive arms against the terrible and very real sea of troubles in which he or she and millions of other Palestinians are desperately treading. And if the current cease fire breaks down as a result, Israel, of course, will have another excuse, another alibi (which presumably would be endorsed by an ever compliant Washington) for calling the whole thing off and resuming an even more relentless full steam ahead campaign of territorial thievery and appalling humiliations.
Al No'man is a case in point. Standing on top of the hilltop, which looks down into that wadi lying between it and Beit Sahour, one clearly and helplessly is forced to observe the track of the latest section of the hate wall as it is being relentlessly nudged from east to west around the village toward Har Homa.
The residents of Al No'man lack the power to protect themselves from the unique consequences of having the wall constructed between it and the rest of the West Bank. I say unique because quite some time ago the village was annexed into Jerusalem, which lies just to the North. But the residents all have West Bank IDs. In other words they are not Israeli citizens, even though they will be cut off from Palestine and the West Bank by the wall.
West Bankers, of course, are not allowed to live in Israel. So, in effect, Al No'man's residents are squatters on their own land. Meanwhile the 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 the kids off from Beit Sahour. And so far this facet and many others of this difficult catch 22 have not been resolved.
In fact, its citizens continue to suffer the usual occupation indignities: home demolitions, settler harassment, no permission to build on their own land while they see Israeli homes shooting up all around them in the steadily encroaching settlements, 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 there are continuing to be caught in another catch 22 vice. This summer settlers from both colonies have been busily ratcheting up their on going campaign of carving new roads or extending old ones down from their settlements into and through Palestinian farm land below. Then through threats and wire fences, which they have been subsequently installing to divide up the fields, armed settler security guards have been forbidding Palestinians from entering those fields to tend to their own crops. In the valley they are mainly grapes.
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 from going in "in order to protect them from the settlers."
Barred by the soldiers, the farmers then will complain to the "Civil Administration," the Army bureaucracy that runs the West Bank. (Civil Administration is a semantic obfuscation designed to obscure the pertinent fact from the gullible or unknowing that the Israeli Army controls and runs every aspect of life in the occupied territories: to the extent that, when it serves its purpose, it has the power to overrule the Israeli courts in the name of security.)
The Civil Administration will agree with the farmers that the settlers are out of order. But they are told that it is the soldiers' job to keep the settlers in line.
"The Israeli are playing cat and mouse with us" a Palestinian activist complained to me last week.
"The game could go on for a long time, couldn't it?" I asked.
"Not so long," my friend answered. "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. So 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."
This decades long dirty war the United States has helped Israel wage against the Palestinians and their land to an excess beyond all humane logic and justification reminds me of a poem that a once very popular and angry American poet, Ogden Nash, wrote not too long after Pearl Harbor, a perfidious event which had understandably upset him greatly.
The specific racist sentiments he expressed back then, of course, no longer obtain. But they do make, I think, a significant contemporary point. Here it is. And, if the shoe fits…
How courteous is the Japanese;
He always says, "Excuse, it please."
He climbs into his neighbor's garden,
And smiles, and says, "I beg your pardon";
He bows and grins a friendly grin,
And calls his hungry family in;
He grins and bows a friendly bow;
"So sorry, this my garden now."