Before 1997 and the Oslo II accords, which furnished historic assent to Palestinian administration of West Bank communities large and small, the typically occupation-beset Palestinian village of Tuqu'--situated in the Judean hills southeast of Bethlehem--had no modern civic and civil institutions of any kind. "So we had very urgent needs," said Suleiman Abu Mufarreh, Tuqu's thirty-something Mayor. "Not just repairing infrastructure but building it."
"But we were a traditional village," he said. So, at first, twelve old men of the village became the members of the new Palestinian Authority authorized Municipal Council. "But after six months," the Mayor said, "there were many disagreements. Nothing could get done." So those village elders asked the younger generation to take over and form a replacement council to manage Tuqu's affairs. It chose Mufarreh to lead it.
To begin with the successor council realized that a Master Plan was needed so that it could make informed decisions about such needs as roads, agriculture, medical support, health care, education, schools, sewage, water treatment, and public buildings. "Without a Master Plan there were always problems," the Mayor said.
"But even after they had one there were problems with the Israelis," he added. The construction of Tuqu's first public building, its recently finished bright white two story municipality center, known as the Baladyeh, and the village's ongoing struggle with settlers and the Israeli Army to keep it from being destroyed is a case in point.
The ordeal began in part because of the lack of any Master Plan for Tuqu'. The only document Tuqu's young managers could put their hands on in order to start the process of determining what new projects were needed, such as new roads, schools, health facilities, pipe lines, a multipurpose center, etc., and specifically where to put them, was a recent aerial photo of the region. Photos like it had been used at Oslo II to delineate the, at first celebrated, but now notorious, West Bank and Gaza zones A, B, and C: Zone A being the major Palestinian cities under Palestinian administrative and security control; Zone B being the newly created smaller Palestinian municipalities comprised of towns or villages to be administered by Palestinians but, where security is still under the control of the Israeli Army; and Zone C, the vast Israeli military security areas where all the Israeli settlements are located and whose open spaces can be closed to Palestinians at any time.
It turns out that those photos had been taken by a firm hired by Israel to take topographical pictures of the occupied territories for the Oslo II negotiations. Then the limits of the municipalities as defined by Israeli negotiators were drawn meticulously and precisely on the photos by the firm's employees in thick white ink at the direction of the Israeli team with no input from Palestinians.
Summing up the arbitrary experience, the Mayor said, "At Oslo the Israelis had all the advantages. They provided the data. The Palestinian negotiating team did not have detailed information, just those photo maps, which had been passed along to them from the Israeli Department of Survey. The Palestinians at the conference could see that they were being pushed. But their protests did them no good."
Ever since--all over the West Bank and Gaza--the chickens with respect to those Israeli imposed boundaries have been coming home to roost. And Tuqu' is no exception.
For example, when Mayor Mufarreh and his colleagues finally got their hands on the photo map of their area, they discovered instantly and to their dismay how craftily that thick white line, which defined what was to be the municipality's Oslo imposed perimeter, had been drawn around their village.
It had the irregular shape of an amoeba; and the logic behind the perimeter's irregular path was quintessentially Israeli. The line the Israeli map makers zealously and unilaterally drew on the aerial photo connected all the local Palestinian homes, circa 1997, which were furthest from the center of the village. Everything inside that irregular amoeba-shaped perimeter was to be Zone B. Every thing outside it was to be Zone C, thus putting all Palestinian land in Zone C in jeopardy: subject to confiscation at any time.
The inevitable effects of the circumscribing gerrymandering have been to: 1) limit the area Tuqu' needs to accommodate its increasing population. (So much for a viable master plan based on the logic of expanding demographics.) And 2) separate the village from its surrounding agricultural lands, thus finessing the issue of ownership, and making it easier to expropriate. Predictably, and ever since, settlers living nearby have engaged in perpetual harassment of Tuqu's farmers trying to work their Zone C fields and orchards.
Sometimes the settlers are merely threatening and intimidating. Sometimes they are violent. More often than not Israeli soldiers assigned to maintain law and order look the other way while the settlers make their menacing or confiscatory moves; or the soldiers engage in their own harassing tactics. "Settlers are willing to shoot us and get in the way of a normal life; and so is the Army," the Mayor said.
To explain, he described how Tuqu' is actually in a special zone designated Zone B+ at Oslo, "That is because we were big enough for a police station of our own. But we cannot control the settlers, and we cannot control the Army; so our Police Station has been closed for a long time."
Meanwhile, since the founding of the municipality, settlers with the eventual acquiescence of the Army have been steadily and relentlessly moving in on Tuqu', confiscating Palestinian land in the gerrymandered Zone C: one field, one orchard, one olive grove at a time. In some areas along the municipal perimeter, the settlers have been incessantly engaged in trying to cross the line and blatantly grab off chunks of village land and other kinds of property clearly inside Zone B. For instance, "one night settlers stole several sheep out of the village, and the Army did nothing to help us," said the Mayor.
And then both the settlers and the Army came down like wolves on the fold on a piece of the village on which the Baladyeh was proudly and enthusiastically being built by Tuqu's residents. Recalling the community's effort and its continuing struggle to hang on to what it achieved, the Mayor reminisced, "We needed a Baladyeh, but a contractor told us it would cost $300,000 to build. And that was too much for us."
"That's when the villagers decided after conferring with the appropriate Palestinian Authority ministry and donors to do as much of the work as they could by themselves without a contractor," said my friend Hisham Ali, who along with my other friend, George Rishmawi, had brought me to Tuqu' to see for myself the progress the once virtually inert village had been trying to make. I was told how the council was able to obtain $90,000 in grants from outside sources, and how the village's eight thousand residents also donated personal labor, materials, and equipment, plus money from their own meager pockets in order to come up "with $70,000 in cash and in-kind said the Mayor. So in the end a $300,000 building cost $160,000."
"Also, when we started to build it," he continued, "we made sure it was in the B Zone; because according to the map, it would be sitting right on the line." (Remember that thick white line Israeli negotiators had arbitrarily and unilateral drawn on the Oslo II aerial photo map of the area, the one which became the municipality's boundary? That's the line to which the Mayor was referring.)
Nevertheless, as construction was nearing completion, the Israeli Army ordered, "Tear it down!"
"They told us," said the Mayor, "that if it's on the line, it is Zone C, not Zone B." Then they told us, "Since the Baladyeh is sitting on the line, it is your responsibility to remove it."
"So, the Mayor went to some human rights lawyers, who went to court several times," George said; "and they helped the municipality delay the order for two or three years."
"But, even before the Army interfered with us," said the Mayor, "settlers started coming to the land near to where we were going to put up the Baladyeh and tried to take it from us. They told us it is famous for their religion. They said it is where the prophet Amos is buried, so they want to come to pray there."
Amos, of course, is the celebrated prophet who warned his co-religionists that God knew of, did not like, and was being pushed to the limits of omniscient endurance with respect to the ancient Hebrews' transgressions, their sins, and their tendency to push aside the needy at the gates.
"So I spoke to some people, and there was an investigation," the Mayor continued. "I asked them, 'Where does it say in the Oslo agreement that Tuqu' is important to the religion of Israel?' They know there is nothing in the agreement about that. Then other Israelis ordered that there was nothing to the claim. So the settlers stopped coming back to the land near where the Baladyeh is, at least for the time being."
"But, you know, that land and the Baladyeh are at the main entrance to Tuqu', so we think what the settlers really want to is to control that opening," the Mayor said. Then he added that these days the Israeli Army controls all twenty one of the village's entrance/exits from the village and has since early in 2001. Each is blocked by high dirt barriers erected to block automobile traffic. "It used to take me ten minutes to drive the fifteen kilometers on the main roads to Bethlehem, but we do not have permission to drive on them anymore. So, now I have to change cars three times and walk about four hundred meters to get past the dirt barriers the Israeli Army has built to block our side roads. So, now it takes me maybe forty five minutes to an hour to get there."
The very latest threat to the Baladyeh has come once again from the Army, which insists that the village never did have its permission to build there and never would have gotten an O. K., because it is in Zone C. (That thick white line on the photo map again!) But, as is well known, the Israeli Army is a law unto itself in the occupied territories; so, despite the help from those human rights lawyers, the Army can ignore in the name of security any orders from any other Israeli official or institution.
"So, now for 'security reasons' a demolition order can come at any time," said Hisham. "And after that: the Baladyeh will be gone!"
"And," the Mayor added, "the soldiers have warned us, 'if the Army has to remove it, because you do not, you will have to pay the cost of the Army taking it down.'"
"Nevertheless, despite these kind of setbacks, which Palestinians know they can always expect from Israel, you can see that the people of Tuqu' have done very much: road improvements, new schools built on land donated by local families, pipelines, and more," George said. "It just shows what Palestinians can do, when they have even some control of their lives."
"Especially when there is motivation and persistence," Hisham interjected.
"And despite the odds," George agreed.
Then to make sure I understood exactly what he meant by "odds," George added, "Spell 'odds' this way: o-c-c-u-p-a-t-i-o-n."