I've written the following before: "Every time my wife and I leave Palestine and Israel and head for home--when our visas are about to run out--we hope that things won't get worse here while we are back in the States; but sadly we know they will.
And, sure enough, they do.
Similarly, when we come back from the U. S. we hope that things won't get worse once we get back to the territories; but sadly we know they will.
And they do."
Since returning to the not so Holy Land this time, we have seen that clearly the spiral and spirit of destruction, debilitation, and depression here is continuing. The truth of the well-known notion that the more things change, the more they stay the same, is impossible to deny or ignore here. That truth is a constant in even the remotest corners of West Bank and Gaza cities, towns, villages, and countryside. In all those places the dreary and gloomy sameness to Palestinian life is the norm despite the parallel and paradoxical fact of constant occupation imposed changes that tragically signify not relief but instead ominous continual pain and sorrow.
Take, for instance, Hebron's Old al-Shallalah Street on one side of which runs the oldest of its inner city Israeli settlements, Beit Hadassah, and on the other a long row of first floor Palestinian shops and upper story Palestinian apartments. When the Israeli Army extended its control over H2 by appropriating a piece of H1, al- Shallalah Street was more adversely affected than some of the other neighborhoods also swallowed up in the same unilateral redrawing of the West Bank map.
No longer in the more vigorous H1 commercial and residential area, business and personal life made a catastrophic nose dive due to the fact that not only did the tiny neighborhood have to endure the constant curfews that were the terrible lot of Palestinians living everywhere in H2, but also because it was ruled off limits to anyone except those who actually lived there.
H1 is the area of Hebron granted by Oslo II in 1997 to the Palestinian National Authority but which has been totally reoccupied by Israel since the summer of 2002. About one hundred and twenty thousand Palestinians live in it.
H2 exists because it is the area of Hebron consigned to Israel after Oslo II at Israel's adamant insistence because it is home to a unique enclave of four small ultra Orthodox ultra nationalist Jewish settlements. Its militant residents (approximately four hundred and fifty), backed by the Israeli Army (approximately two thousand soldiers at any one time ruling approximately H2's thirty thousand Palestinians) have over the years been stunningly successful at stifling and closing down most Palestinian business inside the Old City as well as creating such discouraging conditions that more than half the Palestinian population there has fled.
Actually life had stopped being sweet in al Shallalah Street long before it was unilaterally made part of H2 almost a year ago. The bad days began and became a way of life when Beit Hadassah was established more than two decades ago. Militant settler residents often joined by belligerent ultra nationalists, not necessarily from West Bank settlements, rampaging in and above the narrow street, menaced and harassed shop owners and residents virtually unhindered.
They damaged or destroyed merchandise; or, from Beit Hadassah windows above the street, they pelted passerbys with refuse, garbage, slop, and more dangerous objects such as rocks, tiles and cement blocks while Israeli police, Border Police, or Israeli soldiers stood by to insure that no settlers were harmed in return. The Israeli Army's subsequent worse than the disease antidote to the violence was--in the wake of such attacks--to order the shops closed and to impose curfew in the street in order to "protect" the Palestinians.
Finally came that de facto annexation into H2 several months ago. More than that, it actually became a blockade to even the residents, who were only grudgingly allowed to leave and come back, especially when there was curfew.
Then suddenly late last month, the blockade was lifted. Palestinians were once more allowed to come and go and conduct business as they pleased. But almost immediately, although street rampages have been successfully prevented by the various Israeli security forces in Hebron, the dangerous bombardments from those Beit Hadassah windows above the street began again.
Occupation authorities have, however, quickly moved to thwart the danger not by arresting settler provocateurs, but by installing along the entire length and breadth of al-Shallalah Street, between the first and second floor level, transparent metallic mesh to keep the angry missiles being dropped from above ever reaching the streets. Walking beneath it the other day, I could see laying among the trapped debris above me a two-foot long slab of cement.
However, the street is clearly not going to be what it once was: a thriving exuberant boisterous neighborhood of thriving shops and homes. Since getting back to Hebron on the 15th of December, and checking on the forlorn street almost daily, I have not seen one open shop or a single resident either coming or going.
So much for the city. Out in the country east of Hebron, I along with CPTers and other internationals were led very recently to a towering mound of rock and stone "fill" that is growing ominously higher and higher just outside the northern edge of the West Bank's oldest Israeli settlement, Kiryat Arba. Purposefully being dumped onto adjacent Palestinian farmland in a shallow valley called Wadi al-Ghroos, its looming growing presence marks the latest incremental phase in the settlement's ongoing land grab at the expense of its Palestinian neighbors. The "fill" is being used to surface thirty- five foot wide dirt swaths being bulldozed farther and farther down, into, and over the valley's fields, orchards, and vineyards.
Once surfacing has been completed, high wire fences equipped with electronic sensors will be installed for--according to the settlers-- "security reasons." However, according to Palestinians, whose livelihood-supporting property is being taken from them, the roads and fences are being built, like those in the past, so that the settlers can "steal our land." There is, of course, a factual element to both views.
Security for the settlers is an issue, because a former protective buffer "security" strip of land previously confiscated from Wadi al- Ghroos Palestinians, situated just outside the settlement's former outer ring of housing, has disappeared in precisely the same manner beneath a long row of recently built settler homes. So a replacement buffer security zone for this new outer ring is now in the process of being created.
There is a historic sameness to this process of change, just as there is a historic sameness to the strangling of the Hebron neighborhood I described earlier in this presentation. For instance each time a new expansion takes place, Wadi al-Ghroos farmers are promised that once the work is completed they will have access to their former plots. But in practice this has not been the case.
In fact once the work begins, armed settlers begin to prevent them from working their property. So during the past year, a stretch of land at the northwest corner of Kiryat Arba extending about a quarter of the distance along its northern edge has been lost to the farmers: approximately 50 dunams. (Four dunams equal one acre.). Recently bulldozers once again began leveling paths for even newer graveled roads along which more of those fences with their electronic sensors will be built, thus paving the way for the isolation of another 50 or so dunams along the settlements' northern edge.
Each time settlement boundaries are pushed out from Kiryat Arba and into Wadi al-Ghroos, affected families, through lawyers, lodge official complaints with the local office of the Civil Administration. Civil Administration is a euphemistic misnomer, because its employees, although civilian functionaries, actually work for Israel's Ministry of Defense, which is the sole and inevitably arbitrary ruler of the occupied territories. And these employees are only superficially civil. So absolute is the Army's word, that even decisions by Israel's highest court's can be ignored in the occupied territories for "security reasons." Like death and taxes, and despite lower court victories in connection with these kinds of land seizures, at the end of the day the Palestinians, more often than not, lose.
So with respect to the current dispute, even though the Israeli Army has temporarily halted bulldozing, it is not restraining the continued buildup of that growing mound of rock and stone "fill." Dump trucks continue unhindered to add to the pile; so expectations are, as in the past, that more Wadi al-Ghroos' farmland, which has been lovingly and thankfully worked for generations by its Palestinian residents, is destined to end up beyond their reach and benefit: beyond and behind brand new unilaterally assigned borders and boundaries marking off an ever shrinking map of Palestine.