The wrong walls tumbled

I was held up for six hours at the Jenin terminal, the visa stamp in my passport not worth its weight in ink, when the news came through of the Israeli raid on the Jericho prison. This unimaginative generation use tanks and bulldozers. Joshua's forces had trumpets.

The predicament of the British authorities sounds plausible to me, but the timing of their pull out and that of the Israeli attack smells of collusion on the one hand and pre-election machismo on the other. Our job here is now harder.

I am not surprised by the Palestinian reaction. Conditions are tinder dry for a flare up. The TV was full yesterday of angry Palestinians with guns. Here’s a taste of what I’ve seen since I joined the programme, in order to give some introduction to the daily provocations of life under occupation.

In the village of Nu’man we met Fatima (not her real name), the daughter of Mahmoud Ali Shawaura who was found badly beaten, one afternoon 3 months ago, tied to his donkey by his wrist and dragged along the ground. He had last been seen the morning before by his brother being detained by the border police. He died five days later in hospital. The case against the police remains un-pursued. The family is too poor to continue paying their lawyer and the Palestinian Authority - for reasons not yet clear - are not paying as promised. There are many demolition orders – and the rubble of recently destroyed homes - hanging over houses in this village, which lies within the Jerusalem Municipal boundaries and close to the site of ‘Har Homa D’; a proposed settlement expansion. If Fatima begins to trust us, we may be able to escort her across the line where the border police patrol the incomplete fence, so that she can continue her studies at Bethlehem University.

Hope Flowers School, an acclaimed secondary school with a pioneering curriculum in peace and democratic education, which has brought Jewish, Muslim and Christian students together has not been able to run beyond its senior school since 2000 because checkpoints and the oncoming Wall make it so hard for pupils from further afield to come, including Israeli students on exchange visits. Head teacher Ibrahim Issa told us only massive international pressure, including US Consulate support, lifted the demolition order on the school cafeteria which runs just within the prohibited 150 metre boundary of the proposed separation barrier.

In Battir, a famously peaceful village perches on the edge of a wadi above the British-built Tel Aviv to Jerusalem railway, which marks here the ‘Green Line’ or ceasefire line of 1948. Here, eight clans have divided the water for irrigation from the one spring equitably for hundreds of years with a unique eight day cycle. As we walked amongst the terraces our host, Sameer Oweneh of the Battir Charitable Society, explained how the Wall plans delivered recently by the areas military commander cut off hundreds of acres of olive groves – and irrigated terraces - from the village. A peaceful demonstration including two hundred Israelis from the peace organisation ‘Tayush’(meaning coexistence) six months ago, has made no impact on the Israeli authorities. “In the last fifty years there has been peace between Israelis and Battir citizens” Sameer explained “Yet the Israeli government is pushing the villagers to violence by making this Wall”. Last season, some olive pickers who dared to cross via the railway tunnel, freely used by children and sheep, were jailed for one month.

Monday is my day off and I thought I’d walk to the Herodian, the fortress palace of Herod the Great, east of Bethlehem near the edge of the Judean desert. Just below our flat on the first bit of green a young shepherd, a graduate of Abu Dis University, tells me of his relative often having to wait two to four hours, rising before five am, just to get through the new ‘improved’ checkpoint known as the terminal. An hour further on I bought a drink and met Issa, a Beit Sahour businessman out for a game of tennis. He told me: “They can have their security but they shouldn’t stop our daily life. Today this shopkeeper’s nephew couldn’t get to BirZeit University (across two checkpoints) and had to turn back. Yesterday I was held up for hours along with a lot of busses at the Jericho checkpoint and a two and a half year old girl had to urinate in a container we had in the car because we couldn’t get out. Three weeks ago people had to sleep in their cars when the checkpoint was closed. Old men have to use the road verge in full view of the people. It’s daily harassment just traveling within the West Bank.”

Our Arabic language teacher, a retired teacher who lives by the Wall sighed as she spoke of the Israeli soldiers this morning. “Those boys, they are so frightened.” Indeed I had a taste of their tetchiness on Monday as during the walk, deep inside the West Bank, I took a picture of a hilltop military post. I had crossed the invisible line between ‘Area A’ which is meant to be fully under Palestinian control to ‘B’ which is under Israeli control. An hour later as I sat talking to an agricultural engineer and his assistant testing varieties of local wheat for resistance to herbicides, five commandos came over the hillside straight for me. Dov, with a big smile, demanded that I hand over the camera. His hands trembled as he went through the pictures. After some negotiation I agreed to delete the one picture (which wasn’t good anyway) of the camp I’d taken.

These soldiers were reservists on their one month a year tour of duty. Dov is an analogue designer whose firm works closely with one in Maidenhead. Lior, a clinical psychologist, with long ginger hair below his helmet and shades, responded as if I’d criticized him. “It depends what glasses you put on”. To them, tight security is justified by the search for terrorists. “Sure I would like to go back twenty years maybe, when both sides were free to come and go, but it’s not like that now. Most times when I stop a car with yellow (Israeli) number plates -many cars are stolen by the way - I just take the plates and tell him to get Palestinian ones. Sometimes we pick up a wanted man this way. It just takes one to get through….” Picturing one yellow number plate amongst many, parked by a Tel Aviv café maybe, I saw his point. There were about 500 Israeli civilian deaths from suicide bombers from 2001 to 2003.

And now, as a result of Israel's Hollywood-style prison raid, two Palestinians are dead. In a Jericho hospital eleven children lie injured, shins and wrists shattered by dum dum bullets, which break up on impact. They are illegal under international conventions. Chris Ferguson, Jerusalem Representative of the World Council of Churches saw them, talked to the doctors this afternoon and wrote:

" …a young man living with Downs Syndrome waved his arms and gestured to show us how he was handcuffed, blindfolded and beaten by soldiers. His wrist and arm were hurt by the rough treatment with the handcuffs. ‘Couldn’t they see that this guy has Downs Syndrome?’ asked a doctor…Rationally most admit that no one has clean hands in this mess. However that being said, nothing justifies the gross violation of human rights of the Palestinians which elevates Israeli impunity to new and fearsome heights."