Maps
I love maps. I am a person that can study maps for hours, follow the rivers and the borders, the location of the towns and try to imagine how the places look in reality – or remember places I have been to by visiting them again on the map.
For a person that loves maps, the West Bank is the place to be. Here maps are key to understanding what is going on; they make analysis possible. Maps predict the next places were the bulldozers will destroy farmland for the wall to be built. And maps reveal how distant a contiguous Palestinian state is.
Al Walaja village
One evening we sit at our friend Ata’s place in the village of Al Walaja and study maps. He tries to make us understand how everything changes. The original Al Walaja is located few kilometres to the west in what in 1948 became part of the state of Israel. The villagers fled and ended up on the other side of the armistice line – in the West Bank. It was there they founded a new village with the same name. 1949-1967 the West Bank belonged to Jordan but ever since the six-day war in 1967 Israel is occupying the West Bank, and consequently also new Al Walaja. At present the villagers of Al Walaja are stateless Palestinians under Israeli occupation.
An American Jewish student moving to Israel
A few days later in Jerusalem, we meet a group of Jewish students who recently chose to immigrate to Israel – called Aliyah. Emily who grew up in Ohio says that the most difficult issue for her was to adjust to the borders. “Is this my land or their land? Am I on this side or that side of the border?” She also says that it has been an enormous relief for her to come to a country where she is part of the majority population. “In Ohio I cried every Christmas when I was a child and prayed to God that he would make me a Christian because I just wanted to be like everybody else.” And she continues: “Having a collective identity is very important. It makes you feel you are part of a larger whole, part of a Jewish moment in history. That is very powerful. But moving here was not a statement that this land does not belong to more than one people. I do not think that we will ever have a successful Israeli state until we have a successful Palestinian state.”
The UN Special Rapporteur
However, a viable Palestinian state seems distant. UN Special Rapporteur John Dugard, in his recent report (29 January 2007), gives a dark picture of the situation. He describes Gaza as an isolated territory where Israel controls all contacts with the surrounding world; he sees the West Bank as more cut off and disconnected every day, by the wall, by the checkpoints, the Israeli settlements and the Israeli roads that only settlers can use.
An EAs reflection
Israel is now building tunnels so that the sliced up Palestinian land will have some connection between its various pieces. But can you achieve a viable state consisting of disconnected pieces of land linked with tunnels? I try to imagine Swedish towns linked together with tunnels while other people with other laws and other political leadership travel above us on roads that only they can use. It does not come easily.
Protests against the building of the wall continue in Umm Salamone. We EAs go there every Friday where the demonstrations gather hundreds of people – at the same time as the bulldozers are working full speed. We also visit other Palestinian villages affected by the building of the wall – such as Al Walaja that is one of the villages that will be totally walled in.
So many facts and figures are going around in my head that everything seems a bit blurry. I do not get much wiser from all the maps that we look at, as maps of the Middle East not only map the reality on the ground but also are something very political. The border between Israel and the West Bank, the so called “the green line”, is erased on most of the Israeli maps we see – the West Bank appears as part of Israel. Some Palestinian maps only name the main cities and not Israel or Palestine; it is difficult to label Palestine when Gaza and the West Bank are separated. Biblical maps differ again (Galilee, Judea, Samaria, Philistia, Phoenicia, Decapolis, and Negev).
Despite all the maps, it is not easy to keep track of the history. When we look out over the beautiful valley from Ata’s house in Al Walaja we can get a glimpse of the railway track running between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. We ask Ata if Israel built the railway but he tells us that it was built in the nineteen century during the Ottoman times. Traits from different historical epochs overlap and at times, there is even some ancient Roman amphitheatre emerging in the landscape. In a way it is a comfort to see Roman ruins. The histories pages turn and things changes. Maps must constantly be redrawn – and walls eventually fall.
EA Elisabeth Miescher (Switzerland) speaks to a fellow grandmother at Um Salamone on Mothers Day.
Photo: Kristina Hellqvist.
