The price tag

No doubt the summer sales are in full swing with everyone looking for bargains. The "festival of shopping" in Nablus is also drawing the crowds. Not that the people of Yanoun, just 12 kms away, are very excited about the Nablus shopping bonanza. Their economic circumstances make a shopping trip to Nablus generally beyond their reach. Many of the children of Yanoun have never been to Nablus and many of its adult residents, even the few with cars, have not been there for many years. This is especially true of the women, the very ones you would expect to enjoy some retail therapy. While lack of resources is one reason why the Yanoun villagers frequently do not venture further than Aqraba, a small town 4 kms away, the constraints of a repressive occupation are an even greater obstacle.

Nablus should be the centre of life for all the villages and small towns in this northern section of the West Bank. It also has the biggest and most prestigious university of the West Bank, (20,000 students.) Its hospitals and clinics provide medical services for all those within a 30 km radius of the city and its markets and shops are the major outlets for locally grown produce. A city noted for its strong opposition to the occupation it has incurred the very heavy hand of Israeli oppression as the IDF attempts to eradicate all "unrest." In addition to its frequent incursions into Nablus one of the IDF's major control tools was the encirclement and isolation of the city, thus making it all but impossible for those inside to leave. For those wanting to visit Nablus the process was equally difficult and once in they knew they may not be able to leave or may spend hours waiting at Huwwara checkpoint before being able to return home.

The difficulties of trying to pass through the Huwwara checkpoint proved an effective deterrent. Only those who really had to go to Nablus to work,  to attend a clinic, to receive hospital treatment or to attend university were prepared to endure the delay, the unpredictability and the humiliation of even attempting it. Therefore, families separated by the checkpoint rarely if ever paid each other a social visit. Shopping in Nablus for the villagers beyond the checkpoint became too much of a challenge and people's experience of the checkpoint when they had to use it for essential travel, something they never wanted to repeat.     

In my discussions with villagers of Yanoun and the surrounding area I have been told of Palestinians detained for hours at Huwwara, of mothers giving birth at the checkpoint as they were kept waiting to get to the hospital, of those who stood in the sun for hours waiting to be "processed" and of being humiliated just for being a Palestinian.   

Huwwara checkpoint is still there but progress through is much easier. While I was on duty there two weeks ago I was approached by a soldier very keen to tell me the pedestrian terminal was closing the next day. "Are the soldiers leaving?” I asked. “No” he replied somewhat surprised at my question, “we will still check 'suspect cars.'  But you see” he boasted “things are moving freely.” True, passengers can now stay in the cars and on the buses as they go through Huwwara, they do not need to get out and go through the pedestrian terminal as the soldier indicated. Checks on cars, lorries and buses  and their occupants are random and the delays are generally five to ten minutes, not hours. Progress? Perhaps, certainly those who have to pass through Huwwara are relieved that life is less unbearable but the scars of abuse suffered at Huwwara are still very vivid in the minds of those who endured them and there are few signs the healing process has begun. The villagers of Yanoun, especially the women folk, do not make "unnecessary" trips to Nablus. The recent memories of trying to get there are too painful, their confidence eroded and their determination to resist suppressed. This is a depressing conclusion. It indicates the success of the Israeli tactics in maintaining the occupation. Regrettably, it is a position held by much better informed observers than me. Jonathan Cook in his recent book Disappearing Palestine writes:       

"Palestine is fast disappearing. Over many decades Israel has developed and refined policies to disperse, imprison and impoverish the Palestinian people in a relentless effort to destroy them as a nation. It has industrialised Palestinian despair through ever more sophisticated systems of curfews, checkpoints, walls, permits and land grabs. It has transformed the West Bank and Gaza into laboratories for testing the infrastructure of confinement, creating a lucrative 'defence' industry by pioneering technologies needed for crowd control, surveillance, collective punishment and urban warfare."¹

Occupation has a high price tag and it is paid for most acutely by the ordinary Palestinian men, women and children who merely ask for the possibility to live their daily lives free from the "infrastructure of confinement."²