Christmas in a tent
We are sitting in a tent in Al Walaja. It is a village just outside Bethlehem. The tent is quite big but worn, and the grey canvas won’t keep the rain out. Between two small wooden beds the ground is covered with tarpaulin sheets. Some basic kitchen appliances are stacked on a table in the corner and there are a few plastic chairs to sit on. This is the new home of the Sahem family.
Their house is gone. On the 12th of December, the bulldozers came with four jeeps and twenty soldiers from the Israeli army. The house was to be demolished and the family given 45 minutes to pack up their belongings and move out with their furniture. Then the bulldozers reduced their home to a pile of rubble.
The whole operation did not take more than half an hour. Half an hour to demolish a house. Half an hour to erase hundreds of hours of work. Half an hour to make five people homeless. Four of them are sitting here in the tent with us. Mother, father, and two sons. The have put up the tent next to the destroyed house. This is their land.
The father, Munthe, is 51 years old but could easily be ten years older. His olive skinned face is worn. Big worker’s hands rests on his knees. Not much use for them these days, work is hard to find. Twelve-year-old Mohammed sits on the bed with his mothers arm around his shoulder. He smiles shyly to the strangers that are visiting but his face looks tired. His mum says he does not sleep well at night; he has nightmares about soldiers coming to destroy his home.
I ask them what they will do now. Munthe shrugs his shoulders, “What will I do now, tonight, tomorrow? What about the house, what about the future, what about this, what about that? I hate these questions, I have no answers. No money, no possibilities, no answers. The house was all we had; now we have nothing”.
It is not the first time the Israeli army has destroyed Sahem’s house. They came a year ago and levelled their first house to the ground. The ‘security’ wall is going through Al Walaja and their house is in its way. Twenty other houses have been demolished in the village and there are warrants to destroy eighteen more. The last time people in the village came together and rebuilt Sahem’s home. That won’t happen this time. They can’t fight the Israeli bureaucracy and army again. They have given up.
On our way out of the village, we see new and half-built houses in the Israeli settlement Har Gilo right next to Al Walaja. Palestinian houses are being torn down and Israeli houses erected. Since 1967, more than 12,000 Palestinian homes have been smashed to rubble while new Israeli houses have been built to accommodate the more than 400,000 Israeli settlers that have moved in to the occupied Palestinian land. It is hard not to call it ethnic cleansing.
Photo by Anna Ljung
