Jericho

On Thursday I said goodbye to Joni, Ludmi, Oz and Ben, who were as wonderfully warm and welcoming as Joni's family in Buenos Aires always has been. I spent the day doing a tour of the Old City of Jerusalem, and in the evening set out on my own to find something to eat. The Old City is one of those places that travel guides say you can "lose yourself in its timeless charm", and indeed I did get completely lost within 5 minutes. It took about half an hour to finally get out of the maze, as vendors rattled along the cobblestones with trolleys, yelling in Arabic and Hebrew, in the last frenetic burst of activity for the day. By the time I figured out where I was again, the last of them had evaporated into dark doorways and little lanes, the shops were all shuttered and the alleyways were eerily quiet. I almost died of a heart attack when a couple of kids jumped out from behind an archway to chase each other down the echoing steps, followed by a stream of whooping seven to ten year olds. At night time the Old City turns into the world's most intrepid, labrinthine playground. The child in me leapt excitedly after them and I had to hastily catch up with him to recover myself.



As soon as we came out of the tunnel I felt the difference. I was jammed into the back of a van full of Palestinian school kids, excitedly calling out words in English and giggling shyly. Angela, an Israeli peace activist, had invited me to accompany her on a trip to Jericho in the West Bank, where she wanted to take a look at some land for sale, and talk to Eid Abu Khamis, a representative of a Bedouin settlement under threat of eviction. In Israel even the most minor rules are strictly enforced. People stand at the traffic light waiting for the little man to turn green before crossing the street, even if there are no cars coming for miles in either direction. A couple of times I've unthinkingly walked across and received nervous stares from people waiting on the other side, glancing over their shoulders to check for a watching police car. At the collection of shops and markets at the top of the hill on the Palestinian side of the border, people cycle the wrong way down the street, cars cut each other off, hooting horns, driving over the median strip to narrowly miss pedestrians who leap out of the way, screaming insults over their shoulders. It's like taking a deep breath of fresh air.



We jumped out of one van and into another, then sat waiting for it to fill up. A friend of Angela's from the Bedouin settlement walked by, and they greeted warmly as she got in next to me. Presently we took off down the hill, flying a hundred metres past where she had to get off before the driver could get control of the van. Angela spoke to him in Arabic, and he agreed to take us past the centre of Jericho, to a place known as bananaland where the property she's interested in is located. We got out and picked our way down the gravelly slope into fields of bananas and cauliflour, then up the other side into the back of someone's house. The owner came out and smiled broadly, waving us through and opening the gate on the other side, then closing it behind us to stop the goats getting out. As we gasped up the steep hill kids came out of their houses to shout out greetings in English, and their parents waved and called Salaam Aleikum. We poked around the dusty, flat patch that had been cleared for building, and looked up at the caves cut into the cliff above, then made our way down to a road running back into down. Angela flagged down a taxi that was driving past. The driver, Nasser, agreed the price then backed up the road and drove us to his house further up the hill. He yelled something at his kids who scurried off, chatting to us in broken English until they returned with something in a plastic bag. On the way into town he saw his sister-in-law and stopped to say hello, lifting her baby through the window and holding him up to us in the back seat as he gurgled and smiled beatifically.



Nasser took us back up the highway towards Jerusalem, pulling up at a small settlement. We clambered over the waist high barrier, and were immediately set upon by a group of excitable children, who trailed us up the small slope to the shack where Eid Abu Khamis lives with his family. We sat on thin mattresses and cushions on the floor, and he and Angela spoke in a mix of Hebrew and Arabic, filling each other in on the latest developments in the community's struggle to maintain their existence. High on the hill overlooking the ramshackle Bedouin village is an Israeli settlement of clean, modern buildings. Eid has documents showing that the land on which his village lies is owned by Palestinians, who have made no protest against his family's presence there. However the Israeli army has served them an eviction notice, saying they are there illegally. The army has not served any eviction notice to the Jewish settlement on the top of the hill, which was also built on Palestinian land, and indeed the settlement is slated for expansion.



The army's strategy is to place settlements all across the West Bank, while simultaneously evicting Bedouin and Palestinians. The land is claimed for nebulously defined security reasons, eviction notices are served, and then people are removed by force if they don't respond to threats and offers of compensation. While legal battles are going on, the army employs other means to make evictees lives difficult. For three years it has stopped granting work permits to anyone in Eid's village, and recently it moved a sewage vent from down in the valley below to a very specific place in the village: right outside the window of the school.



Israel provides running water, electricity and all the modern day amenities to the settlement on the hill above Eid's village. Instead of offering land inside the settlement to the Bedouin, as it would for Jewish refugees, the government has proposed they move one kilometre from their present position to land next to a garbage dump which independent experts have classified as "unfit for human habitation". Yesterday I went to a press conference by the UN Special Raporteur on Adequate Housing, at which she gave her preliminary findings for Israel and the Occupied Territories. She said that Israel has an admirable history of providing adequate housing to millions of Jewish refugees over decades, and that the question in the case of communities like Eid's is not whether they have a right to adequate housing, it is why the government feels they must be forcibly moved in order to acquire it.



Jericho
The answer is that the government wishes to build settlements in an arc between the biggest Jewish settlement, Ma'ale Adumim, and Jerusalem, cutting a big swathe through the West Bank that will destroy the dream of a Palestinian state.