Saturday, July 5, 2008

Jerusalem Studies

On Saturday morning, the Centre for Jerusalem Studies (http://www.jerusalem-studies.alquds.edu), in collaboration with the UN organisation OCHA (Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs), had organised a bus tour around Jerusalem called ‘The Annexation Wall in and around Jerusalem’. A Palestinian friend in Copenhagen had sent me an email about the tour and Samar had made sure that we’d got a place on the bus, some of the last available. Samar knew Hudda who was one of the organisers from the Centre for Jerusalem Studies and the University in Abu Dis.

The tour would start out from OCHA and everyone who was taking part in the tour gathered together in a meeting room there where Jeff, a very British man, began to describe at length the legal and geographical conditions around the Wall. As a representative of the UN he was very careful about the way he spoke about things. He also didn’t allow anyone to videotape his presentation. OCHA’s main task is to map out the conditions as they are, the ‘facts on the ground’ as they call it here. The organisation had a large amount of very detailed maps of the course of the Wall, checkpoints, closed zones, sectioned roads, settlements, etc. Everything was very objective but it was also very, very depressing to see it all laid out across a map. He described how the international community sees the conditions in Israel/Palestine and made it clear that the part of the Wall that is running through the West Bank is illegal under international law. If Israel had decided to erect the Wall on its own territory or on the Green line, it would be legal. The problem was that only 20% of the Wall was on the Green Line and the rest lay deep inside the occupied territories. Jeff then made it clear that permanent settlements in the occupied territories are illegal unless they have a security function; housing for soldiers or security personal would make them legal. The annexing of East Jerusalem in 1980 and the merging of East and West Jerusalem in one large municipality isn’t recognised by the international community who take the Green Line to be the legitimate border. In this way, he calmly recounted the series of breaches to international law that the Israeli state is guilty of. He was very civil servant-like and wouldn’t comment on questions of a more political nature. For example, one of the participants asked how, on the one hand, the international community does not recognise the settlements even though many of them were financed by the US. He shook his head to express that he knew very well that this was the case and said that he only worked with the ‘facts on the ground’ and couldn’t comment on political issues.

After the more general historical introduction from 1948 forward, Jeff then went through the course of the Wall around East Jerusalem. The map he took us through can be downloaded from OCHA’s website (http://www.ochaopt.org/documents/EastJerusalem_closure_March07.pdf). The Wall in East Jerusalem initially follows the border that Israel drew up in 1980 when they annexed Jerusalem’s Old City and a large area east of the city. Changes have been made to the annexed area in connection with the construction of the Wall as the construction was initiated in 2002. As a result of the Wall, areas with a majority of Palestinians living in them have now been excluded from the city and been made into part of the West Bank. Amongst other places, this includes the Shufat Refugee Camp that used to be a part of East Jerusalem but now, with the erection of the Wall, lies as a pocket cut out of the Jerusalem municipality. At the same time it’s planned that the Wall will cordon off a large area far east of Jerusalem that’s more than half way to Jericho and the Dead Sea. This vast area is called E1 and there is already a large settlement there, Ma’n Adumim. However, international pressure against Israel has meant that they are still hesitant to expand the settlement further and so a large area inside the Wall now lies empty awaiting future Israeli development. Jeff told us, though, that a rich American Jew had just bought and built a large police station ‘in the middle of nowhere’ with a large four lane access road. You can ask yourself, then, what that might be the beginning of, Jeff said rhetorically. E1 literally divides the West Bank into a North and a South. The Wall around this area is not yet finished and is still being built.

As the Wall snakes and twists and turns its way up and down, in and out in order to exclude Palestinian towns and include Israeli settlements, it’s clear that a very complicated map is being drawn around Jerusalem. This means that several Palestinian villages north of Jerusalem have been entirely enclosed and surrounded by the Wall. When this happens, the Israelis build the so-called ‘fabric of life’ roads that are fenced on both sides or are in tunnels leading through areas controlled by the Israelis in order to connect the secluded Palestinian areas to the rest of the West Bank. This means that although these villages are only a few kilometres from Jerusalem the population has no access to the holy city with its religious monuments and have to travel all the way to Ramallah if they want, for example, to go to the cinema or to buy necessities. At the same time, this seclusion leads to the killing of agriculture and business life in these areas and makes life in these villages generally more and more unbearable for the inhabitants. In addition to this, the Israelis can close off the thoroughfares whenever they feel like it. Jeff described a future scenario where the border that the Wall defines becomes the national border of Israel — something which would also, of course, be a breach of international law. In this way, the Palestinian populations who live in Jerusalem and have Jerusalem ID but who have been cut off by the Wall will probably be forced to choose to either move across the Wall or lose their Jerusalem ID. This is probably what will happen to the people who live, for example, in the Shufat camp.

People who live outside of the Wall on the West Bank don’t even have access to Jerusalem unless they can gain permission from the Israeli officials. This has a wide effect and Jeff explained how the Wall was precisely placed in a way that East Jerusalem’s six hospitals lay on the Israeli side of the Wall. In this way, if you live outside of the Wall and need medical attention, you first have to gain permission from the military before you can get treated. This makes it very difficult, especially in acute cases. For example, Samira, who I had visited in Bethlehem some weeks ago, told me about the day when her father had had a stroke and how she’d called for an ambulance that had to then wait on the other side of the checkpoint. She had driven him in her car and sped through the checkpoint and up to the ambulance herself. She said that the only reason the soldiers hadn’t opened fire at her was because she was a woman and had been screaming out of the car window. Her father had survived the stroke but there were many more tragic stories where Palestinians have died at checkpoints. Between September 2000 and October 2004, 61 women were forced to give birth at checkpoints and 36 of those births had been stillborn; statistics such as these put the Palestinian condition in perspective. Jeff was a man of facts and simply stated that one needs a permit if one wants to go to the hospital.

Outside there was a bus waiting for us. Here Hudda from Jerusalem Studies took over. Hudda is Palestinian and didn’t need to restrict herself when describing the situation and she didn’t hold back when voicing her observations. She started by explaining that the Wall has been given many names but she prefers to call it the Annexation Wall because that is exactly what the Wall is doing: it is encircling and annexing Palestinian land. To start with we drove to the Shufat Refugee Camp. We could see it from a high point on the Israeli side of the Wall where we had stopped. The Wall ran in a nice curve around a densely populated area with small square houses in many layers on top of each other. The camp has been there since the beginning of the 1950s and consists of brick houses. The roads in the camp were mainly gravel. On the other side of the Wall, we could see the settlement of Pisgat Ze’ev, located high above, with nice new asphalt roads and neatly planned buildings. Jeff said that the inhabitants of the two areas, Shufat and Pisgat Ze’ev, paid the same amount of council taxes but that in the settlement there were several public facilities you wouldn’t find in the refugee camp, such as preschools for example. There was no secondary school in the camp either which was why many of the school children had to pass through the checkpoint to go to school every morning. Often the Israelis closed the checkpoint and so there wouldn’t be any school on that day. In a similar manner, he sketched out a whole series of differences concerning health and infrastructure in the living conditions between the refugee camp and the settlement — and there was big gap between the quality of life in the camp and in the settlement, even though, on paper, both were a part of the same municipality.

The tour ended near the August Victoria Hospital on the Mount of Olives from where we had an incredible view over East Jerusalem and could see all the way to the Dead Sea in the East. From here we could also see the extensive E1 area that is being surrounded by the Wall. As was customary amongst the Palestinians, lots of delicious food suddenly appeared: humus, pita bread, cheese, tomato salad and fresh fruit. Jeff, at a small distance from this abundance, continued explaining to a small group of people some more about ‘the facts on the ground’. Amongst other things, he talked about the Palestinian villages that had been squeezed between the Green Line and the Wall up north where the inhabitants were stuck between a rock and a hard place.

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