Newsletter: Vol. 9. Iss. 2
15 December 2009
Resistance in Bethlehem's
Villages
Ellen Cantarow
Christmas is coming. My e-mail has returned at least one plea to help Bethlehem – Christ’s birthplace crucified by Israel’s segregation wall; 25 foot-high concrete punctuated by militarized watch towers surrounds the entire town. PEACE BE WITH YOU reads a huge legend on the wall without (apparently) the slightest trace of irony; stenciled in English. Hebrew, and Arabic, it’s signed, ISRAELI MINISTRY OF TOURISM.
What lies beyond Bethlehem – the Bethlehem province or “governate,” – is equally shocking, though invisible to the casual visitor. According to a May, 2009, UN report, Bethlehem governate’s total land mass is 660 square kilometers, but only 13 per cent remains for Palestinians to use. The rest has vanished under the Greater Israel’s ever-expanding colonies and “outposts”; its ever-lengthening wall (declared illegal in 2004 by the International Court of Justice: Israel and its US backer have simply ignored the ruling); and Israel’s designation of most of Bethlehem’s region as “Area C”. (The Oslo Accords diced the West Bank into Areas “A” -- Palestinian Authority (PA) rule; “B” –PA and Israel joint rule; and “C” – Israeli rule. Area C is 60 per cent of the West Bank).
Palestine’s Stop the Wall campaign, launched in 2002, has been waging
nonviolent resistance here to retain and regain land – weekly demonstrations
in the village Al Mas’ara, land-reclamation in other villages (clearing
stones, preparing the land for planting, petitioning the Palestinian Ministry
of Agriculture for supplies and trees), and rallying a population exhausted
by over three decades of “peace process” that has meant only land-theft
for the Palestinians.
Stop the Wall was launched by activists like 65-year-old Sharif Omar Khalid
whose roots go back to Palestine’s Land Defense Committee (a nonviolent
movement begun in 1980), and younger activists who cut their teeth organizing
the first Intifada (1987-1990). 46-year-old Jamal Juma, the Campaign’s
coordinator, says that when Israel began building the wall in 2002, he and
other activists realized an unprecedented danger.
“We saw that this was a huge political project,” he commented this past October. “The whole country [Palestine] was under siege, all the villages . . . We [began] building a movement against the wall”. The campaign built popular committees in villages menaced by the wall. From 52 of these in 2005 it has consolidated into ten committees, governing a region (the Bethlehem region is one). The campaign can’t possibly cover the entire Palestinian population so it focuses on “hot spots” – places where the wall intrudes or is about to be extended, and land where settlers and soldiers harass villagers.
In a field near the village Artas, south of Bethlehem, stands a mammoth rectangle of cement surrounding two giant circles of piping. This was to be an Israeli sewage dump, part of a waste project servicing the Israeli colony Efrat and neighbor-colonies to Bethlehem’s south and west. Stop the Wall and Artas villagers are litigating against the sewer in Israel’s Supreme Court. The case is still pending.
60 apricot trees once grew where the cement and pipe sections now rise. They were on a trajectory leading straight through Artas’s 182-dunam green belt (a dunam is a little over a quarter-acre). Over twenty kinds of vegetables flourish in this rich agricultural matrix. Abu Swayk said it would all be destroyed by the sewage dump, the run-off cascading down and permeating the fertile land. As it stands, the sewage housing seems just a nibble into a small plot of land. But think: Israel wants to dump the colonists’ excrement where people once raised crops for their living. Moreover, since 1967 such “small” confiscations have been a motor force driving the Greater Israel – the Jewish state’s continuous expansion beyond its borders.
I remember the West Bank in the 80s when I reported here regularly. The landscape was Mediterranean, rippling with dry-wall terracing; olive trees’ silvery leaves billowed in the wind; fruit and nut trees and grape arbors etched darker greens against the grey of stones and taupe colors of earth. You could still see old Arab architecture in West Bank villages – beautiful pale stone with rounded arches over doors and windows; vaulted ceilings within homes. There were scattered colonies, but none of the sprawling suburbs and whole cities that slice and dice the region now.
Returning here in 2002 after a fourteen-year absence was like waking up in another country. The hills were freighted with bland, California-style urban sprawl buttressed by a vast prison network for containing the natives whose presence so annoys the Greater Israel -- the wall in its early forms, huge holding-pens called “checkpoints,” mazes of other barriers, and Jewish-only super-highways that made me feel I was somewhere in New Jersey. The state of the villages was also a shock: Israel almost never lets Palestinians build beyond their urban limits, so Palestinian expansion can only be vertical. New, Palestinian multi-storey buildings, so different from the traditional one-to-two-storey village architecture, are as faceless – ugly, even - as the colonies.
