Last update - 02:56 20/06/2003
The Zionist dream fulfilled
By Uzi Benziman
Who is Dvir Kahana? This writer managed to have a brief phone conversation with him the other day, but Kahana cut it short, saying he was in the middle of a meeting. Repeated attempts to contact him got no further than the answering machine. Dvir Kahana is key to the following story, but the gist of it may be told even without his cooperation.
About a month and a half ago, a man going by the name of Dvir Kahana appeared in Mazmoriya, which is between Jerusalem and Beit Sahur. Mazmoriya is the Roman name of the area upon which a small village called Na'man (population 250, with 25 families) was founded 150 years ago. The first residents, from the Ta'amra clan, lived in caves and tents, but permanent structures were added in the 1920s. After the Six-Day War, the village was ostensibly annexed within the borders of the Jerusalem Municipality, but the seeds of the first paradox were planted at the same time: Since the village was so tiny, all of its residents were registered under the address of the mukhtar, who lived in the next village, which was not included within the boundaries of unified Jerusalem.
In 1992, 25 years after the annexation of East Jerusalem, residents of Na'man were instructed to convert their blue identity cards (indicating Israeli residency) to orange ones. Their children (about 70 in number) were no longer eligible to attend Jerusalem municipal schools in nearby Umm Tuba; since then, they've had to attend school in Beit Sahur or Bethlehem. The Jerusalem Municipality cut off the water supply to Na'man, but when the village got hooked up to the PA's water system, the Israeli authorities found ways to wreck the pipes.
Bezeq does not connect them to the Israeli telephone system, but when telephone poles were erected to connect them to the PA's phone system, Israel saw to it that the poles were knocked down. The Jerusalem Municipality sued village resident Nidal Darawi for an illegal building addition, but he was unable to make it to court because he did not have a blue Israeli ID card. Because of his failure to appear, he was classified as a "wanted man" - which caused him to be stopped at the checkpoint when he tried to get to court for another scheduled appearance. The way things are going, Na'man looks to become the fulfillment of the Zionist dream of annexing a piece of "empty" land.
Life was already hard for the villagers before the outbreak of the intifada. Then they discovered that their unique status brought with it another cost: The roads to the village from Jerusalem were blocked with impassable dirt barriers. The only way to get there now is on foot. Things only got worse when they saw that the separation fence under construction on the outskirts of the village is being built in such a way that it will cut them off from Jerusalem as well as from Palestinian territory. No gates are planned for this section of the fence, which means the residents of Na'man will eventually be trapped within a veritable ghetto. The fence will also divide another nearby village from its cemetery. And as if that wasn't enough, it looks like the road being paved between the settlement of Nokdim and the Har Homa neighborhood will have to go through some of Na'man's farmland.
Dvir Kahana came to Na'man in late March to try to resolve the paradoxes.
The annexation paradox
According to Na'man residents, Dvir Kahana told them he was there on behalf of the Defense Ministry, the Housing Ministry and the Moriah company (the Jerusalem Municipality's development company) and explained that the village was due to be evacuated. He was accompanied by four Border Police officers and started writing down the names and ID numbers of the village's homeowners. The residents say he told them that the separation fence will hem them in on all sides, and as they are officially residents of the PA, they will have to move into its territory. They say he mentioned in passing that he heard Israel was going to expel them. In a second meeting about two weeks after that, Kahana pulled out what he said was the evacuation decree and offered $25,000 for every house that was willingly vacated.
The main explanation he gave them was that they were residing illegally on an open, green space belonging to the city of Jerusalem, in an area where construction was not permitted. He was not dissuaded by all of the documentation they showed him attesting to the village's continuous presence in this location for 150 years (including some 80-year-old houses). He said he was willing to compensate anyone living in a house built before 1992 (when the Jerusalem Municipality imposed a building freeze on the village), but not anyone who violated the law by building a house after that.
When they protested and spoke of their attachment to their land, Kahana suggested they sell their land to Palestinian straw men, with whom he would subsequently deal.
For whom does Dvir Kahana work? Two days ago, the Defense Ministry insisted that he does not work for them. The Housing Ministry also said it has no one by that name on its roster of employees. Apparently, he was sent by a company that received a concession from the Housing Ministry to operate in the Mazmoriya area. It's not clear how he came by the Border Police escort for his two visits to the village. In any case, he managed to deeply worry the village elders and residents. Yusuf Darawi, a contractor who has been unemployed for some time due to the situation, and his cousin Jamal Darawi, a clerk for the PA in Ramallah, were little children in 1967. They grew up amid all the absurdities that define the village's life. And it's not just a matter of bureaucratic distinctions; it's all translated into daily hardships that make life exceedingly difficult and imperil their ability to keep living in their place of birth.
Ta'ayush, an organization for Jewish-Arab coexistence, which is trying to help their cause, describes the Israeli actions here as "quiet transfer."
B'Tselem - the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Territories, which is also investigating the matter, says the designated route of the separation fence in the Mazmoriya area is a flagrant example of "Israel's systematic disregard for the Palestinians' human rights."
The lessons of this story are also paradoxical: If you were to ask Na'man residents privately which they would prefer - an orange ID card or a blue one - many would probably choose to be annexed to Jerusalem and not to the PA; and even when Israel takes a clearly defensive step - building a fence - along the municipal boundaries of (united) Jerusalem, it ends up perpetrating mind-boggling acts of injustice and foolishness.
