Last update - 02:17 16/01/2004
Wailing wall
With great speed,
the original low, irrelevant wall is being
replaced in East Jerusalem with a new structure that resembles some
vast mythological dragon. All around are people who thought they'd
already seen everything during the occupation, watching the scene in
disbelief
If Jesus had been born 2,000 years later, he would have had a hard time bringing about the famous miracle of Bethany, in which he bid Lazarus - who had died four days earlier and was buried in a cave, wrapped in shrouds - to "come forth." This conjecture is not based on new information about changes in Jesus' skills, but on the height and impact of the wall that is now being built in the town of Azzariyeh, next to Jerusalem, the Bethany of the New Testament, whose Arabic name derives from the name of Lazarus. The local Palestinians, showing surprising humor in view of the massive barrier that is being erected in front of their homes, joke that the wall would have made it impossible for even Jesus to get to the place.
And even if Jesus would have found passage problematic, it's easy to understand how flesh-and-blood Palestinians feel in the face of the "obstacle" that is being built in front of their eyes - a concrete wall, 8 meters high, made of slabs that are connected to one another. There are many objections to the Israeli use of the word "obstacle," as though it were a euphemism to avoid the open use of the word "wall." In fact, though, "obstacle" is an extraordinarily accurate word in this case. A wall is just a wall, but this threatening concrete monster is rapidly becoming a true obstacle in every sphere of life.
According to a study by the United Nations Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), which is based in East Jerusalem, the wall in this area will disrupt not only the mobility of the Palestinians, but also their access to education and health services, and sources of livelihood - all basic, existential needs that the Fourth Geneva Convention is intended to protect and ensure. The opposition of OCHA to the fence is not all-inclusive; it is based on the route of the fence and its infringement of these basic human rights.
Up to their noses
On Monday of this week four heads were looking out of a window on the second floor of a residential building in the town of Abu Dis, which abuts on the Old City of Jerusalem to the east. They watched with astonishment as the slabs of the wall were connected to one another, each new piece bringing the wall closer to the very tip of their nose, like some sort of looming mythological dragon.
The heads belong to four students who attend Al-Quds University, three of them studying nursing, the fourth, political science. All four are from the West Bank, two from the Tul Karm area, the other two from Hebron. Like young people everywhere, they sought not only higher education, but also independence away from home in the big city; and, like other Muslims, they wanted to be close to the mosque in Jerusalem.
Instead, they got the fence in their face, two meters from the entrance to their house. It started off as a low fence, 2.5 meters tall. Even then, when it was first to be built, three months ago, it was a visual blight, but that, it turns out, wasn't the end. Many photographs documented local residents, including elderly people and children, climbing over that nascent version of the wall.
This week it grew taller. In the meantime the four are imprisoned in their residence, without electricity - which was cut off because of the construction - and subjected to ear-splitting noise. They can't even leave their apartment, because of the roadblocks that have been set up everywhere in order to protect the wall.
"I have already missed an important exam in English because of this," says Mohammed Lutfi Huseen, who was born in Kuwait, where his father teaches English, and returned here alone three years ago. "This is not what I dreamed about," he adds with an embarrassed smile.
Now Huseen is watching as the ineffective low wall is being transformed into a high wall. The forklifts, the bulldozers, the generator that was brought in so the work could continue at night - they are all back. With a speed uncharacteristic of Israel the irrelevant wall is being uprooted and replaced with the new structure. All around are people who thought they had already seen everything in the course of the occupation, and are watching the scene in disbelief.
"They have killed my business," says Hassan Ekermawi, who has a grocery store in the gas station that has now become a construction site. "Before this, people used to come to buy from Abu Dis, from Azzariyeh, from the eastern part of Sawahra. It's all one unit of Jerusalem, you know. Now no one comes."
The grocery store will, in fact, remain on the Jerusalem side, but the customers will be on the other side, behind the wall. "Do you know what the strangest thing about this story is?" he asks and replies himself, "that we, the Jerusalem Palestinians, are paying for this whole project with our taxes, with the cut in my father's old-age pension. I am not talking about politics now, I am talking about life."
About 10 meters away, on the other side of the road along which the wall is being built, all the stores are closed. It's hard to avoid wondering who decided that the Jerusalem shop owner on the right side of the road is so much friendlier to Israel than his colleague on the left side, which will now become "territories."
Now six 14-year-old students arrive at the area of the wall. They are making their way from their school in Jerusalem to their homes in Azzariyeh. They all have Jerusalem residence cards, but they live in the territories. They know that this is probably the last time they will be able to do this route on foot, to jump over the low wall and get home safely. At the speed with which the work is being carried out, with an incentive of NIS 500 for night work per worker, it's likely that their route will be blocked by a high wall within a day or two.
They are asked what they think will happen. "Our parents will try to rent houses in East Jerusalem," they say. This, too, is part of the weird logic in this story. The implicit intention of the route chosen for the fence - which can be summed up by saying that Israel will get as much land as possible and the Palestinians as little as possible - doesn't always work in reality. According to OCHA, about 15 percent of the 11,000 residents of Abu Dis and about a quarter of the 16,000 residents of Azzariyeh have Jerusalem ID cards. Some of them, those who can afford to pay the rocketing prices of the apartments in East Jerusalem, where demand has soared due to the wall, are moving to the other side.
Defeated logic
If the wall has any demographic logic, it is defeated by events on the ground. One of the speakers in a symposium about the wall that was held this week at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute was Terry Bulata, principal of the New Generation School in Abu Dis. She has a Jerusalem ID card, though her husband has a "territories" card. "If the idea was to make life hard for us with the wall, so that we will leave, that is not about to happen," she says. "We have learned the lesson of 1948: We are not going anywhere."
Nor is Ibrahim Qiresh going anywhere, though he could if he wants. Twelve years ago he moved with his wife and their 9 children from Wadi Joz in East Jerusalem to Azzariyeh, where prices were cheaper. He built his home on a steep hill in the town, which is a suburb of Jerusalem, and then rebuilt it after it was demolished by order of the municipality. A finely wrought window adorning the facade of the house is the professional pride of Qiresh, a metalworker who counts many Israelis, including artists, among his friends.
In the past month a 9-meter-high wall has arisen in front of Qiresh's house, cutting him off from the lovely view of the slopes of the Mount of Olives. In his workshop, where he also has a large dovecote - he raises the birds for pleasure, explaining, "I can't bring myself to slaughter them for food" - he says that until now his life was pretty orderly, even if by moving he lost his entitlement to National Insurance Institute child allowances and to Kupat Holim health maintenance organization services for himself. An Israeli friend helped him obtain private health insurance, as though he were a foreign resident.
"It's as though I am living abroad," he guffaws. Still, the Jerusalem residency card afforded him a certain mobility, and clients would come from Tel Aviv to order special window frames. In the course of the intifada, with its prolonged closures and curfews, he lost his livelihood, and now his life is about to be ruined, too. Even now, with the wall only in the construction stage, the Jerusalem card, which was once an asset, has become a liability. Whenever he arrives at a checkpoint, or tries to get home on foot via the Mount of Olives in order to bypass checkpoints, he is told, "Go back to Jerusalem."
"I don't know what is going to happen now, with the wall," he says. "I live in Palestine, but the police keep sending me back to Jerusalem. But I can't go back to Jerusalem. I tried, but even the simplest apartment there costs at least $500 a month. I haven't got that. When the wall is completely finished, I will close the workshop. We will be in a prison. What can we do. When God brings a person into the world, he calculates his life."
Devastating effects
However, other elements are also intervening in that calculation. While we were conversing, a curfew was suddenly imposed on Azzariyeh. According to the official version, there was a "serious security problem"; according to the Palestinian version, the curfew was intended to help get the wall built faster.
Within minutes, the town, once a favored shopping area for Jerusalem's Jews, too, becomes a ghost town. The gates of the shops are slammed shut, people disappear into their homes. From the area next to the high wall, Border Policemen in a Jeep can be seen shooing pedestrians from the bottom of the Mount of Olives toward Azzariyeh. One of them was a young mother who was holding an infant newly born at Makassed Hospital on the Mount of Olives; another was an elderly woman who was returning home from an examination after open-heart surgery. She could barely trudge through the muddy ground, and was assisted by men who saw her plight.
But even life as an extreme sport will change once the wall is in place. The residents of Azzariyeh will be cut off not only from their natural attachment to Jerusalem, but also from the hospital that serves them. "Maybe we will die," a women from Azzariyeh says with bizarre merriment as she walks home from a visit to her brother, who has undergone a serious operation at Makassed.
But even the right to transit by foot, which is still possible, is ultimately not going to help 10-year-old Abdullah Iyyad. He was born with broken bones in his legs. When he was a year old, his family used all its resources to spend four years in Philadelphia, where there is a children's hospital that specializes in surgery of this kind. The family returned to Azzariyeh 5 years ago. Abdullah, wheelchair-ridden, was sent to a special school, which is also a treatment center, on the Mount of Olives. Before the wall - people here divide their lives into "before" and "after" - Adnan Iyyad, Abdullah's father, brought his son to a taxi that waited every morning by the gas station at the entrance to Azzariyeh, lifted him out of the wheelchair and placed him in the cab, which had yellow (Israeli) license plates. Within three minutes the boy was in school.
Now it's a different story. The road from the gas station is blocked and the taxi has to take a long roundabout route via the Ma'aleh Adumim road to the Mount of Olives. Instead of NIS 15, the cost of the trip before, Abdullah's father now has to pay NIS 80 every day to get his son to school. He himself can't drive the boy, because he doesn't have an entry permit for Jerusalem. Because of the steep expenses, the family doesn't have the money to pay for Abdullah's physiotherapy, which costs NIS 30 per treatment, or for gas to heat the house. The wall and the innumerable checkpoints have also had a devastating effect on the livelihood of Adnan Iyyad: Residents of Jerusalem no longer bring him their television sets to repair.
The new route is also taking a toll on Abdullah's schooling. Every morning the cab is stuck in traffic jams at the checkpoint, as they wait for the residents of Ma'aleh Adumim - a city east of Jerusalem, in the West Bank - to make their way to work safely. Nearly every day he is late for his first lesson. Taking the approach that everything is relative, Adnan says he envies healthy people who until now could climb over the low fence. After all, it's impossible to lift a wheelchair weighing 75 kilograms over the fence. Until now there was a small gate in the low fence and he was able to carry his son through it, if the soldiers let him. Now the gate is being sealed with concrete and the Iyyad family has a new problem. Like everyone else, they are unable to imagine what life will be like after Azzariyeh is completely sealed off by the wall.
Something of that emerging reality can be seen at the "Container Checkpoint." In the West Bank, Ibrahim Halsa's kiosk (which functions in a container) is at least as famous as the Ha'oman 17 nightclub in West Jerusalem. The reason is that the checkpoint between the Jerusalem village of Sawahra and the twisting road that leads to Bethlehem and effectively connects the northern and southern sections of the West Bank, is named after this kiosk, which is no more than an old hut in which Halsa has sold sweets, Coca-Cola and shoe polish for the past 12 years. Until not long ago, it was situated at the bend in the road and was easily accessible to customers. When the permanent checkpoint was established, Halsa was told to move his kiosk to a different road, where passing cars can't possibly stop, so his already meager income was wiped out. Halsa thus joined the growing number of the poor in the West Bank, where unemployment is rampant and which is being abandoned by international aid organizations that are fed up with the unending occupation. After arguing among themselves, the representatives of these organizations reached the conclusion that responsibility lies with the occupier and that by assisting the residents, they were effectively underwriting the occupation.
Sawahra is an integral part of the bloc of villages that includes Azzariyeh and Abu Dis, meaning the "territories," but it is also an integral part of Sawahra, which is in Jerusalem, meaning Israel. Now the wall, which is already under construction here, will divide the two parts of Sawahra, and the entire bloc that will remain in the territories is supposed to shift its urban affinity from Jerusalem to Bethlehem. It sounds simple, but it involves the uprooting of a whole fabric of life. For example, instead of being able to walk four kilometers to Makassed Hospital, those on the West Bank side will have to make a trip of 18 kilometers along a winding trail that is known in Arabic as the "Valley of Fire."
The checkpoint, which brought about endless traffic jams even before the fence sealed the area hermetically, seems to have no logic. If the intention of the fence in the Jerusalem area is to cut off the city from the West Bank, why stick a checkpoint in the heart of what has now become a central road that links the north of the West Bank to the south?
"There is a security event," a grim-faced Border Policeman says, explaining the long line of cars backed up at the place. An ambulance that had tried to make its way through the narrow space on the side was stuck in that traffic jam this week. The driver simply gave up and stopped along the shoulder. In the ambulance was a 7-year-old boy suffering from brain cancer, who was on his way home to a village near Hebron after receiving chemotherapy in Jordan. The boy's father, Faiz Aidah, a graduate of Abu Dis University and a social worker by profession, stepped out of the ambulance.
The chilling calm with which he accepted the situation - the result of a cruel process of adjustment - was harder to take than any outburst of hysteria would have been. Every 20 days he makes this journey with his son, "and it's the same situation every time," he says. Afterward he would explain that it's nevertheless easier to get to Jordan for treatment than to Hadassah University Hospital on nearby Mount Scopus, which entails a route studded with no end of checkpoints.
"The fence around Jerusalem in the east is not separating Israelis from Palestinians, but is separating 200,000 Palestinians, who will remain in Israel, from 82,500 Palestinians outside the fence," was how Colonel (ret.) Shaul Arieli, who was involved in the Geneva Accord, summed up the situation in the symposium held at the Van Leer Institute. "The political consideration overcame the security consideration."
The situation was summed up less neatly by Ayoub Saadi Abu Saad, a 25-year-old construction worker, who arrived breathing heavily after a panicky run. In the morning, when he crossed the open field between Azzariyeh and Jerusalem on his way to work, as he does every morning, he ran into Border Policeman, who told him, "Palestinian, go to Palestine." So he ran. In a few days even that route will be impossible. "They are closing us in like birds in a cage," he says. "Now all they have to do is cover it with a net and we won't be able to fly, either." Then he bursts out laughing, pleased with his metaphor - though a lot less pleased with the situation.
