Last update - 02:26 13/02/2004
Seamier and seamier, this seam-line
Just to sleep in their own beds, some 6,000 Palestinian residents of the seam-line expanse require permits. And visitors cannot enter, businesses are folding, farmland has dried up and houses are being demolished.
By Lily Galili
With a bit of positive thinking, it's possible to see the patterns of life that have been forced upon the Palestinians within the so-called expanse of the seam line as a kind of compliment. If the prolonged occupation has mainly necessitated a talent for survival, then the "regime of permits" - as the new procedures in the area were defined by the High Court of Justice this week (in reference to the petition of the HaMoked Center for the Defense of the Individual and the Association for Civil Rights in Israel) - could be considered an expression of admiration for the Palestinians' intelligence.
Your average Israeli, who collapses under the burden of filling out an income tax form, would not survive for a single day in the thicket of permits, 11 in total, that Palestinians need in order to exist in this area.
The prevailing assumption among the Palestinians is that the purpose of making life in the area impossible is to bring about pressure for voluntary transfer, to enable the annexation to Israel of territories close to the Green Line (pre-Six-Day War border).
It's an interesting term, "the seam-line expanse." The word "expanse" suggests some sort of openness; "seam line" could be perceived as an interesting connection between two experiences. In fact, these are people who are imprisoned in an area located between the Green Line and the separation fence. Trapped in this area are more than 6,000 Palestinians, who are in fact living in a closed military zone, under what is called in military language "The Declaration of Closing of Territory No. 2/03 C. (Seam-Line Expanse) - 2003."
Luck did not smile on the village of Jabara south of Tul Karm: It is located within the seam-line expanse. According to initial plans, the route of the fence was supposed to pass to the west of the village and leave it in the West Bank. However, according to the change that was subsequently made, apparently in order to include the Jewish settlement of Sla'it to the south of Jabara on the Israeli side of the fence, the route was moved eastward and thus Jabara and Sla'it are living unhappily ever after in the seam-line expanse.
The inhabitants of Sla'it, it should be noted, are exempt from all the decrees requiring permits that are imposed on the inhabitants of Jabara. According to "The Declaration of Closing of Territory," the requirement for permits does not apply to: "A) a citizen of the State of Israel; B) a resident of the State of Israel; or C) a person who is entitled to immigrate to Israel under the Law of Return."
If clauses A and B reflect some sort of policy that takes into account the existence of Jewish settlements in this expanse, it is hard to understand the relevance of the proviso about entitlement under the Law of Return. It is hard to believe that one day a person wakes up in the morning, in the miserable Diaspora, remembers his Jewish grandmother - thanks to whom he can be included in the Law of Return - and decides that after 2,000 years of exile, all he dreams of is to live in the seam-line expanse. Unless, of course, the regulation exists simply to allow entry to any Jew in the world, and to deny it to any Palestinian, even if he has lived all his life in a village that is in the seam-line expanse.
Almost Provence
This is the existential situation of the 300 inhabitants of Jabara, an especially lovely village in a pastoral area not far from the Green Line. But everything that was once a geographical advantage has now become a geopolitical obstacle. In the garden of the fine-looking home of Tsadek Masoud, the deputy chairman of the local committee, a small group of men who live in the village gathered last week. The grass, the fruit trees all around and a fountain-like marble structure gave the place the look of a tranquil village in Provence. Only a large painting of the Al-Aqsa Mosque on one of the external walls of the house anchored the occasion in time and place. In effect, this is a large prison in which life has become intolerable. At first, the inhabitants refused, via a hopeless civil revolt, to apply for the permits that have been imposed on them. For an entire month the village was closed: No one went out and no one came in. Then they surrendered and obtained the permits, but life has not improved much.
The following is a list of the permits that the inhabitants in the seam-line expanse need in order to conduct their everyday lives. The most important permit allows a person to sojourn and to sleep, and is not issued to residents as a matter of course. There are those who receive such a permit for one year, and those to whom this permit - enabling them to live in their own houses - is issued for three or six months, and who must renew it when it expires. This, incidentally, is the case for Tsadek Masoud, the principal of a school in Tul Karm. In the past, Masoud served a 10-year term at the prison in Nablus and was released in the context of the humanitarian gestures after the Oslo agreement.
Why was he arrested? "For having worked for peace," replies Masoud evasively. Since then he has been a permanent suspect, and he received the first permit to live in his house for only three months. "In fact, it's interesting," he says. "It's as though I'm living in a hotel. Soon we'll need a permit to sleep with our wives."
In addition to this conditional permit to live at home, an inhabitant of the seam-line expanse needs a special permit to travel between cities in the West Bank, a special permit to cultivate his land, which lies mostly outside the fence that bounds the expanse, and of course a special permit to enter Israel.
But this is not all. Life, after all, is not a one-way street and naturally it creates situations in which it is necessary for some other person - a relative, a tradesman, a doctor or other person with a reason - to visit someone living in the seam-line expanse. For this purpose, 11 different kinds of permits have been defined that must be requested by persons wishing to enter the area: a permit for a proprietor of a business inside the expanse; a permit for a merchant; a permit for a person who is employed in that area; a permit for a farmer there; a permit for a teacher; a permit for a student; a permit for an employee of the Palestinian Authority; a permit for a visitor to the area; a permit for a worker for an international organization; a permit for an employee of a local authority; and a permit for a member of a medical team.
One entrance
Are you exhausted just from reading about the thicket of permits? This is what is required of everyone who needs permission for themselves and their vehicle to enter the seam-line expanse. Thus it happens that all these people elect simply not to get involved and to give up entering the area, while its inhabitants remain isolated and cut off.
In its deliberations on the seam-line expanse, the High Court of Justice recognized that the plethora of permits for entry, sojourning and working "makes the fabric of life very difficult" for the population of the area. However, this recognition is barely an understatement for the reality that has developed in Jabara. With the blocking of the other entries, the village has only one opening, via the Kafriyat roadblock. Even the soldiers there admitted this week that of all the roadblocks, this one is perhaps the most insane.
Through this roadblock, which is now located in the heart of a noisy construction area, Jewish settlers enter Area C (under Israeli control), the residents from Tul Karm enter Area A (under Palestinian control), and the inhabitants of Jabara enter Area B (under Israel security control). In this hodgepodge of people, cars, donkeys and carts, it is hard to understand who is going where. Maybe the soldiers at the roadblock "aren't doctors," in the nasty language of the commander of the Israel Defense Forces College, but they have been given an impossible task of running around among the holders of the confusing permits and the different destinations.
Into this melee one day this week came an elderly Palestinian, an inhabitant of Tul Karm, a plasterer by trade. That morning a Jabara resident had phoned him and asked for an estimate for some work on his house. This phone call could have rescued the plasterer for a moment from the prolonged unemployment and poverty that is growing ever deeper in his city; the man from Jabara needed plaster in the rainy winter. The plasterer stood for a long time at the roadblock, finding it difficult to understand that he needed a special permit to enter a village that until just recently was an integral part of Tul Karm. He stood there with a look of total bafflement on his face, and did not enter.
"The soldiers at the roadblock are replaced all the time, and they always have to learn the lists of permits anew," say residents of Jabara. "The soldiers themselves don't understand what is happening and they take arbitrary decisions, depending on their mood."
And the soldiers are sometimes in a very bad mood. Especially those who have to open the only gate in the fence to the east, through which exit and entry is permitted only to schoolchildren. In Jabara, a small village, there are no services, not even a school. All the children attend school in the villages of Al-Sar, Sur and Jamal, which are now outside the separation fence. Every morning soldiers open the gate for the schoolchildren, lock it, and come back to open it again at exactly 1:30 P.M. to enable the children to return home. Every morning they wait for all 88 students, from first to last, to gather at the gate, and only then allow them to go through. Anyone who is tardy doesn't get past. For the benefit of the children, who sometimes have to wait for a very long time, UNICEF has set up a pergola there to protect them from the sun and the rain. How shameful. Not Israel, but the United Nations has taken the trouble to make this small gesture.
The process repeats itself on the way home from school as well. A student who gets there late has to sleep in another village, outside his home. Incidents of this sort have already occurred and have been included in the report issued by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). Sometimes it is the soldiers who get there late, and then the students lose hours of schooling. School vacations are often linked to holidays in Israel. Well before Tourism Minister Benny Elon implements his missionary program to convert the Muslims to Christianity, they are already celebrating the Jewish holidays here. On Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the gate was not opened and the children stayed home.
When the soldiers are in a good mood, they joke with the children. Sometimes, during the wait, they divide them into groups - Hamas, Jihad, Fatah - and ask them to act out a skirmish among the factions. Humor, you know. Israel has many justified complaints about the Palestinian textbooks that are full of hatred, but even if these children are assigned Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's book "A Place Among the Nations" as required reading, the seeds of hatred are implanted in them every day, at this gate.
`Everything is dead'
But this luxury of a gate that opens is not available to inhabitants who aren't schoolchildren. They stay caged inside the seam-line expanse, leave only infrequently and are prevented from meeting their relatives who have remained on the eastern side of the fence. The crops in the greenhouses, the fruit of years of labor, wilted long ago. The inhabitants of the area initiated an application asking the institutions of the European Union to finance transfer of the greenhouses into the area in which they are imprisoned. Inside the EU a disagreement broke out over this. Up against the desire to make the Palestinians' situation better, there is the reservation about continuing to finance the results of Israel's policy, to which they are opposed. The chicken coops, another branch of farming from which the locals earned a living, have emptied.
"Most of the people here had chicken coops," says Farouq Awad, a local resident. "The chickens need food and they need a veterinarian. Now the feed trucker or the animal doctor don't want to get involved with the permits they need to get in order to come to us. Everything is dead."
North of Jabara, in the village of Faroun on the southwestern slopes of Tul Karm, stands Zoheir Oud, holding in his hand the green permit to cultivate his land in Jabara. It used to be, before it was butchered into pieces, that Tul Karm and its environs were a single human and agricultural unit. Most of the farmland of the residents of Faroun is located in Jabara, which has become inaccessible to them. Someone pulls out of his pocket a list of 11 farmers who have applied for a permit to cultivate their land in Jabara, and 10 of them were rejected.
All of Tul Karm is cut off from the surrounding villages, moving on an axis between being a battlefield and longing for normality. The colorful advertisements that adorn its walls are overlapped by placards with the names of shaheeds (martyrs) and their pictures; a sign for a bridal salon, illustrated with a pretty picture of young woman getting a soothing facial treatment, hangs over a street scarred by tracks of tanks that passed by there not long ago. In the midst of all this, Zoheir Oud is stuck between his home in Tul Karm and his land in Jabara. He has just found out that the green permit he obtained is not enough. He also needs a magnetic card and documents that testify to his ownership of the land.
On that same day the group of men in Faroun had another reasons for worry. In the morning hours of Monday, a rumor spread that houses were being demolished in their village. Only two weeks ago two houses there were demolished that were "too close" to the separation fence. This too is a strange definition, as this is the fence that got too close to the houses that were there long before it. The rumor about the razing of additional houses turned out to be inaccurate. All that happened that morning was that demolition orders were received for another 10 houses on the side that faces Taibeh, which is inside Israel.
The rumor spread by word of mouth and the inhabitants went out into the street to talk it over. The frequent changes in the route of the fence, in accordance with pressures from within and from without, are bewildering them. Each time they move the fence, more houses become "too close to the fence," and then the authorities demolish them as well. People are afraid to go out of their house lest it be demolished in their absence, and they boast aloud of the fact that not a single terrorist has come from their village.
"They're not looking for security; they're looking for our land," charges Yusuf Omar in fluent Hebrew, the result of 30 years of working in Israel. "They've already demolished two houses. Now they are going to demolish another 10, and then 30, until they erase the whole village. It cannot be said of the houses they want to demolish now that they are `too close to the fence.' You can see with your own eyes that it's more than 300 meters," he says, indicating the direction of the Taibeh roadblock down the slope of the fields.
"I know your politics very well. The Likud's politics and the Labor Party's politics. It has one aim: that we not exist. Those orders to demolish houses don't really tell us `stop building.' They tell us `stop living.'"
