EXCERPT:
As in much of Area C, daily life for villagers is full of travel restrictions, housing demolitions and confiscations of land. Some now live full-time in their sheep camps, since they fear that abandoning them will result in permanent loss of their lands. “If they lose any of their land, they suffer -- they need every bit of land to graze their flocks,” said Joshua Hough, an American activist walking toward the school. He lives part-time in al-Tuwani as part of Christian Peacemaker Teams. “The land is continuously being taken in little chunks. The amount of land Palestinians have available to them is becoming less and less every year.”
The school was three steel frames built on cement slabs, draped with canvas. Local leaders spoke through a megaphone, arguing for freedom of movement and access to education. After the speeches, schoolteachers began handing out free pencils. Manar and her fellow students quickly crowded around, reaching out their hands.
“Members of the Palestinian Authority hardly ever come here,” said Na’im al-Adarah, driving us back in a battered pickup which has served as a makeshift school bus. Once, he said, a man from the Palestinian ministry of local affairs came from Ramallah but refused to come in a PA vehicle. “So we took him from Ramallah in our cars, at our own expense.” The official was appalled at the conditions he witnessed. “He said this is the first time he knew that this land [within the West Bank] is ours. A minister like him is surprised that we have these areas? I asked him ‘how can a minister like you not know this? You’re the minister of local government!’ It was like he didn’t know what was happening in his own country.” Al-Adarah squinted at the broken road through a cracked windshield. “We’re forgotten, unfortunately.”
For these Palestinians, the semi-liberated enclave centered in Ramallah is part of another country.
“Ramallah is not Palestine,” said Muhammad Abdullah Ahmad Wahdan. “It’s 5%. But 95% of Palestine suffers.” We sat in the living room of his concrete block home in Qalandia refugee camp north of Jerusalem. Just a few minutes away lay Ramallah, another country. Outside, Israel’s separation barrier loomed above the camp like a prison wall. There is talk that Israel will reroute the wall through the middle of the camp, and Wahdan says, given that this is Area C, the Palestinian Authority (PA) would be powerless to stop it. “This leadership has given us nothing,” he said. “No work, no homeland, no stability, no security.”
Wahdan long ago dismissed the dream that the PA could help him recover the lands of citrus and olives that his family were driven from during the creation of Israel six decades ago. Now, after losing a son to the struggle -- the young man was 19, and his wife was pregnant; when a baby girl was born, the family called her Palestine -- he is wary of any more sacrifice for the Palestinian leadership. As she served us refreshments, Wahdan’s wife said that these are the people who “put our kids under the cannon fire.”
Wahdan said: “This particular class of the bourgeoisie exploited the people who fought the struggle. We did this for their benefit. They were the ones who got something out of it.” Wahdan’s 15-year-old grandson, Anas, sitting under a large portrait of his martyred uncle, added: “They wanted us, with no weapons, to [make the] sacrifice. Their kids have cars and villas, they own phone companies. There’s no equality between someone like that and someone like me, who lives in a house that’s falling apart, and whose father may or may not have enough money to bring bread or have clothes.”
And if he and his friends should voice their displeasure? “We’ll be told, ‘Well, you’re just refugee camp kids’,” said Anas’s friend Munir. He wants to become an eye doctor. “There’s nothing to do here, maybe play games on the internet. There’s a military base next to me here, and the checkpoint crossing there, and the Israeli army comes in at night. And maybe if you go and play games at the internet place, you’re happy that you did something for the day.” Refugee-camp teenagers like these once fuelled the resistance to occupation. Not now, said Munir: “All that anger has been absorbed by depression.” Perhaps some day, that anger will again rise. But for now, said Anas: “People say ‘I’m exhausted, and rocks will not liberate me’.”
No comments:
Post a Comment