A Tent for all Nations

The encroachment of settlements that I saw yesterday around Bethlehem is even more intense in the countryside southwest of Bethlehem. Daud Nasar’s farm is ringed by three expanding settlements: Neve Daniyyel, Rosh Zurim and Efrat, plus their outposts (trailers on hillstops metastasised from the established settlements in order to sprout new tumours). The settlers are desperate to take control of this little hill farm to link up this settlement bloc and further constrict the 7000 villagers of Nahhalin down in the valley underneath the huge settlement of Betar Illit.

In 1991 Daud learnt indirectly (since the Israelis didn’t tell him) that his 100 acres of land was being confiscated along with the rest of the hill. When he raised an objection he was given just 45 days to dispute the confiscation order in a military court. His family were the only landowners in the area who had paper deeds – from the Ottoman, British and Jordanian periods – and so the only ones able to file a dispute. The Israelis were really shocked that he had these papers (most Palestinians land ownership is based on oral contracts, and therefore is easy for Israel to brush aside) and so they demanded still more and more “proof” of ownership to try and find a pretext to dispossess him.

His grandfather bought the land in 1916, and lived in a cave (which Daud has renovated), working hard to make the hillsides bloom. His uncle also lived there from 1916 until his death in 1987, remaining single al this time; “he was married to the land,” Daud explained. Since 1991 it has been a continual struggle to retain the land, and Daud says: “Many families in this situation give up and leave, and we can understand why they run out of energy, but we will not give up and betray the hard work of our ancestors.”

First the Israelis demanded a new map (the existing one was dated 1926) within 35 days – a tall order. When Daud managed to get the map produced they next demanded eyewitness testimonies that his grandfather had lived on the land. When these testimonies were produced they continually postponed the court hearing – “They want us to give up”, exclaims Daud. During this whole period from 1991 until today the Nasars have faced continual intimidation and property destruction from the settlers. At one point they even barged into the house and threatened Daud’s mother with a gun.

In 2001 Daud’s lawyer received a one line letter from the military court: “You haven’t got enough evidence that you own the land, so you’ve lost the case.” Supported by notable lawyer, Jonathan Kuttub, they took the case to the High Court, where they were told they needed another survey, but this time done by an Israeli – this is costing them $70,000. The family actually lose money on the farming because of all the restrictions on Palestinian trade, and so they have found it really hard to pay for this. Nonetheless they have refused the many large offers they have received from settlers, including the latest last week which was a blank cheque! The family’s perseverance and self-sacrifice, protecting not just their little farm but the whole region from assimilation into a vast settlement block, is inspiring. Their lack of enmity towards the Israelis is also a real testimony to their commitment to Jesus Christ. When settlers come around waving their guns Daud still politely invites them to come inside and drink tea with him (they refuse to).

Realising that they need help the Nasar family have invited internationals to visit and work on the farm, When settlers destroyed 250 olive trees, some European Jews came and helped replant them. A British volunteer painted beautiful murals on some of the walls and in the caves. They are calling the project the Tent of Nations, because international visitors must camp out since Israel will not grant a permit to build or even to install water and electricity. This is typical double standards – permitting laissez-faire expansion of the settlements but preventing Palestinians from even adding a toilet onto their humble homes. Indeed the Israeli army has even attempted to demolish their two existing buildings, dating from the 1970s. The court thankfully had little choice but to block the demolition order because the army made a huge blunder, claiming that the houses had been built just two weeks ago, something the Nasars were easily able to counter by producing a photo from five years before.

Daud is passionate when he argues that most international observers waste their time by staying in Area A (the urban areas representing about 15% of the West Bank which in the Oslo Agreement are meant to be under Palestinian Authority control) whereas they should be working on the real front line which is in Area C (under full Israeli control; in Area B Israel has control of security and PA supposedly has control of civil affairs). Daud understands Sharon’s grand plan to limit any Palestinian state to the towns (Area A) and annex as much of Area C as possible to Israel “proper”. As the settlements encroach on Palestinian villages, and as checkpoints prevent or delay the villagers from getting to work, they are forced to migrate to the towns, leaving the countryside in the hands of the settlers. The sickest irony is that, while they remain in the villages, robbed of their land and will few other employment options, the only way for many Palestinians to put food on the table is by doing construction work in the very settlements which are squeezing them out of their homeland.

[left] Settlement Betar Illit to the North West, with the Palestinian village of Nahhalin in its shadow
[right] Settlement Neve Daniyyel to the North East

The Nasar family back in the 1920s in Ottoman era dress, painted from an old photo.

Oh little town of Bethlehem...

I’ve seen many maps of The Wall and of settlement expansion, but it feels a whole lot more sinister seeing an satellite photo superimposed with the new route (ain the Israeli media) and seeing that it snakes less than 50m from where you’re now sitting. Jad Issac trained as a botanist but, as a result of seeing his home town of Bethlehem gradually being encircled and gobbled up with settlements, he has given his life over to the arcane arts of GIS and GPS – cartography 21st century style, founding ARIJ and using his detailed research to unveil the continuing Nakba to the world and advise the Palestinian Authority in negotiations. His contagious enthusiasm awakens in me of my own childhood fascination with maps, while the horrific truths these maps reveal makes his cynicism equally contagious.

Bethlehem – a prime location just a few miles southeast of Jerusalem – has now been surrounded on three sides by illegal Israeli settlements (or “colonies” as Jad rightly calls them). From Tekoya and Efrat (“the Snake”) in the South, through Neve Daniyyel and Betar Illit in the West and in the North to Gilo and Har Homa (built in 1997 by Netenyahu, on the site of the last forested hill in the region, in order to finally undermine the Oslo peace accords). Now the Wall is tightening the noose, squeezing right up to the very edge of Bethlehem and effectively annexing all the city’s agricultural land to the settlements and eventually to an expanded Eretz Israel – this is land grabbing at its most blatant. Jad had even mapped all of the traditional family lands in the thousands of acres to be annexed behind the Wall, sadly pointing out the small plot just below Har Homa settlement which has belonged to the Issac family for centuries and where he had always planned to be buried. Beyond Bethlehem Issac’s maps revealed the inequitable allocation of the water (settlers fill swimming pools while local Palestinians get a few hours of running water a week and pay three times as much for it) and Sharon’s open plans to carve up the remaining 22% of historic Palestine (this is the West Bank and Gaza) into vast settlement blocs dotted with a few small “native reservations” for those few Palestinians still too stubborn to leave despite all the harassment.

Stepping outside the office into the bright sun I can see the Wall itself, less than a minute’s walk up the road. I walk around the corner to the checkpoint marking the edge of Bethlehem (a point which Attalah who hosted me last night has been unable to go beyond for 18 years since he was arrested for crossing the street to see his uncle during curfew during the first intifada). On the way I pass near Rachel’s tomb, around which settlers have started seizing houses to build a new colony even inside Bethlehem itself. There is a surprise waiting for me at the checkpoint. Five new concrete segments have been added to the Wall since I was here yesterday afternoon, blocking the entrance to Bethlehem to local shepherds (there aren’t any now that their grazing lands have being annexed), wise men (from Iran, they actually wouldn’t have made it past the Jordanian border) and certainly to pregnant Jewish women on donkeys from Nazareth (which is over the Green Line in Israeli and so subject to the Israeli government’s ban on its citizens visit the West Bank, other than the settlements of course, although the few who defy this still find a friendly welcome from Palestinians). Oh little town of Bethlehem...


[left] Settlements south of Bethlehem seen from Dheisha refugee camp. Efrat is in the top right corner, and all the hillside from there to Bethlehem has been confiscated.
[right] Har Homa settlement north of Bethlehem, seen from the office of Wi'am, a local conflict resolution group.

[left] Jad Issac of ARIJ explains Sharon's land grab plan.
[right] The Wall extending around Bethlehem (at top of the road), seen from ARIJ's office.

Five Wall segments, new today, beginning to block the main road into Bethlehem.

My 1st friend and the 3rd Temple

Today I made my first new Israeli friend this visit. He was an orthodox Jew in the Old City running athe Museum of the Third Temple. The museum contains a detailed model, based on a prophesy in Ezekiel, of a temple building which the most extreme Jews (and Christians) want to see build on the Temple Mount – of course the Dome of the Rock would need to be demolished first to make way for this.

I had an inkling of all this before I entered, but decided to get to know this person rather than get into a heated argument immediately. So I acted like a curious but fairly ignorant tourist (which I guess I am!) and listened to him explain his opinions in response to my innocent questions. What he had to say was pretty appalling: He always spoke of the “Palestinians” with gesticulated quotation marks (perpetuating the lie that they are not a distinct people, just another bunch of Ay-rabs) and he referred to them as “the enemy”. He said that most Muslims don’t care about Jerusalem, and that those who do only really started bothering after 1967. He clearly felt under attack from all sides, including from fellow Jews. He said that Mordechai Gur, the general who conquered the Old City in 1967, unilaterally decided to let the Palestinians, who had fled, return to their homes because he was aggressively secular and didn’t want religious Jews to be in control of the Old City. My friend said that Ben Gurion (Israel's first Prime Minister), who was secular, had the blood of 1000s of Jews on his hands for blocking the immigration of religious Jews wanting to flee from the Nazis. “Even the US”, he said, “is not really a reliable friend, it is only supporting us now because this is in its self interest, and it would abandon us tomorrow if it felt its interests had changed.”

As we talked, for almost an hour, we moved from politics and I learnt about his family – though he was only 23 he had two children because, like many orthodox Jews, he married young. He told me how he had got engaged to his wife only 5 days after meeting – and how she had actually proposed before he’d had the chance to do so! He talked about how his wife's family had initially been unsure of him, but had finally warmed to him strongly. We talked about his rapid engagement and he insisted that it wasn’t love-at-first sight because he believes love is something that you work at and which develops over time – a position I also agree with. In this conversation I felt connected to his common humanness. Yet perhaps it was some of his friends who beat up my CPT collegues today in at-Tuwani in the South Hebron hills where they were accompanying shepherds blocked from their traditional grazing lands by new militant settlers. What a horrible and wonderful world.

Tears on the tarmac

Even before the plane took off from London my neighbour was crying. It wasn’t my fault this time, rather the tragic injustices of the Middle East (which will be the substance of my life for the next few months) had decided they couldn’t wait for a few hours while I read a book and watched an in-flight movie, but had come to meet me here on the tarmac of Heathrow airport.

Jamal is a Palestinian. He’s never set food on Palestinian soil and his passport clearly says Kuwaiti, but until the day he dies that is how he will introduce himself to strangers. A few simple words of Arabic and some questions about his family resulted in this gush of tears. I haven’t actually seen many Arab men cry (many men in fact including myself, though often I long for the self-expression of salty tears), so I’m surprised by this display of emotion. As the flight progresses and we talk continuously it emerges that there was more in those tears than just the Nakba (the sufferings of the Palestinian people). He is flying back to his extended family – his parents and nine brothers and sisters – because his father is having a bypass operation after a heart attack. And there’s more, his family in America (where he’s lived since the invasion of Kuwait) is under tremendous pressure as his teenaged daughter struggles to come to terms with her parents’ separation and her own mixed cultural identity. My friend is suffering a great deal of pain, personal and political, yet at the same time he has a wonderfully bright smile and speaks repeatedly of the importance of cherishing the beauty in creation alongside all the suffering. Over the 5 hour flight to Beirut (where the plane stops briefly) I hear many stories about the occupation of Kuwait and the Palestinian struggle – all brought alive by personal anecdotes about the events and his family connections to influential actors.

My experience on the plane, the privilege of hearing someone’s stories and even to comfort him in some small way through my listening, felt like a divine encounter. My original seat on the plane suddenly broke soon after I sat down (I have no idea how) and so I was moved to the only row on the plane with free seats. Then at the very last moment before the plane began taxing Jamal arrived and was booked into the seat beside me, enabling our conversations.

Amman always feels like a homecoming. I’ve arrived at the airport five times now and the procedure and the taxi ride into town is comforting. Jordan at night, illuminated by the green glows from minarets, always seems so peaceful – a picture of how Palestine and Iraq could become one day. The conversation with my driver about his family, the feeling of reawakening as my smattering of Arabic creaks back up into my conscious mind, the triple refusal of the driver to take my payment (a polite gesture showing that he welcomes me, not an indication that I really shouldn't pay!) – I relish the familiarity of all this. Then at my hotel, where I stayed 18 months ago, one of the staff greets me by name and with a hug.

And now I’m sitting I’m my room reflecting and thanking God for such a welcoming start to this next chapter of my life. Over the last week I’ve been tense, depressed and lacking in energy. Now I feel alive again and reassured that this is where God his work for me to do. Al-hamdulillah.

Preparing for Iraq

There's a season for all things they say, and I'm now very much in a season of flux. I arrived back in Britain last week from my training with CPT in Chicago and felt profoundly lost. I find it hard to readjust after having lived shoulder to shoulder with a small community of people through an intensely emotional and exhausting month. I've been flittering between home, Oxford and London since then, living out of a tiny bag (just a change of cloths, a Bible and my wonderful new Fujitsu 4010 Tablet PC) and trying to order my life and relationships so that I'm prepared for a possible extended stay in the Middle East. I've had wonderful support from friends which is sustaining me. My family are still quite opposed and it breaks my heart causing them to worry and not having their approval, but sadly that can't be helped.

I'm flying out to Jordan on the 13th, then going over to see some old friends in Jerusalem and visit others in various parts of Israel/Palestine. Then hopefully I'll get the green light to go over to Iraq to join the CPT team there in early March, although this is not confirmed as they are still figuring out how many people they want to have over there at the moment. So I might be back in Britain in early March trying to figure out what else to do, or I might be out in Iraq until the summer... either way I'd value your prayers for me and more importantly for Iraq as she enters a new stage.

P.S. I saw Nelson Mandela today, speaking to a MakePovertyHistory rally in Trafalgar square. If you look at the photo on the BBC report, I've figured out from the camera angle that I'm one of blurred blogs about 6 rows behind the two red flags you can see, vertically above the right flag in the picture. From where I was NM was just a blob too, albeit a very inspiring blog!