With
the Wall, the Settlers will Have all the Olives
By Gush Shalom
06 May, 2003
On Saturday May 3, at the
approaches to the village of Mes'ha in the Qalqilia District of the
West Bank. What had been two and a half years ago a bustling highway
is now completely blocked off by two piles of earth, at a distance of
some fifty meters from each other, making it impossible to get by car
in or out of the town - as is the situation at the entrance of virtually
every Palestinian community in the West Bank, from tiny hamlets to the
big cities. The official reason is that if the movement of all Palestinians
is hampered, the movement of suicide bombers will also be hampered.
The unofficial reason is the assumption that disrupting the Palestinians'
daily life would bring them to their knees.
Neither reasoning seems to
be working out - and still the siege continues, and the earthen barriers
have already been there long enough to sprout a lot of vegetation. In
today's Yediot Aharonot, Condolizza Rice is quoted as demanding "Israel
restore the Palestinians' freedom of movement"; Mes'ha inhabitants
do not seem to wait with bated breath. The blockage of the entrance
is anyway old news, a terribly heavy burden on daily life but with which
they had to learn to live for more than two years already and to which
they find some small practical ameliorations.
Nowadays, Mes'ha is faced
with a more immediate and existential threat -the wall which Sharon
is in the process of building, and which turns out to cut very big slices
out of the West Bank; Mes'ha will be separated from98% of its agricultural
lands. The Separation Barrier as it is officially called, the Apartheid
Wall which is the common name hereabouts, or just The Wall - has become
the most important fact of life for these thousands of villagers.
It is the Wall which has
brought us here, three busloads of activists from Tel-Aviv and Jerusalem,
as over the past three weeks it has brought an increasing number of
Israelis, internationals and Palestinians from other places to an ongoing
protest encampment in the place where this village's lands are being
stolen. The earthen barriers make it impossible for our buses to get
anywhere near the place. It would be a considerable walk. Making a virtue
of necessity, it had been decided to make this walk into a demonstrative
procession.
Crossing the barriers (there
was only a token force of five or six soldiers, rather surprisingly
no serious attempt to bar our way) we find a crowd of villagers waiting
already, with a sprinkling of the internationals who had been here for
quite some time already. Together forming a heterogenous mixture: the
emblems of half a dozen Israeli peace groups; the conspicuous two-flag
signs of Gush Shalom; the shirts of the Palestinian Agricultural Relief
Committees recognizable by the green tree in a circle - and worn also
by internationals and Israelis; the competing red flags of the Democratic
Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Palestinian People's Party;
Fatah supporters bringing the Palestinian red-green-white-black and
among them youngsters in the shirts of European Anarchists. One woman
had a rather worn shirt with Down with the Occupation in Hebrew, English
and Arabic ("I am wearing this in every demonstration since 1988
and will continue to do it until the end of the occupation").
To the front, big signs are
unfurled: "Israelis and Palestinians Together against Occupation",
Gush Shalom's "The apartheid Wall - Prison for Palestinians, Ghetto
for Israelis", the black triangular "Oppression of Palestinians
is Our Oppression" of Kvisa Schora. Slogans are constantly exchanged
and translated back and forth between Hebrew and Arabic: Settlers Go
Home / Two States for Two Peoples /Liberty for the Palestinian People
/ a Different Future Without Wars / No Killings of Civilians, Jewish
or Arab.
As we walk through the town's
main street there are smiling and welcoming faces. Little boys dart
into the crowd with bottles of coldwater, very needed under the blazing
sun. a participating Israeli farmer takes out a nylon bag full of fresh
fruits and hands it to one of the boys, and soon the fruit is also distributed
by many little hands to the marchers.
Out of the last houses and
into the fields and olive orchards. There is no shadow here at all,
and the chanting is slackening. Going up and down several hills, and
there it is: a white strip, some twenty meters in width, cutting through
he whole landscape north to south.
Three months ago there were
there hundreds of olive trees which are now gone. Three months from
now, approaching it might be a life danger from guard towers. At this
moment, the Wall itself has not yet been erected in this sector and
it is still possible to cross the strip of devastation.
On the other side, the side
which will become inaccessible once the Wall goes up, is the protest
encampment: four large tents, one used as kitchen and the other giving
shelter to some twenty activists who come forth to greet us. Many of
them are wearing a specific T-shirt with the picture of an enormous
bulldozer destroying olive trees. All around is an exhibition of many
such photographs, documenting in minute detail the ongoing ravage.
No less than three groups
of international activists are present: the well-known ISM; the women
of IWPS; and also the Ecumenical Accompaniers sponsored by the World
Council of Churches.
A young villager gives guidance
to the top of a hill. "You see on this side the root of the Wall.
And all the land, which it will take away from us. And there, on the
other side, you see the settlements Elkana and Etz Ephraim; they were
also build on Mes'ha land. Now in fact we already lost many of the olive
trees near the settlements. The army does not let us go there, and the
settlers harvest our olives. The trees which are here in this hill,
we did harvest this year, but when the Wall will be there, the settlers
will have them all."
The rally starts, with a
big rock serving as improvised podium. After calling for a moment of
silence to commemorate Rachel Corrie, Uri Avnery of Gush Shalom details
what he calls The Big Con Game": "The Israeli public is told
that here is being built a security fence to protect them against suicide
bombers. If it had been built along the Green Line, the old border that
would have been somehow plausible. When we can see that it is snaking
around deep inside the West Bank, curving here and there to contain
all the settlements, it is clear that this is just one more device for
stealing Palestinian land."
"The Sharon who builds
this Wall has nothing to offer the Palestinian people, except for killing
and murder and robbing of land," Suhil Salman of The People's Party
exclaims, and Razaq Abu Naser of the Democratic Front adds: "Twenty-three
percent of the whole West Bank this Wall is going to consume, and this
twenty-three percent includes 80 percent of the fertile land; 80 percent
of the water sources." He was followed by two internationals: Karen
of IWPS ("thirteen years after the fall of the Berlin Wall; nine
years after the fall of South-African Apartheid") and Allison of
the Nablus ISM ("The Israeli government and army threaten to expel
us, but we will persist in our mission of solidarity").
Prof. Tanya Reinhart spoke
of "the junta of the army generals and the ex-general ministers,
who treat us to the myth of 'liberating' the land, liberating it from
itsinhabitants." Aharon Shabtai read his poem "My heart"
written during the big invasion a year ago: (...) the roadside corpse
that help couldn't reach / the empty oxygen tanks at the clinic in Nablus.
"Our land is our honor. We want to live in peace with Israel. Suicide
bombings are not our way, but how can anybody expect us to live in peace
when our land is stolen, our trees are uprooted; the last piece of bread
is taken from the mouths of our children. Does the world accept this
as justice?" - cried Nabih Shalabi, representative of the directly
affected farmers, holding a sign in Arabic and Hebrew: The Wall - over
my dead body; not on my land.
Activist Efri Shirman read
out... the phone numbers of Victor Bar-Gil, Deputy Director General
of the Ministry of Defence, who is indirect charge of the Wall: +972-(0)3-6965944
(home);+972-(0)3-6976161 (office); +972-(0)50-91710 (mobile); +972-(0)3-6977818
(fax). (NB: use these numbers before they will b changed!).