Turtles and Palestine

I have been living under the Israeli occupation for three months. I have been with people who have lived their entire lives, longer than my nearly 30 years of age, under the same occupation. An occupation that they know is visible and well known throughout the world, but which still doesn’t show any signs of ending. For three months I have lived behind the Wall that stretches from south of the West Bank to the far north.

How do the Israeli policies against Palestinians differ from the Nazi policies against the Jews, one participant at a private speach by Herbert Pundak (the father of one of the architects of the Oslo Agreement and a Danish citizen) wondered. She shouldn’t have done that, for it led more or less to the man "clicking in angle" as we say in Norwegian. He got really mad, to put it briefly. Most recently, our (Norwegian) Foreign Minister met the same reaction from the Israeli embassy because he wrote in his newly published book that the situation in Hebron commemorate the events we know from other places from other times. It is not easy for the Palestinians, nor me, to see the clear difference, but I understand why it is so vulnerable to Israel. Nazis are not primarily known for it's discrimination against Jews, but for their attempt to exterminate the Jews (Israel is only attempting to expel Palestinians), but there is no doubt that there are many symptom similarities.

A more fruitful question (for the discussion that night) would be what separate Israel's policies against the Palestinians from South Africa's apartheid policies against the blacks?

No, there is not much. Some would say there is none.

The apartheid regime in South Africa was condemned by the entire world except from the “democratic” state of Israel. A set of policies put out to clearly discriminate between whites and blacks in South Africa. One of the policies was to build various townships well insulated from the white areas, without any form of employment other than low-paid work in the white areas. Not surprisingly, it was after a visit to South Africa in 2000/01 that Ariel Sharon “found the solution” to the Palestinian issue. The result of his solution is clear for everyone today: A massive wall across the entire West Bank.

We Europeans, the children of the Cold War - or whatever we’re called - remember the word Wall only as the Berlin Wall. Every now and then we hear historical speaches held in this city (most recently from our newly elected president Obama) about how we must tear down all the walls in the world. But bad enough as that wall was, it only separated one city. Wall in the West Bank doesn’t only separate one or two cities, or just the West Bank from Israel, it separates and isolates the various Palestinian villages / towns from each other as well. Only exceptionally moving along the green line (the borders between Israel and the West Bank before 1967) it’s largely built deep inside the Palestinian territories. The apartheid wall in Palestine works primarily as a protection for the illegal settlements built deep inside Palestine and secondly to close the Palestinian cities / regions in ghettoes.

Palestinian cities / regions are well enclosed in small enclaves separated from each other, surrounded by the wall, illegal settlements and the so-called settler roads as their new borders. On the map of historical Palestine, the Palestinian areas are reduced to "spots on a leopard" as Karsten O. Tveit, a Norwegian reporter, so nicely formulates it in his book about Norwegian policies towards Israel (1978-96), while Israel controls the rest. 13% of South Africa was for the blacks during apartheid regime; today only 12% of historic Palestine is accessible for the Palestinians.

With huge unemployment, agricultural areas destroyed by the Wall, the only opportunity is to be cheap labour for the Israelis. Very few, if any, are let into Israel for work, but fortunately there are plans for joint Israeli-Palestinian industrial zones in Palestine. Imposed by the World Bank and financed by the EU (which is the milking cow for Israel's occupation) and others, there are plans to construct industrial zones close to Palestinian cities. Work will be created for poor Palestinians, and they’ll work for Israeli companies for far below the Israeli minimum wage. Actually, the Israeli business community is after many years finally talking about being able to compete in the international market, thanks to the cheap labour Palestinians will be for them. To put it even more clear; These industrial zones are nothing more than legitimizing Israeli occupation and maintaining Israeli control over Palestinian development, financed by European and other states.

During the last months, I’ve been walking next to the apartheid wall. Especially in Qalqilia (northwest of Palestine) and Jayyous area (village east of Qalqilia). It can be, and is, written several dissertations about the damage this wall has caused in Palestine. Only in Jayyous, a village of 4,500 people, the wall has confiscated 78% of the village's land. 2,000 olive trees have been completely destroyed (4,000 injured). 100 farmers have lost all their land. 1,000 workers have lost their work and around 300 families have been cut off from their main source of income. To cross the wall (or the security fence) to get to their own land on the other side, people in Jayyous must now cross two of the gates built, the south gate and north gate, which opens twice a day and have a complicated permit system. The occupying forces refuses to allow many from the same family to cross the fence. Only some (usually the oldest) from one family can cross the fence to harvest olives from their own trees on the other side. The land on the “Israeli side” is usually either confiscated by the nearby settlement, or access to it so reduced that it becomes meaningless to own the land and trees on the other side. This story repeats itself across the West Bank. Nearly 72,000 houses have been demolished since 2000 and around 300,000 olive trees are uprooted because of this wall. It is disastrous when the olive trees are the most important income source for 70% of the Palestinians.

Back in Jayyous, after a High Court decision to change the route of the Apartheid Wall, Occupation forces began uprooting trees and destroying farmland to make room for the rerouting of the Wall, resulting in even more loss for the Palestinians in Jayyous. People in Jayyous are fighting for there land these days even after all the losses they've had and the occupation forces keep crushing the demonstrations.

As we (we were a group) walked along the wall that parts Palestine, a friend of mine noticed that we had been trampled through a landscape where one might expect to find many snakes, but we didn't seen any. Only some turtles, holding on to their shells/houses, hastening away, in order to protect themselves from our tramp. The only snake in the area slithering through Palestinian land is today 450 km. long, still growing, and is 7-8 m. tall, while the Palestinians are holding on to their homes and land the best they can.

I didn't mention; The International Court of Justice (ICJ) in Hague, despite intense pressure from Israel, the US and EU Governments, confirmed (July 2005) what Palestinians and the world knew since the beginning of its planning and construction – The Wall is illegal.

For three months I have lived under this occupation, and I understand less for every day. News of the inhuman situation in Gaza, acts of violence in Hebron or poverty in Jenin fill our TV screens every day, and has done so for over 60 years, but still nothing happens. No sincere action is been taken against Israel. It’s all accepted. Israel's security is holy. So holy that no one cares about at what price, or the more significant: what about the Palestinians' security?

Since September, 3 people have been shot and killed by the occupying force in areas around Ramallah (left out are all the killings in the Gaza strip). 2 of them in Jalazone refugee camp, that is close to BirZeit and mentioned in my previous writings. Eyewitnesses say that they came too close to the security fence between the settlement Beit Il, and the camp, while Israeli forces, for their part, claim that they were ready to throw fire bombs against the settlement. What ever reason, it is difficult to understand why the soldiers had to shoot to kill. Why not a shot in the leg, arm or elsewhere to defuse the person, as this article in Haaretz questions? Why did the snipers from the occupation forces use the so-called "butterfly" or "dummy" bullets, which at hit spins around in the body and is synonymous with certain death? A type of bullet that is banned in most civilized countries, but the "largest democracy in the Middle East" doesn’t hesitate using against the Palestinians.

Since September the settlers in Palestine has killed a 14-year-old shepherd in the village Aser al Qablayh, and a 60-year-old shepherd in the Jenin district, and stolen their sheep without the occupation forces being able to do anything about it. Let alone all the difficulties the settlers have made during the harvest season in Hebron, in Kufar Qadum and so on the whole last month, and which the whole world witnessed. On Sunday, we met a 74-year-old man in Salfit, the nearest neighbour to the Ariel settlement, the largest in the West Bank with its own university, who was stripped of his 23 sheep (some of them even pregnant) by the settlers and thus lost his only source of income. The Palestinian Authorities are powerless, and the world is screaming for Israel’s security?

For three months I have lived under this occupation, but still I will never be able to understand what it is like to live under the occupation. With my magical passport, I will never be able to understand how it is to cross the numerous checkpoints as a Palestinian. I may have to stand in line for a few minutes and might even give them the evil eye, but I'll never understand what it is to be harassed by 18 years old soldiers, being stripped or whatever they please. The occupation exists in our heads, a friend of mine said to me the other day, they control everything. They tell us when we can drink, what we can drink. Even the air we breathe they control. 60 years of occupation is enough.

But for the West 60 years are not enough.

The West believes that the occupational force, Israel, can continue its abuse of force. Continue, until the Palestinians are able to guarantee Israel's security. One of the world's top 5 strongest military needs the Palestinians to guarantee their security… While the world's 5th strongest military can shoot their advanced bombs with their advanced aircrafts and helicopters and kill who ever they want, the world community demands that the Palestinians put their hands in the air, let them be shot at, see their country getting confiscated by the illegal settlements day by day and refuse to resist and even guarantee security for Israel.

That's the Oslo-agreement and the recent agreements in brief for you.

So the young Palestinians, not agreeing on giving up their land to the Zionist colonialists without resistance, that being peaceful or armed, will continue to go in and out of Israeli prisons, as over 75 % of Palestinian youth already have, and Israel will not have peace. Until someone gets the guts to make Israel stop the arbitrary arrests, use of force in Palestinian land and increasing the settlements/settlers in Palestine.

Israeli security doesn’t rely on building more checkpoints or higher walls; it relies on ending the problem: The occupation.