Qawawis is a small village with big problems. After an Israeli court ruled that villagers had the right to live on their land, settlers have harassed them with humiliation and violence. ISM and other organizations have kept a constant presence in the village.
Here’s an account from one of the volunteers who recently stayed in Qawawis. — via thismuchicansayistrue, an ISM media coordinator’s blog.
by Henry Norr
Berkeley Daily Planet
Life in the tiny Palestinian hamlet of Qawawis seems straight out of the Old Testament, but that doesn’t stop the Jewish settlers in the hilltop outposts that surround the place from doing their best to destroy it. And if something isn’t done soon about the settlers’ latest threat—denying Qawawis’s shepherds access to watering holes their flocks depend on—the villagers might have no choice but to abandon their ancestral homes and lands.
Qawawis, located near the southern tip of the occupied West Bank, south of the city of Hebron, is home to just four extended families and a few hundred sheep and goats. Only one of the families has a house; the others live in caves carved—originally by nature, later by human hand—out of the region’s limestone hills.
Like their neighbors in nearby At-Twani and dozens of other villages throughout the south Hebron hills, the residents of Qawawis have faced harassment from the settlers since the 1980s. (See “Means of Expulsion: Violence, Harassment and Lawlessness against Palestinians in the Southern Hebron Hills,” a report released in July 2005 by the Israeli human-rights group B’Tselem, and the reports of the Christian Peacemaker Team on the poisoning of wells, the beating of schoolchildren and international monitors, and other forms of settler harassment in At-Twani.
For a while things in Qawawis got so bad that the villagers had to move out altogether. When they left, settlers promptly moved into their caves, until the Israeli military decided to clear everyone out (for “security reasons”) and brought in bulldozers to seal the caves with rubble.
But in March of this year, after winning an order from Israel’s High Court confirming their right to their land, the villagers came back to Qawawis, cleaned up the mess left by the settlers and the army, and reclaimed their homes. In hopes of deterring settler retaliation, the villagers requested help from progressive Israelis and internationals, and ever since the International Solidarity Movement has provided a steady stream of volunteers to stay in the village and accompany the shepherds to their fields.
Neither the court order nor the international presence has stopped the harassment, though. At first the settlers showed up almost daily, often wearing masks, shouting insults and threats, waving guns and throwing rocks, sometimes attempting to enter the villagers’ caves, and beating locals and internationals alike. (See the account posted on April 1, 2005 by Kasper Lundberg, an ISM volunteer from Denmark, at electronicintifada.net/v2/article3735.shtml.)
While I was in Qawawis in late July, the settlers came up with a new trick: two of them showed up on horseback, galloping through the village’s olive groves and right past the caves. They didn’t stay long and caused no particular problem, but under the circumstances, their very appearance on village land was an act of intimidation. As I followed them, trying to snap their pictures, I could only imagine what would happen to a Palestinian who had the temerity to approach the settlers’ outposts.
What really has Qawawis’s residents worried at the moment, however, is the threat to its always precarious water supply. In July, after a suicide bombing in the Israeli coastal city of Netanya, the settlers informed the villagers that they are no longer permitted to graze their sheep and goats within 150 meters of a road that leads to one of the outposts.
That order, which appears to have no legal basis—not even one of the military orders that provide pseudo-legitimacy for most of the occupation’s abuses—denies Qawawis a significant portion of its land. But the immediate problem is that the prohibited strip includes two watering holes to which the village’s herders have taken their sheep and goats since time immemorial. To keep the animals alive in the area’s stifling summer heat, the villagers have had to share the water from their own wells in the village. But the capacity of those wells is limited, and the villagers say it’s insufficient to supply both them and their animals (not to mention the internationals) for long.
Time standing still
At a glance, you might wonder why the settlers bother with Qawawis. The population usually totals only about 20, though it sometimes rises to 50 or 60, depending on how many offspring and relatives are at home at a given moment, as opposed to staying in the nearby town of Al-Karmel (a 40-minute walk), sleeping in the hills with their flocks, or—as in the case of one young man I met—studying electrical engineering at the university in Hebron. If you drive by on the highway that runs near the place, all you see are the solitary house (three bare rooms, no plumbing or kitchen) and the stone walls that surround the cave entrances and pens for the sheep and goats.
There’s no running water, just a couple of wells. Electricity arrived only this summer, in the form of a generator provided by Ta’ayush, a progressive Israeli organization with both Jewish and Arab members; the generator runs for just an hour and a half or two every evening. Each cave, as well as the outdoor platforms the families sometimes eat on and the canvas-roofed shelter the villagers recently built for visiting internationals, now has a bare light bulb and an outlet, but so far they have had no visible effect on the residents’ lifestyle: there’s no radio, TV, or any other appliance except a video camera left by a visiting international, which remains something of a mystery to the locals.
Daily life revolves around the sheep and goats, as it has in this area for millennia. At sun-up, men from each family take their flocks—about 30 or 40 animals each—out to graze on the rocky fields that surround the village, or sometimes to the adjoining olive groves. The women, meanwhile, prepare the food and tend to the homes, crops, and kids. (Except for constant infusions of tea and sugar, all the food I was served during my three-day stay was homegrown, including delicious flat bread baked in tabuun, or traditional outdoor ovens.)
By around 10 a.m., at least in the summer, the heat begins to get overwhelming, and the shepherds bring the flocks back to their stone-walled pens in the village. Then everyone seems to disappear for a rest and the midday meal. At 3:30 or 4 p.m, it’s off to graze again until dusk. By 9:30, when the generator cuts out, most everyone seems to have retired, until the routine begins again the next morning.
All in all, it’s a simple, peaceful life—or it would be if not for the settlers and the warplanes constantly audible and occasionally visible overhead. (There’s apparently an Israeli air force training base nearby—perhaps they’re practicing for a raid on Iran’s nuclear sites?)
The planes, though, are easy to ignore. The settlers are not. The shepherds continually look over their shoulders to see who might be sneaking up on them; the boys study each car that passes on the settler road.
Running dry
So far, the villagers have complied with the settlers’ demand that they stay away from the road and the watering holes near it—though they seem to value the presence of the international volunteers, they obviously don’t believe that we’re capable of protecting them from the consequences of defying the order.
The villagers have, however, tried to interest international humanitarian organizations in the threat they face. While I was there, a jeep from the International Committee of the Red Cross pulled up to the village, carrying an investigator, a translator, and a three-person film crew.
At the time the family that owns the house was away (they were in town with relatives visiting from Saudi Arabia), but one of the other elders had a key, and the house was quickly opened, and a half-dozen of the men, plus the two internationals, assembled there to meet with the ICRC team.
In addition to describing past incidents of harassment, the villagers explained the impending water crisis. The ICRC investigator tried hard to get the villagers to give him exact figures for Qawawis’s population as well as for the capacity in cubic meters of each of the “water systems” in question. The men were unable to respond with the precision he wanted, but after much consultation among them, they arrived at the key conclusion: if the sheep and goats as well as the human residents have to use the village wells, they’ll likely run dry in as few as thirty days, or sometime around the end of August.
The ICRC investigator promised to file an urgent report with the Israeli authorities. Whether that will do any good remains to be seen. But unless someone intervenes, the residents of Qawawis may again be forced to leave, and the settlers will have succeeded in cleansing another small piece of Palestine of its legitimate owners.
Update:
After this article was written, activists from the Israeli grassroots organization Ta’ayush brought a water tanker truck to Qawawis. With the activists standing by to deter settler interference, the truck pumped a tankful of water out of one of the prohibited watering holes, then into one of the wells the residents still have access to.
This emergency response has apparently eliminated the immediate threat to the survival of Qawawis, but it’s obviously not a long-term solution. That, of course, would begin with the removal of all Israeli settlements from the occupied Palestinian territories, as required by the Fourth Geneva Convention, United Nations Security Council Resolution 242, and dozens of subsequent U.N. resolutions.
by Ilan Pappe
There is an amazing gap between the global discourse on the Gaza Disengagement Plan of the Sharon government and the local realities on the ground. Whereas the Israeli pullout is being portrayed in international public fora as an historic decision, which offers a rare opportunity for peace in the area, local observers – especially in Palestine – warn that the plan is not likely to advance the peace process; in fact, it is seen as a deliberate attempt by the Israelis to obstruct any future progress towards an acceptable solution.
Read the rest at MIFTA.
by Joharah Baker
Published at Palestine Report on August 31, 2005
The road to Bir Nabala has always been rocky. Whether the traveler comes from Jerusalem or Ramallah, the turn toward Bir Nabala from Al Ram intersection has never been a pleasant trip. Potholes and unpaved sections of the road have proven detrimental to cars and the ubiquitous dust clouds make leisurely walking an impossible feat.
Nonetheless, the trip, unpleasant as it may be, has never been impossible. Nestled in between Jerusalem and Ramallah, Bir Nabala has long acted as a go-between for people of both cities.
That is until Israel decided to build its West Bank separation wall around Jerusalem, closing off all Palestinian communities around it, Bir Nabala included.
According to the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs’ (OCHA) June 2005 humanitarian update, the separation wall will create the so-called “Bir Nabala enclave. This enclave includes five villages, all part of what the PLO Negotiations Affairs Department considers Metropolitan Jerusalem: Bir Nabala, Al Jib, Judeira, Qalandia town and lower Beit Hanina. With the wall effectively cutting off all West Bank areas and even parts of Arab East Jerusalem from the center of the city, Bir Nabala, located about 10 kilometers north of Jerusalem will be virtually isolated, encircled from all sides.
The enclave, in which more than 15,000 people live, will be linked to Ramallah by underpasses and a road fenced from both sides. The above ground highway, which currently links northern-area Jewish settlements such as Givat Zeev to Jerusalem, will become an Israeli-only road. Residents of Bir Nabala, mostly West Bank ID holders, will have no further access to Jerusalem save if they obtain special permits from Israeli authorities and travel through the Qalandiya checkpoint via Ramallah. Even the town of Al Ram – currently a five-minute drive away, will be virtually inaccessible to the people of Bir Nabala, except through a “detour” through Ramallah and back again.
“We still don’t know exactly what is going to happen,” says Yousef Abed, a social science and Islamic history school teacher and also coordinator for the Popular Committee for Resisting the Wall, a grassroots committee put together by representatives from the five villages. Still, he has a pretty good idea.
Peering down at a large aerial map of northern Jerusalem, Abed smoothly traces the steady orange line that is the wall. Like an insidious snake, the wall, once completed, will encircle Bir Nabala from three sides, swallowing up hundreds of dunams of land. The eastern sector of the town, or Al Mawahel, which now connects to the main Jerusalem-Ramallah Road will most likely be cut off in the middle by an Israeli patrolled gate.
“Most of the people living on this road have Jerusalem ID cards and hired a lawyer so that the gate would not put them on the Bir Nabala side,” Abed says with a hint of resentment. The fact is the gate will also divide families from Bir Nabala from one another, families who will only be able to reach each other by traveling via the Qalandiya checkpoint. Abed says there are a total of 1,200 people or 200 families who will be severed from Bir Nabala proper once this gate is set up.
For years, scores of Jerusalemites have made Bir Nabala a place for both their homes and businesses, given that housing is less expensive and business in the West Bank is often more profitable than in Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem. Now, however, many are returning to Jerusalem as the ominous shadow of the separation wall looms over them.
“We estimated that 2,000 Jerusalem ID holders have left Bir Nabala already,” says Abed. That is a large chunk, if you consider that over half of Bir Nabala’s population, which Abed puts at approximately 8,000, are not from the village itself.
Abu Marwan, however, says he is willing to sweat it out. The owner of the “Engineering for Electrical Motors” shop in the heart of Bir Nabala, Abu Marwan is as easy-going as they come. A father of three, this businessman from Jerusalem says he will not abandon his Bir Nabala store unless he absolutely has to.
“This is my sixth year in Bir Nabala,” he says. “I am not thinking of moving shop. Not unless I have to.”
Abu Marwan, who admits he left his store in East Jerusalem to begin business in Bir Nabala in order to avoid the high Israeli-imposed taxes in the occupied city, is optimistic that business will continue, even with the wall. “Maybe I will find business from neighboring villages,” he says.
This seems to be a long shot given the slump in business since the Intifada began five years ago. “For me, business has gone down 90 percent since the Intifada,” Abu Marwan estimates. “At first it dropped slowly, but now with people afraid of what is going to happen when the wall comes up, it has been reduced to a trickle. It is like a leaky faucet,” he says with half a smile.
And unlike most Jerusalemites, Abu Marwan is not intimidated by the Israeli threat to confiscate the ID cards of those who do not make their “center of life” in Jerusalem. “The Jerusalem ID card does not define me,” he says defiantly. “Even if they take it away, it is no big deal.” For him, the only real benefit to having residency status in Jerusalem is the accessibility to medical insurance at Israeli hospitals. “That is the one thing that really holds us to it.”
For the people of Bir Nabala, medical facilities are fast becoming a major concern. After the wall goes up, Al Maqassed Hospital and Augusta Victoria Hospital, the two major Arab hospitals in East Jerusalem will be out of reach. Ramallah’s hospitals will become their only viable solution, but with only one access road to this major West Bank city, one guess is as good as the next on how fast and how easy it will be to actually get there.
The underpass, which is currently under construction, will run from the middle of Bir Nabala, through the adjacent town of Judeira and Qalandiya town before opening onto Ramallah. Israeli authorities also said they planned to establish six agricultural gates in the Bir Nabala enclave, so farmers may have access to the land.
Or at least the land left over after Israel finishes with it. According to both Abed and a copy of Israeli military order T-10-05, 147 dunams of land from Bir Nabala will be expropriated for the wall’s infrastructure in the southern sector of the town. An additional 360 dunams just behind the wall will also be expropriated. Although the wall will not be built on top of this land, it will be rendered useless to the people.
This is not the first time land from Bir Nabala has been confiscated by Israeli authorities. Back in 1996, 800 dunams of land from this village alone were fenced off and labeled “green area”. On the mountainside below the Tomb of Samuel, the rows of olive trees and rolling green fields all became one of Israel’s “nature reserves”. The land – and olive trees – all belonged to Bir Nabala residents, some even belonging to Abed’s family.
Schools are another concern for Bir Nabala. While some students attend the village’s four small government schools, many find their education outside its boundaries. Many private schools are either in Jerusalem, Ramallah or somewhere in between in Dahiet Al Barid or Shufat.
Nur, a shy, soft-spoken high school senior goes to the Iman School in Shufat. In the past, crossing the checkpoint at Dahiet Al Barid never posed a problem, especially since she was “under age” – Israeli authorities do not require anyone under the age of 16 to carry any form of identification. However, this summer, as Nur took preparatory classes for the high school matriculation examination, the Tawjihi, she was forced to take dangerous back roads to circumvent the checkpoint to be able to reach her school.
With the start of classes last week, Nur tried a different tactic. “I heard if you prove you are going to school, they will not bother you at the checkpoint,” she said. With a letter from the school in hand, Nur now crosses the checkpoint unhindered.
Still, once the wall is up and the gate severing Bir Nabala from the main road to Jerusalem is closed off, Nur and her sisters – who also go to schools on the other side of the checkpoint – can only hope that some kind of solution will be offered. With the pressures of the Tawjihi already pressing down hard on this studious young woman, the wall is just an added burden. “The terrible thing is not knowing,” she says. “All we can do is hope.”
by Ali Waked and Efrat Weiss
This is a translation from Hebrew of an article appearing in YNet
A group of settlers verbally attacked diplomats of the EU and Israeli activists of the organization “Breaking the Silence” this morning (Wednesday) in Kiryat Arba, during one of the tours the organization holds weekly in the Westbank and the Hebron area for Israeli and international groups.
A convoy of 8 vehicles arrived at Kiryat Arba that morning, accompanied by two members of “Breaking the Silence”. The settlement’s security officer noticed the guests and alerted more security personnel who delayed the convoy close to the town council building. Dozens of settlers headed towards the group and began yelling and cursing.
Avihai Sharon, one of the two Israeli activists, told /ynet/ that all hell broke loose and the diplomats were very stressed, and claimed that the visitors had not posed any kind of provocation: “We’re not wearing anything special, not bearing banners or signs, not calling out any slogans, and the diplomats don’t even dare getting out of their vehicle.”
Policemen arrived and the parties negotiated with their help, as the settlers demanded the Israeli activists and diplomats be sent away. Eventually the police decided to let the tour proceed, although a confrontation was noted between the police and the diplomats who claimed they were being jeopardized. They also stated their intention to file a complaint to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
The police and army reported that no acts of physical violence had taken
place.
