23 February 2012 | International Solidarity Movement, West Bank
Al-Khalil (Hebron) is a divided city. As a result of the Oslo agreements negotiated in the 1990s – the people of Al Khalil became familiar with two new terms – H1 and H2. H1 refers to 80% of the city, which is officially under control of the Palestinian Authority, while H2 makes up the remaining 20% and falls under full Israeli military control. In area H2 Palestinians are daily exposed to human rights violations to an extent that can hardly be overestated. Israel severely restricts Palestinian freedom of movement in H2 in the name of “separation,” but in practice this is a policy of segregation.
Passing through Checkpoint 56, one of eleven permantly staffed checkpoints betweeen H1 and H2, the consequences of this policy can be heard, seen, and smelled. Passing through the checkpoint, the scents, sounds and sights of the vibrant commercial city center give way to a deserted area where the only people to be seen are a few settlers strolling down emptied streets and Israeli soldiers posted on rooftoops and street corners.
Punishing the victims
Abed, resident of Shuhada Street
According to the latest UN report on freedom of movement in the West Bank, there are 90 different closure obstacles in the H2-area, that all interfere with freedom of movement for the Palestinians living in or having errands in H2. Closure obstacles can be staffed checkpoints, roadblocks, electric fences with barbed wire, and more. Along with these closures, Israel has imposed a ban on all Palestinian vehicular traffic on Shuhada street, which was once the vibrant main street – connecting the North with West of Al-Khalil. In large sections of Shuhada Street, the Israeli army also enforces a ban on pedestrian traffic.
The Oslo Agreement gave Israel the chance to normalize and justify military emergency conditions and zones, already in place since 1994. That year a known member of the settler community of Khalil, Baruch Goldstein, walked fully armed into the Ibrahami Mosque and killed 29 people – injuring a over 100. Israel’s response to this act reveals an important principle in Israels policy applied in the H2 area – collectivepunishment of the victims. Israel’s immediate response to the massacre was a 14 days of round-the-clock curfew – followed by stern restrictions on freedom of movement – with the argument that these measures would prevent reprisal against settlers.
As human rights worker Hisham Shabarati from Al-Haq laconically notes “If an Israeli kills a Palestinian – we will be punished – if an Israeli kills an Israeli – we will be punished.”
Israel used a situation of emergency to deny Palestinians basic human rights. With the argument of protecting a community of about 650 settlers they imposed, according to Shabarati, disproportionately harsh policies that far exceed any needs for security. Denying inhibatants of Shuhada Street to use their front door, for instance, serves an agenda of making life impossible for Palestininans in H2. As Shabarati stated “Israel is looking for excuses rather than reasons for imposing the policy of segregation. ”
Childhood on Shuhada Street during the Intifada
Abed is a young man living on Shuhada Street, who at the moment studies English at Hebron University. Remembering his childhood during the Second Intifada, week-long curfews and being denied entry/exit through his front door comes to his mind. “Often times,” he said, “the school would be closed for ten days and then open for one day and so on – the curfew was announced from jeeps driving around the city. We didn’t know for how long the curfew will last.”
According to statistics from B’tselem, Israel imposed curfews on Palestinians for a total of 377 days during the first three years of the Intifada (over 1/3 of the time). The Israeli military used every excuse it could find or devise to tighten an iron fist around the Palestinian population . Although the Israeli military excused repression of civilians during the Second Intifada in the name of “military emergency” – few restrictions on Palestinians’ freedom of movement in H2 have been removed since then. Given that the number of Israeli soldier and civilian casualties by Palestinians has been at a minimum since the end of the Intifada, these ’emergency measures’ cannot be justified.
Israei military checking IDs along Shuhada Street
There have been limited improvements. Some inhabitants of Shuhada Street have been allowed intermittent vehicular access to their houses, and in recent years Abed and his family have won the opportunity to receive guests in their house. However these regained freedoms are not anywhere near to the normalcy Palestinian residents of H2 expect. For Abed part of the struggle lies in not normalizing this situation of denied freedom within his own city. “Just three days ago,” he said, “I was detained for three hours on my way to the University. For me the situation feels somehow normal – but it is not!”
The 90 closure obstacles and thousands of soldiers stationed in Khalil are every day delaying and denying access to inhabitants of Khalil. Severe restrictions on freedom of movement, combined with direct military closure of over 500 shops, have successfully drained the H2 area of life and business. The Palestinans residents of Khalil have an obvious right to freedom of movement and to access Shuhada Street. Open Shuhada Street!
Andreas is a volunteer with International Solidarity Movement (name has been changed).
3 October 2011 | International Solidarity Movement, West Bank
For more pictures of Salim's olive harvest ordeal, click here.
As Palestinians in Salim began the first day of their annual olive harvest this morning, October 2nd, Israeli Occupation Forces locked the gate which gives those living in Salim access to their olive trees. The gate was unlocked at 7:00am to allow farmers to reach their trees, but shortly afterward, soldiers locked the gate for purported ‘security reasons’ around 9:00am according to many reports. When passing shortly after 8:00am, four ISM volunteers reported no problems with two soldiers guarding the gate. Sporadically throughout the day, the gate was opened a few times to allow access to the olive trees or village center. From 9:00am until 5:00pm, there was only a possibility for those living in Salim to reach their land through the single entrance/exit.
The village itself is divided — the settler only road has carved the land in two and beyond the road lies the majority of the olive trees which are adjacent to the illegal Israeli settlement, Elon Moreh. After the al-Aqsa Intifada, the gate was built not only to restrict movement for Palestinians in Salim to reach their land where the majority of trees are growing, but also to continually keep the residents of Salim completely enclosed. The gate now serves as the only entrance and exit for those living in Salim to reach their olive trees, many of which have been overgrazed by settler’s sheep.
Seven years ago, 100 sheep were stolen by settlers from Salim’s Abu Sultan while he and his family were bound up inside their home. Those sheep, now belonging to the Eskali family, graze on the lower branches of the trees belonging to the Ahmed Abul-Jabar’s family which then leave them barren, dried out, and unable to grow olives. It isn’t just overgrazing, however — the farmers from Salim are only able to tend to their trees twice a year due to the Israeli occupation and annexation of their historic land. In April, Palestinians are allowed to till the land and ensure the trees are ready to grow. The next time they are able to reach the groves is October when harvest season begins. Palestinians are restricted from being able to access their land in order to properly irrigate, prune, and care for the olive trees. Today, family members all remarked how poor this season was in particular due to these problems from the illegal Israeli occupation.
This morning marked the first of four allotted days Palestinians in Salim for the olive harvest. Before the Intifada, Salim’s farmers could spend a month properly picking the olives. Now, after applying for a permit through the Palestinian Authority’s Ministry of Agriculture which secondly gets approved through the Israeli District Coordination Office, residents of Salim are only given four days.
Many farmers today reported being frightened and scared of being threatened by the settlers surrounding Salim or being intimidated by the Israeli soldiers. While there were no clashes with settlers today as in the past, the closure of the main gate proved troublesome for many looking to access their land. Soldiers reluctantly unlocked the gate when Palestinians and ISM volunteers asked only to lock it again shortly after.
This is a bad story with a happy ending. It’s also a story that makes one happy, but still leaves a bit of a bitter taste in one’s mouth.
It’s the story of a Palestinian baby girl who was born during a period of unrelenting siege and curfew in her village and became ill, so that her parents had to carry her through the hills to a hospital. It’s the story of a Palestinian infant who needed a kidney transplant but for whom no suitable donor was found in the family; finally, a courageous South African woman decided to donate one of her kidneys to the little girl. It’s the story of how the donor got to Israel, after a complicated legal effort involving government authorities and after donations were collected to finance the operation. It’s the story of a successful transplant and the girl’s full and joyful recovery. But it is also a story that has something bad about it: At present, Israel is preventing the donor from visiting the girl whose life she saved.
Lina Taamallah
It was Lina Taamallah’s bad luck to be born on the day Israel launched Operation Defensive Shield in the West Bank, in the late winter of 2002. The delivery was in Rafadiyeh Hospital in Nablus. It was a rainy day, tanks and soldiers were everywhere, and most of the villages and towns were under curfew.
“It was a miracle that we made it to the hospital at all,” recalls her father, Fareed, 37, who holds a master’s degree in journalism and international relations from Birzeit University and works for the Palestinian Authority’s elections commission. His wife, Amina, a housewife, gave birth to Lina by C-section.
A few months later, Lina fell ill. For a week it was impossible to get her out of the house and to a doctor because of the curfew in their village, Qira, near Salfit. Lina, who developed a high fever and had severe diarrhea, was treated according to telephone instructions by a pediatrician, using medicines in her parents’ home.
In an article Fareed Taamallah published in The Los Angeles Times in May 2006, he described how his wife once had to carry Lina five kilometers through the hills of the West Bank to reach a doctor. In the wrenching article, Taamallah drew a connection between Lina’s ordeal at that time and the kidney failure that afflicted her a few months later.
When she was a year old, Lina contracted anemia. At first she was thought to be suffering from thalassemia, a blood disorder, but her parents had undergone genetic testing before the birth so that was ruled out. A few months later, Lina (who has three healthy siblings ) was diagnosed with renal failure. The family endured 16 hard months, in which she underwent dialysis every four hours, 24 hours a day, via a special machine suitable for infants.
Her physical development was arrested and her parents’ life became unendurable. Distraught, they turned their home into a kind of miniature hospital and they themselves became a medical team: It was essential to ensure that Lina did not come down with any infection. “I can’t bring myself to remember that period,” Fareed says now. “It was a nightmare.”
It was urgent to find a kidney donor for Lina, to save her life and then upgrade its quality. Her parents were willing to donate a kidney but were quickly found to be incompatible. Desperate, they looked for another solution. They examined the possibility of obtaining a kidney from Egypt or Pakistan, but discovered there are serious ethical problems about the way kidneys are harvested in those countries. Fareed says he did not know what to do.
Around this time, he met Anna Weekes (whose father is Jewish ), who later went by the name Majavu, from Cape Town; she was born in 1973. They met at a summer camp of Palestinian, Israeli and international peace activists in the West Bank. Anna stayed with the family after the camp disbanded and became a good friend. She knew Lina almost from the day of the girl’s birth. After a time, Anna was put on the Israeli authorities’ blacklist and deported due to her pro-Palestinian activity in the West Bank; she was in Britain at the time Lina fell ill. Fareed informed her about the development by e-mail, and she replied immediately that she would donate a kidney.
“I didn’t believe it. I thought she only wanted to express solidarity and friendship, and that the offer was meant just to make me happy,” Fareed says. He thanked Anna politely and added that at that point, he and his wife were then undergoing tests to see if they could be donors. Two months later, Fareed wrote to Anna that both they were incompatible, and Anna repeated her offer and emphasized that she was perfectly serious.
Anna then suggested that the transplant be done in Britain, however, under British law, organs must be donated by a member of the family. She decided to come to Israel for a compatibility check, and entered using a different passport which she carried legally. She underwent the examination in a private hospital in Nablus, in the meantime taking part in demonstrations against the separation fence in Bil’in and Budrus – and was again deported. She was found to be compatible.
“Now we had a compatible donor but one who could not enter the country,” Fareed recalls, going on to describe the family’s ordeal to save his daughter’s life: They considered having the operation done in South Africa, Egypt, Jordan or Pakistan, but discovered that in all these countries the donor had to be from the family. They found that the most suitable place for the transplant was Israel, where organs can be donated by people who are not family members after a professional committee considers the motives for the donation.
A few devoted friends of Fareed’s – Israeli peace activists who had heard about Lina’s illness – rallied to the cause. “We now faced two battles,” Fareed explains, “the battle to get Anna into the country and the battle to raise $40,000 to pay for the transplant.” They had to choose between Schneider Children’s Medical Center in Petah Tikva and Hadassah University Hospital in Ein Karem, Jerusalem. With the help of local friends, they chose the latter, which offered to do the operation at a discount. After lobbying, the Palestinian Authority agreed to cover half the cost of the transplant, the Peres Center for Peace also contributed and the rest was obtained through private donations. All that remained was to bring in Anna.
Attorney Gabi Lasky, who specializes in human rights cases, conducted negotiations with the Interior Ministry for Anna to be allowed to enter the country because of the special humanitarian situation. The authorities finally relented – on condition that Anna go directly from the airport to the hospital, have the kidney harvested and then return directly to the airport. Fareed himself was (and still is ) barred from entering Israel, and Lina’s mother took her for the preliminary tests at the hospital alone.
In September 2005, Lina entered Hadassah. Anna arrived from South Africa – after she was interrogated for several hours at the airport – and the operation was performed on October 2, 2005. Lina was three years old at the time. Her father also finally received a permit to be with her at the hospital. On the day of the operation, Anna’s fiance, Mandisi Majavu, arrived to be with her at the hospital.
The transplant was successfully performed by Prof. Ahmed Eid, head of the department of surgery at Hadassah in Ein Karem. Anna was discharged after a week and taken to Qira for recovery. She stayed there for about a month and flew home to South Africa on the day Lina was discharged. “We only had a few hours when the two of them were together,” Fareed relates.
On the last night of Anna’s stay in the village, the family held an improvised wedding reception for her and her fiance, who would be married a few weeks later in South Africa. The photos of the party in the family album reflect tremendous joy: Anna in a colorful and traditional embroidered Palestinian dress; Mandisi in a kaffiyeh and galabiya, both pure white, rolling amber beads with his fingers.
A short while later at the airport, Anna was again interrogated for a few hours before being allowed to leave. The security people told her she would never be allowed into Israel again. She did not sign any document, she said this week. Since then, she and Mandisi have become the parents of a daughter in South Africa. Her name: Bil’in Nkwenkwezi.
Lina recovered fully. We met her this week in the family’s second home, in an affluent suburb of El Bireh, next to Ramallah. She is a charming girl, full of life. One cannot see any outward signs of what she went through. She is in the fourth grade in the American School of Palestine, which is near her home.
Every few months she goes to Hadassah for a checkup, and because her father cannot enter Israel, an Israeli volunteer takes her from the checkpoint to the hospital. It’s usually Shraga Gorny, a 76-year-old Jerusalemite. Gorny, an electronics engineer, worked for 41 years at the Hebrew University and for the past 10, did medical research at Hadassah. Gorny regularly volunteers to drive Palestinian children for medical treatment at the hospital, which is how he met Lina and her family and got to know them well. (He is one of a group of Israelis – among them Herzliya-based peace activist Dorothy Naor – involved in such efforts.)
A few weeks ago, Gorny wrote me: “The girl who was like a matchstick before the transplant now looks beautiful and blooming.”
According to Fareed, Lina is not yet able to appreciate what Anna did for her. For her part, Anna told me this week, on the phone from Cape Town: “It was nothing. The body does not need two kidneys. I did not do anything special. I don’t think it was a noble act, as you said. I know the family and I have known Lina since she was born. I know the ordeals the family endured when they had to go through the hills by foot to get her to the hospital during the period of the curfew. It was only logical for me to donate a kidney for her. That was my duty. I just worry that Lina’s kidney will function and that no problems will arise in another few years.”
Anna is now a journalist in South Africa and raising Bil’in. Meanwhile, in a few weeks, the family will celebrate the sixth anniversary of the transplant. They celebrate Lina’s rebirth every year and their dream is for Anna to join them. Lina has never met Anna since the operation, but Anna is still banned from entering Israel.
A spokeswoman for the Interior Ministry’s Population and Immigration Authority sent the following response to Haaretz: “An examination of the details shows that there is no request by Mrs. Weekes to enter Israel. The interrogation she underwent when she left the country was not carried out by a representative of the authority, so, accordingly, in the absence of a reason of which we are not aware, there is nothing to prevent her from visiting Israel. “It should be clarified that if she wishes to enter the territories of the Palestinian Authority,” the spokeswoman continues, “she must arrange this with the coordinator of government activities in the territories. It is also desirable to check the question of why she was delayed [at the airport] with the relevant authorities.”
The Shin Bet security service provided this response to Haaretz: “Usually, the person authorized to either permit or deny the entry of Mrs. Weekes into Israel would be the interior minister, or someone associated with him. At this time, it is not his intention to recommend, to any authorized figure, to object to her entry unless negative up-to-date security-related information about her is received which would change his position.”
29 August 2011 | International Solidarity Movement, West Bank
On the final Friday of Ramadan, Palestinians and supporters alike peacefully marched towards Jerusalem from four directions in a symbolic attempt to enter Jerusalem, which has been illegally annexed by Israel, preventing fasting Muslims from worshiping during the final holy days of Ramadan. Yet more than just to protect the freedom of worship or even the freedom to access Jerusalem, Palestinians demonstrated the harshness of geopolitical obstructions meant to defy an identity tied to the history of the land. And just as symbolically, the Israeli military attempted to defy the everlasting humanity of Palestinians with a show of force, flying teargas, and typical oppression.
