9th June 2014 | International Solidarity Movement, Khalil team | Iqrit, Occupied Palestine
(Photo by ISM)
Yesterday morning on the 8th June, Israeli police forces raided the village of Iqrit (located on the northern tip of Israel, within eyesight of Lebanon). The police uprooted trees, destroyed and confiscated all the personal belongings of Palestinian activists present in the village. Furthermore they beat and violently arrested 3 Palestinian men who were present in the village at the time. The 3 arrested are: Walla Sbait, Nidal Khoury and Jeries Khiatt. They were taken to the police station in Nahariyya, where they were kept in detention over night.
Confiscated belongings loaded into an Israeli truck. (Photo by Iqrit activists)
Today at 8:30 AM the three detainees were brought before the Kiryat Gat Magistrates’ Court, following a police request for an extension of their detention. The police have charged the detainees with trespassing the land owned by the ILA, obstructing the work of public officials, assaulting a public employee and endangering public order.
(Photo by Iqrit activists)
The court ruled that Nidal Khoury is kept in detention until Wednesday 11th of June. Walaa Sbeit and Jeries Khiatt was sentenced house arrest until Sunday 15th of June and they are not allowed to go back to Iqrit for 60 days.
In 1948, the village was home to 600 Christian Palestinians. (Photo of archive picture by Jonathan Cook/Al Jazeera)
As the season of Advent approached in November 1948, the Israeli military forced residents of Iqrit and the neighboring village of Kufr Bir’im —all citizens of the newly created state of Israel— to leave their homes near the northern border with Lebanon because of military operations in the area. The Israeli forces made a promise to the inhabitants, that they could return to their homes after 15 days. The people of Iqrit are still waiting. In July 1951, the Israeli High Court ruled that the people of Iqrit and Kufr Bir’im had the right to return to their homes. The military refused to comply, and on Christmas Eve 1951 blew up all houses in both villages.
Only the churches and cemeteries were left intact. (Photo by ISM)
Shortly thereafter, all village lands were confiscated by the state and has been rented out to the nearby Kibbutz for their cows to graze until this day. Since then, decades of demonstrations and legal appeals for the villagers’ right to return have seen a string of favorable decisions by courts and commissions that have resulted only in more broken promises and unenforced rulings.In the 1970s, the government had granted use of the cemetery —allowing only the dead to return to Iqrit after they lived and died in exile at Kufr Yasif, Rameh, Haifa or other places. The original villagers and their descendants —now around 1,500 people scattered across northern Israel— are allowed only to hold services in the church and bury their dead in the cemetery. Every first Saturday of the month there has been a mass held at the village church and every year a summer camp has been organised on the hillside. In August 2012 the third generation reclaimed their village.
One of the returned youth, standing on the ruins of his grandparents house. (Photo by ISM)
Around 20 descendants from Iqrit took the initiative to begin resurrecting the village despite the village’s legal limbo. The activists make sure that the village is constantly inhabited, sleeping in tents, under the stars or in rooms attached to the church. The group consists of university students, factory and restaurant workers, and teachers.
Tin shacks serving as a toilet and shower. (Photo by ISM)
Their attempts to construct or plant anything in the village have been met with immediate demolition by the Israeli authorities. But over time, they’ve been able to add a few amenities, including solar panels on the church roof, determined to bring back life to Iqrit.
(Photo by ISM)
Iqrit’s 80 homes are long gone, but the activists goal is to rebuild Iqrit for the villagers-in-exile, refusing only to return to their home in coffins, but alive. The activists have returned to the area and are discussing on how to proceed with their campaign, determined not to be intimidated by Israeli forces and their harassment
In Mapping Exile and Return: Palestinian Dispossession and a Political Theology for a Shared Future, American Mennonite theologian and aid worker Alain Epp Weaver explores a legacy of Palestinian Christian exile, and struggle for return. The book’s terrain ranges from the ethnically-cleansed villages of the Galilee to the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
Weaver focuses particularly on contending geographies: how “Palestinians have been ‘abolished from the map,’ in the words of Palestinian cartographer Salman Abu-Sitta,” and the prospect of “counter-cartographies that subvert colonialism’s map-making.”
His book encompasses the work of specialists, like Abu-Sitta’s maps, the writings of Edward Said, the Institute for Palestine Studies’ encyclopedic volume All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948, as well as “memory production” by thousands of Palestinians through collaborations like the web archive Palestine Remembered.
“In the face of Zionist rejection of Palestinian refugee return, international indifference, and an ineffectual and compromising Palestinian leadership for whom the refugee question is a source of irritation, Palestinian refugees pin their hopes on memory,” Weaver writes.
Significantly, he also includes extended histories of two key initiatives: the struggles for return by the ethnically-cleansed Christian villagers of Kufr Birim and Iqrit in the Galilee, and Zochrot, an Israeli organization dedicated to “remembering the Nakba in Hebrew.”
Rites of return
The residents of Kufr Birim and Iqrit, Weaver writes, “pioneered and in turn inspired activism on the part of other internally displaced persons (IDPs) inside Israel” through mass mobilizations, as well as “rites of return.”
Through the latter, ranging from personal visits to destroyed family homes to community festivals, like Iqrit’s recent Easter celebrations, villagers “carry on a dual struggle, both against the Israeli state and its institutions that deny their rights to the land and against sedentary tendencies and forgetfulness,” Weaver writes.
Later he likens Zochrot’s public mappings of ethnically-cleansed villages to “at least some practices of Palestinian refugees” as “exilic vigils.”
But at times, Weaver’s heavy-handed application of his own theology, and efforts to find its reflection in Palestinian Christianity, pose a bigger challenge.
His analysis is steeped in the writings of another American Mennonite, John Howard Yoder, popular among Catholic Workers and other Christian activists, as well as Mennonites. Like his Mennonite forebears, Yoder viewed nations and their political institutions critically.
At his most succinct, he told a 1957 Mennonite peace conference near Karlsruhe, Germany, “The state is a pagan institution in which a Christian would not normally hold a position” (John Howard Yoder, Discipleship as Political Responsibility, Scottsdale, Pennsylvania, Herald Press, 2003, p. 25).
Following Yoder’s “theology of galut [exile] as vocation,” Weaver argues for “accepting one’s exilic status, even when one is at home,” and advocates a binationalism “differentiated from the one-state solution.”
Theological cartography
His prescription bears some resemblance to the description of a “very fluid model” of “overlapping claims” in ancient Palestine offered by Hebrew Bible scholar Rachel Havrelock.
And in each case study in the book, Weaver searches “for a theological cartography of land and return in which exile and return function as potentially interpenetrating, instead of irreducibly opposed, realities.”
In his section on Edward Said, Weaver may find what he seeks. In another, he fairly claims, “Abu-Sitta’s maps can (but need not) be interpreted as escaping the statist character of most national maps.”
At a low point, Weaver reproaches recently-retired Melkite Greek Catholic Archbishop Elias Chacour, a displaced resident of Kufr Birim and noted writer as well as community leader, for a statement of Chacour’s own, fairly standard Christian belief.
“[N]ow we have a new understanding of the Chosenness,” Chacour wrote in 1999. “Who is Chosen? Man and Woman — every man and every woman — are invited to take part in the divine banquet” (“Reconciliation and Justice: Living with the Memory,” Holy Land, Hollow Jubilee: God, Justice, and the Palestinians, ed. Naim Ateek and Michael Prior (London: Melisende, 1999), p. 112).
This clear opinion “fails to do justice to Chacour’s nuance at other points in his writings,” Weaver states, before divining the position he would prefer Chacour hold instead from his choice of a Bible translation. In such passages, it becomes painfully obvious that what Weaver hopes to find is simply not there.
In 1970, black liberation theologian James H. Cone wrote that “there can be no theology of the gospel which does not arise from an oppressed community.” Theology, Cone added, “cannot be separated from the community which it represents” (James H. Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation: Fortieth Anniversary Edition, Maryknoll, New York, Orbis Books, 2010, p. 5, 9).
Divide and rule
Weaver’s account offers a testimony to both the world’s oldest Christian community’s theological response to its own oppression, and the risks of viewing its struggle through a lens that may, in another context, make perfect sense.
In Kairos Palestine’s recent Easter Alert, Hind Khoury, Sabeel’s vice-president and former Palestinian Authority minister of Jerusalem affairs and Palestine Liberation Organization ambassador to France, writes, “Each one of us is targeted in our very survival and the integrity of our community, as in the integrity of our identity and our culture. Even our memory and our future are being hijacked.”
“One of the latest such laws, for example, decreed that Palestinian Christians are not Arabs in order to further divide and rule and confuse Palestinian cohesive identity,” she added.
Palestinians facing not only occupation and exile, but also denial of their heritage and sectarian attempts to fragment it, may find belonging, identity and nationality more liberatory, for themselves and the world around them, than those of us who share Weaver’s “location within political and theological maps of power and privilege” as “descendant[s] of European immigrants who settled on land claimed by Pawnee and Cheyenne nations,” among a great many others.
And it is the commonality of Palestinian experience and destiny that politically-engaged Palestinian Christians stress, from religious figures like Greek Orthodox ArchbishopAtallah Hanna to boycott, divestment and sanctions organizer Sandra Tamari, who wrote for Mondoweiss last year: “I am uncomfortable with the identity of Palestinian Christian because — thankfully — Palestinians have not fallen into sectarian traps that divide along religious lines.”
“We must create spaces for listening to the broad spectrum of Palestinian stories,” she added. “We cannot do that by excluding the majority of Palestinians who happen to be Muslims.”
Nor, while Israel’s sectarian legislation and attempts to recruit Christians into its army, and what the Catholic Ordinaries of the Holy Land yesterday called “a wave of anti-Christian fanaticism and violence” by Israelis continue, is it likely to happen through the detachment Yoder suggested and Weaver champions.
Instead most Palestinians, regardless of faith, may find more promise in the “firm national position of the Christians in refusing to join a military that exercises violence against the rights of the Palestinian people,” expressed Friday by Archbishop Hannah and retired Latin Patriarch Michel Sabbah, and in the Easter sentiments of Sabbah’s successor, current Patriarch Fouad Twal: “We are the rightful/lawful owners, and you will hear our voice before all governments worldwide.”
Recording the testimony of Nakba survivors is essential for educating future generations of Palestinians, say oral historians. (APA images)
Tucked into a quiet basement suite in the main building of the immaculate Islamic University of Gaza campus, the Oral History Center could at first be mistaken for a bursar or registrar’s office.
But its stacks of metal filing cabinets may contain more memories per square meter than any other place in the occupied Gaza Strip.
Researcher Nermin Habib said that the center conducted interviews with those who had witnessed the Nakba (Arabic for catastrophe), the ethnic cleansing ahead of Israel’s foundation in 1948, as well as the Naksa (setback), Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, Golan Heights and Sinai in 1967.
“We have already conducted 1,500 oral interviews and archived audio files from them,” Habib added. “A meeting can last anywhere from half an hour, to two or three hours. We can also have follow-up meetings.
“We have also published 120 [interviews] in written form. In the future, we plan video interviews. We hope to use them to produce a documentary film about the history of Palestine.”
Launched as part of the university’s faculty of arts in 1998, the Oral History Center has a staff of experienced field researchers and recent graduates from the university’s departments of history, press and media, and social studies.
“It is by experience, by relationships,” said Habib. “We built the archive from scratch. There is no systematic reference center for such information in Gaza.”
The Oral History Center researches a number of fields. Beyond displacement and refugee life, it has programs on Palestinian regions, folklore, politics and culture, as well as Israeli violations of Palestinian rights.
“We are trying our best to maintain our Palestinian identity and Palestinian heritage, customs and traditions, like food and dress, after the Nakba,” said Habib. “Oral history has links with all fields of knowledge, like folk medicine. It’s part of our work as historical researchers to convey this information.
“We seek to document the history of the Palestinian people and the main events that have shaped the Palestinian cause.”
The Gaza Strip has the highest proportion of refugees of any territory in the world. Few aspects of life, from the economy and politics, to the broad range of local foods and dialects from elsewhere in Palestine, are unaffected by the Nakba, during which approximately 750,000 Palestinians were displaced by Zionist forces and hundreds of villages and cities depopulated.
The Israeli army expelled 400,000 to 450,000 more Palestinians during the Naksa in 1967, according to the Palestinian refugee advocacy group BADIL.
By the end of 2011, at least 7.4 million Palestinians had been displaced, 66 percent of a global Palestinian population of 11.2 million, making them the world’s largest and longest-standing group of refugees, according to a recent survey by BADIL.
But with the 1948 ethnic cleansing more than 65 years in the past, the ranks of those who witnessed it firsthand, in the Gaza Strip and elsewhere, are quickly declining.
“We started thinking about how the generation that survived the Nakba are leaving us,” said Haidar Eid of the Oral History Project, another effort to collect accounts of 1948.
The project team has recorded 64 hours of interviews, Eid said. Time to complete the rest is running out.
“Most of these people are dying. For the project, they are supposed to have been at least ten when the Nakba happened. So we are talking about people in their seventies and eighties.”
“One of the major demands of the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement is the implementation of United Nations Resolution 194, which clearly calls for the return of all Palestinian refugees to the lands, villages and towns from which they were ethnically cleansed in 1948 and their compensation,” Eid said. “With the Oral History Project, we are supporting this demand and making it real. We move from ethnic cleansing as an abstract term into the practicality, the life itself.
“An interesting question we sometimes ask is whether they would accept any solution that would compromise their right of return. There is a consensus among all the refugees we’ve interviewed that no compromise on the right of return would be accepted. For them, that is not a solution.”
Gaza’s Oral History Project works in cooperation with Palestine Remembered, an online archive of information on the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, and the Israeli organization Zochrot, which advocates the return of Palestinian refugees. Eid called this “a form of co-resistance” as opposed to projects which normalize Israel’s ethnic cleansing and occupation of Palestine.
“The onslaught of normalization projects has taken place at the expense of two-thirds of the Palestinian people who are refugees,” he added, drawing a distinction with other kinds of cooperation between Palestinians and Israelis. “1948 is the original sin, rather than 1967, on which these projects are all based.”
Young volunteers conduct most of the Oral History Project’s interviews. Many belong to the Palestinian Students’ Campaign for the Academic Boycott of Israel, PACBI’s youth affiliate.
“Revisiting the trauma”
“It’s tiring, I must tell you,” Eid said. “I have been avoiding recording with people myself, because it’s extremely difficult. Revisiting the trauma is not easy. But they would be very happy to talk about everything before 1948.”
Oral History Project interviews consist of three sections: Palestine before 1948, its ethnic cleansing and refugee life.
“We ask about mundane things, the daily life of people in the village or city, weddings, funerals and coffee shops,” Eid said. “We ask if the people still have a thobe [a traditional garment] or anything from the village. They usually love it.
“When they come closer to the moment of truth, when the person was forced from their village, it’s heartbreaking. Many start crying. They can give you minute details about the strangest things.”
Accounts can be not only emotional, but brutal as well. “Those Palestinians who refused to leave Palestine were basically massacred,” Eid said.
“This is the embodiment of the Zionist dream of creating a state with a Jewish majority. To guarantee that, you need to have a process of either ethnic cleansing or genocide.”
A refugee himself, Eid cited his own background to illustrate the importance of oral history to the Palestinian narrative.
“I’m from a village called Zarnuga, which is on the outskirts of Ramle [in present-day Israel],” he said. “I found only three pictures of Zarnuga. Only three.”
“The history of the Tantura massacre relies heavily on oral history. Now people know that a massacre took place in the Tantura village, about 30 meters south of Haifa, based on recorded oral history,” Eid added.
Oral history also has an important role in the continuity of Palestinian culture. “This work has a lot of benefit for new Palestinian generations,” said Nermid Habib. “It allows them to know that what their grandparents were doing,”
Israel “trying to whitewash”
On 12 August, a number of Palestine solidarity groups issued an open letter protesting an international conference on oral history planned by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem for June 2014, calling for oral historians to boycott it.
PACBI endorsed the letter, and Eid and more than 350 others working in the field of oral history have signed it.
“Israel is trying to whitewash and beautify its image,” Eid said. “One of the questions that we want to raise here in Palestine, as academics and also as refugees, is whether the Nakba will be part of the conference, whether the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948 will be addressed. I think this is a rhetorical question, the answer to which we know.”
Participation in the conference by oral historians from the Gaza Strip is out of the question. Most Palestinians are banned from entering present-day Israel. The 1954 Prevention of Infiltration Law even criminalizes the presence of Palestinian refugees in Israel.
But through these longstanding exclusions, Israel may inadvertently highlight the relevance of the work on refugees, as well as the darker elements of its history and society.
“The Zionist narrative has been the recognized narrative in the West,” Eid said. “Before 1948, there was nothing. There was a gap between 1948 and 2,000 years before that.
“We are helping to provide an alternative to it. It’s part of what we call the counter-narrative.”
“The stories of the old are more confident than the history books,” Habib said. “They witnessed the events themselves. There are written histories as well. It’s essential to add a new kind of reference.”
Israel continues to violate the terms of a 2012 ceasefire by attacking farmers in Gaza. (Eyad Al Baba / APA images)
Farming in the Gaza Strip’s “buffer zone” is hazardous under the best circumstances. Israeli troops routinely shoot live ammunition at Palestinian farmers in the free-fire area, which stretches hundreds of meters into the besieged territory from the barrier separating it and Israel, and invade their fields with tanks and bulldozers.
But Israel’s aggression against civilians in the area has escalated since the Egyptian army deposed elected president Muhammad Morsi and installed a new government on 3 July, according to Gaza’s farmers.
“After the coup in Egypt, the Israelis began shooting more heavily,” said Abu Jamal Abu Taima, a farmer in Khuzaa, a village in the Khan Younis area of southern Gaza.
Abu Jamal is the mukhtar, or elected leader, of the Abu Taima family, 3,500 refugees fromBir al-Saba — a town in present-day Israel called Beersheva — now scattered among the farmlands outside Khan Younis.
He and two dozen other farmers from the family spoke to The Electronic Intifada during and after a meeting they held in Khuzaa.
“Egypt was the guarantor of the last ceasefire agreement [in 2012],” he said. “Now the Israelis are free to do whatever they want.”
“Just a few months ago, there was no gunfire. Now there is. We aren’t even in season yet, but they have already started to shoot.”
Morsi’s government brokered a ceasefire between Israel and Palestinian resistance groups on 21 November last year, ending eight days of Israeli strikes on the Gaza Strip and retaliatory fire from groups in the territory.
As part of the agreement, Israel reduced the “buffer zone,” which it had imposed in 2005, from 300 meters to 100 meters, according to the the Israeli military’s civil administrative unit, COGAT.
Targeted
In May this year, following months of conflicting claims about the size of the area by COGAT and the Israeli military’s spokesperson, COGAT stated that the “buffer zone” remained at 300 meters (“IDF: ‘Forbidden zone’ in Gaza three times larger than previously stated,” +972 Magazine, 12 May 2013).
But farmers say Israeli gunfire has extended the zone even further.
“According to the ceasefire, farmers could reach nearly all their lands,” Abu Jamal Abu Taima said. “These days, the Israelis are shooting farmers at 500 meters [from the boundary].”
He is not the only farmer who attributes the shift to turmoil in Egypt.
“After the coup, the Israelis expanded the area farmers couldn’t reach to 500 meters,” Abed al-Rasoul Abu Taima said. “Anyone coming closer to the separation barrier will be shot.”
Other farmers say they have been targeted even further from the barrier.
“The Israelis shot at me at 800 meters,” Zakaria Abu Taima said. “I was preparing to plant when they opened fire. I hid in an iron pipe, but the bullets came right through it.”
The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) documented one Israeli shelling attack, twelve shootings, and seven incursions — resulting in a death and seven injuries, including two children — in the “buffer zone” during July and August.
Since the beginning of September, Israeli forces have undertaken at least two further incursions to level farmland.
Many other attacks, especially shootings that do not result in deaths or injuries, are never reported, according to farmers.
“It’s curious now, when you are talking about these limited incursions,” said Khalil Shaheen, head of PCHR’s economic and social rights unit.
“Violations define the restricted area. Officially, according to COGAT, the de jure area is 300 meters. But de facto, it depends on the incursions.”
Israel’s attacks in the “buffer zone,” especially those beyond 300 meters, discourage farmers from growing trees or building structures, like electrical pumps or wells.
“They don’t allow farmers to plant trees or build infrastructure,” said Dr. Nabil Abu Shammala, director of policy and planning at the Palestinian ministry of agriculture and fisheries. “They claim this is for reasons of their security.
“Agricultural activities in this area face many kinds of risks. Farmers avoid it not only because of gunfire, but also the destruction of land and infrastructure,” he added.
“We are afraid”
Amid the current rise in Israeli attacks, the potential destruction of their land particularly worries Gaza’s farmers.
The threat of Israeli bulldozers leveling fields has convinced many to delay the start of their fall planting.
“We are afraid to reach our land because, after we plant, the Israelis may come and destroy everything,” explained Abdul Azia Mahmoud Abu Taima.
“It’s regular for the bulldozers to level our land every week,” said Abed el-Aziz Abu Taima. “No one can stop them.”
When asked about the bulldozers used to raze their fields, farmers described the distinctive triangular treads of Caterpillar’s weaponized D-9 bulldozers.
“Caterpillar is the main weapon of destruction for the Israelis in the ‘buffer zone,’” said PCHR’s Shaheen. “They haven’t changed their company policy, despite all the information they’ve been given on the use of their machines here.
“After the farmers heard that they could access their lands up to 100 meters, they planted them. Now they cannot reach them. They lost their harvest. Israeli bulldozers levelled it.
“It’s very important to show what Caterpillar is doing, and that they know what’s happening.”
Under current circumstances, farmers face a delayed season with heightened dangers and an uncertain outcome.
“We are waiting until November to begin planting,” Zakaria Abu Taima said. “Usually, we would have started by now.”
“Of course we will plant,” remarked Abu Jamal Abu Taima. “But before we harvest, the Israelis may come with their bulldozers.”
21 July 2012 | International Solidarity Movement, West Bank
Walking through Askar Refugee Camp | Alex Marley
A short distance from Nablus one finds the community of Askar camp. What appears as a suburb or cut-off of the city, is actually a refugee camp. Established in 1964, it today houses some 6,000 people in 1 square kilometre. The inhabitants are both descendants of and those themselves that were once pushed off their lands by Israel. This year, it has been 20 years since the first solidarity funding showed up in the camp, and 10 years since the camp was devastated by the Israeli army during the second intifada.
The secretary of the Social Development Center (SDC) for children and the disabled, explains the dire situation in the camp. Most of the week, water is only available 2 hours per day. 30% of the inhabitants are unemployed and lack a real income. The camp finally established a medical clinic, but it has only one doctor for the 6,000 residents of the camp.
Some improvements have been made. Swedish workers arrived in 1992, and the following year, a three-year support package of 30,000 dollars arrived. Buildings and buses have been acquired, and international volunteers still work with the SDC.
For the residents of the camp, one fact remains. No amount of money or construction will bring a solution. The refugee camp is a temporary home for a people who were forced from their true homes. True solidarity lies in the fight for the right to return.
A teacher at the SDC showed members of the International Solidarity Movement a second attraction that the camp has to offer visitors. At the site of an old kindergarten, 7 white tombstones makes up a monument for victims of the second intifada, ensuring some of what occurred in April 2002 will not be forgotten.
The 7 tombstones include a man shot in the head by the Israeli army while going to his neighbour to ask for food, three men killed by a missile that struck their residential area, the daughter of one of the missile victims who was shot and killed, and another who was very ill and died when an ambulance coming for him was denied entrance to the camp by Israeli forces.
The tombstones of victims of Israeli military violence during the second intifada | Alex Marley
The Israeli military machine devastated Askar Camp during the second intifada. The road at the entrance of the camp was trafficked by tanks instead of cars. From the mountain top across the valley, Israeli forces were able to shoot directly into the camp. Many houses were razed and badly damaged. In total, Askar Camp lost 33 lives during the second intifada. Many were arrested and 50 residents remain to today in Israeli prisons.
Although much has changed since then, a resident of the camp, Naser, can still identify big problems for the refugee camp.
Medicine and equipment for care of children with disabilities is very expensive, and must go through Israel, which further complicates its arrival. There is a lack of assistance from both the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), and the Palestinian Authority. Both are represented in the camp, but do not offer enough to the inhabitants.
The entire camp falls under Area C, meaning it is under full Israeli civil and military control. Thus, Israeli soldiers and armed settlers are known to enter the area and harass its residents. Extremist settlers use the presence of the Tomb of Yousef as a premise to invade the area and increase their influence.
For the children of Askar camp, their minds and memories are saturated with the trauma of living under Israeli military occupation.
The Social Development Center has its own girls team in football. Naser explains how they have travelled to a number of countries in Europe to play games and meet other teams. In the end, they all return to a reality of soldiers and restrictions on movement.
While the children are able to secure a 20-day visa to visit Europe, they are not allowed to visit their own capital city, only 45 minutes away.
“Our dream is to visit Jerusalem.”
Hakim Maghribi and Alex Marley are volunteers with the International Solidarity Movement (names have been changed).
