Led by ICAHD’s Action Advocacy Officer Angela Godfrey-Goldstein, we traveled to the city of Rahat, the largest Bedouin city in Israel. With no overall planning, this city is a study in contrasts – trash-filled lots with corrugated metal shacks sit next to relatively large buildings housing several families. The old tribes are clustered loosely by neighborhood. One quarter of the city has no sewage services and the unemployment rate is high. The Bedouin are not allowed to raise animals in Israel, and in many cases they raise them illegally in the urban centers, creating unsanitary conditions.

Rawia Abu-Rabia, a lawyer working in Rahat, explained how the Bedouins have been fared since the founding of the state of Israel. Before 1948, about 100,000 semi-nomadic agricultural Bedouin lived in the Negev. With the founding of Israel, many were expelled or left outside the Israel’s borders, and the remaining 10,000 were forced into a small geographic area and most of their original lands given to Jewish settlements. The Bedouin are still disputing the ownership of their lands.

In the early 1960s, Israeli state established seven townships into which it forced the Bedouin. Today, half of the 150,000 Bedouin live in these townships, and the other half live in 45 “unrecognized” villages with no municipal services, paved roads, or infrastructure. Residents are prohibited from building permanent houses, and many homes have been demolished.

For lunch we went to one such “unrecognized” village, Tel Sheva, where we heard the story of Mariam and her Daughters of the Desert center. Mariam studied business administration in London, and when she returned, instead of entering into an arranged marriage, she pursued her dream of creating her own business, manufacturing and selling organic soaps, creams and healing ointments using techniques she learned from her grandmother. With our packed schedule of construction work, presentations, and tours, we ICAHD campers have had little chance to shop here, and we were eager to take some of Mariam’s merchandise off her hands for ourselves and as gifts for friends and family back home.

Next we drove through the nearby Jewish city of Be’er Sheva, with the highest standard of living in Israel. We were struck by the grassy landscaping, large parks and smooth paved roads, so different from the bumpy dusty tracks in Mariam’s village. On one end of town, the Israelis have built up a dirt mound to hide from view the ramshackle Bedouin tents a few hundred yards away.

As we drove back north toward Hebron, we could see how nearly every small road leading into this section of Highway 60, the main north-south route in the West Bank, has been obstructed by cement blocks, large rocks, or dirt mounds, making it impossible for the villagers to move equipment to their fields or bring produce out with wagons.

Our final stop for the day was the farm of Atta Jaber, whose house has been demolished by Israeli authorities and was rebuilt by ICAHD in 2000. Angela was relieved to see that the irrigation system, which had been destroyed when she visited a few weeks earlier, had been repaired. She had expected to find the fields of dead and dying crops. Atta Jaber told us how his family is under threat of eviction, despite having reached an agreement with the Israeli government allowing them to farm their lands.

Afterward, we were served tea as we relaxed in the shade; some of the children showed off for us, jumping into the cistern that holds the water supply for the 11 families there. As we enjoyed this typical Palestinian hospitality, we looked across Highway 60 at the settlement of Qiryat Arba, whose residents have greeted their Palestinian neighbors with nothing but violence and harassment; we wondered how long Atta Jaber and his family would be allowed to hold on to their land in the face of the ever-encroaching settlement snaking across all the hilltops in sight.

On our last morning in South Hebron Mountain, breakfast was interrupted by Israeli settlers advancing on shepherds outside of the Palestinian village of Susia. This happens here every couple of days, and the situation is usually diffused before a confrontation breaks out. Today, the settlers turned around and returned to the ideological Susia settlement, escorted by soldiers, after a short interaction with villagers and internationals. Still, this occurrence set a mood of claustrophobia for the internationals here, as we began to understand the lives of Palestinians whose lands are threatened from all sides.

After a couple hours of completing work in Susia (Such as clearing sand out of a cave and digging holes for future toilets and water storage), we left on a tour of H1, the area of Hebron City where Palestinians are allowed, and settlers are not. We walked first through the Old City, where the majority of shops were closed and boarded up, and we were followed by particularly unrelenting young vendors, shoving into our paths pendants of Handala, the iconic Palestinian cartoon of a 5-year old 1948 refugee. Our tour guide later explained the desperate economic situation of the Old City here, where hundreds of shops have been evicted by the army since the Second Intifada, and thousands of residents have left the city because of checkpoints and curfew, which lasted from late 2000 to late 2003. Curfew in the West Bank is not only at night, it is a 24-hour house arrest, with slots each week of a few hours when residents can leave their home to buy supplies. Needless to say, Hebron’s economy is still suffering greatly.

Walking through the city, evidence of settler violence is everywhere. Some areas of the market are situated below settlement apartments, so Palestinian shopkeepers have constructed roves of metal screen to protect people from objects thrown by settlers from windows. As you walk under the screens, you can see large rocks, metal poles, plastic bags (apparently, originally filled with stink water or urine), and layers of garbage. Around many corners, roads are blocked off to separate H1 and H2.

We also visited the Tomb of the Patriarchs, the religious site that theoretically began all of the violence. We entered the mosque half, where bullet holes are still visible from Baruch Goldstein’s attack, a settler who shot and killed 29 Muslims during prayer. It was this attack, in fact, that led to the curfew of Palestinians in Hebron, not an attack by Palestinians against settlers. Of six tombs, two each are situated in the Mosque and the adjacent synagogue, but the tombs of Abraham and Sarah can be viewed through windows from each side. Peeking in from the mosque, we could see Jewish worshippers through another window, and a pane of bullet-proof plastic between the windows. On our way out of the tomb, we passed a group of trainee Israeli soldiers on a tour of the mosque (a mat was laid down for them because they wore shoes inside). Hebron City certainly is one of the most disturbing places I have ever been.

We returned to work at Omer Kher, the Bedouin village beside Karmel settlement. This village has been here since 1980, and the settlement since 1986, and today the village has 22 families, about 150 people. Over the last five years, about 18 structures have been demolished. We originally planned on building a dozen toilets for the village, but a few days before construction began, the military confiscated out building supplies and threatened to demolish all illegal structures: basically, the entire village. Instead, we helped to clear fields, build a new chicken coup, and repair a road leading from one section of the village to another. The village was incredibly hospitable and welcoming, serving us delicious rice, tea, and traditional Bedouin bread. The children of the village were especially excited, following us through the worksite while giggling and giving us hugs. During work breaks, I spent time with a kind and charismatic 16-year old girl from the village, who happily showed me around and brought me into the hills with a donkey to gather water. Many villagers here are highly educated and ambitious, an interesting contrast to their extremely modest living conditions. Because many of their structures are demolished, they live in tents of sheet metal and canvas. Electricity is top priority for the village: electric lines run right over them into the settlement, although they are not permitted to have electricity. In a village like this, it is clear how the military takes extraordinary steps to stunt economic development.

After about an hour of work, a few military vehicles pulled into the village, and soldiers and one settler told us to stop working on the road. It was illegal to lay down gravel, so for a while we continued clearing rocks, to which the soldiers also objected. Ezra, an Israeli activist, wanted to continue working, but the villagers were understandably nervous about further demolitions. Without much resistance, we stopped working, leaving our work unfinished. The villagers thanked us for our solidarity, even though the concrete results of our help were miniscule, and we all had a renewed sense of respect for Palestinians who continue to resist amidst great risk and frustration. This was a sad end to our activism in South Hebron, but it was a telling example of military treatment of Palestinian villages here. We returned to Anata, disappointed and shocked.

Summer Camp 2009: Welcome to Israel

The day I arrived here a right-wing extremist walked into Open House, a lesbian and gay center in Tel Aviv, and pulled out a gun, killing three and injuring 15.

The next morning, at 5:00 a.m., Palestinian occupants of two houses in Jerusalem were evicted and Jewish settlers installed in their place.

Welcome to Israel.

I am here as part of a 60-member delegation to the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions seventh annual summer camp. We will rebuild two houses here in Anata, a village of 30,000 on the outskirts of East Jerusalem, and construct 11 public toilets in the south of Hebron. If there is time remaining, we will work on a project in the Jordan Valley.

We are staying at Arabeia House, which has been demolished and reconstructed four times. It features a spacious downstairs room where the women sleep on mattresses lined up on the floor. The men sleep in two covered areas on the large terrace cut into the hillside. The house has been under a demolition order since June.

On the hill across the way, on the other side of the infamous “Separation Barrier,” as Israeli officials call it (it is known to the rest of the world as the Apartheid Wall), is a military base and prison. Looking east, you can see the Dead Sea and the mountains of Jordan.

On our first full day here, we were taken on a tour of Anata. It was a striking contrast with the well-kept Jewish neighborhood in the south of Jerusalem where we met for our orientation. The first stop is the top of the hill, where a Bedouin encampment is also under a demolition order. The soldiers across the way find the corrugated metal buildings unsightly and want to move the Bedouins, who drive their sheep by our compound in the mornings, into the village. “Whoever heard of animals living in the middle of the village?” asks Salim Shawamreh, who lives in Arabeia House with his wife, for whom the center is named.

Anata is split in three parts; one section is considered part of Jerusalem, all of which has been annexed by Israel; the rest is split between Areas B and C, administrative designations that were applied to the Occupied Territories by the 1995 Oslo Agreement that was supposed to lead to an independent Palestinian state. Areas with the B designation are under Palestinian civil administration and Israeli military control, while C areas are under full Israeli control. All the houses in the Area C section of Anata are under demolition orders, having been built without going through the expensive and tortuous Israeli permit process, which almost always results in denial for Palestinian applicants.

Summer Camp 2009: Welcome to Israel

After our introduction to the village, we began our real work here—building houses for two families whose homes were demolished by Israeli bulldozers. I was working on a house for the Sbaih family, located on a hill overlooking a section of the wall under construction. Looking down, we saw U.S.-made Caterpillar backhoes and bulldozers moving materials around. Up at our site, we were working on pure people power. The internationals, most of them from Spain, cheerfully passed cinder blocks and other materials along human chains. As I passed buckets back and forth, I learned three new words in Arabic: “raba,” sand; “hasma,” gravel; and “mai,” water. These three materials were combined with cement in a small mixer; the resulting concrete was poured into wooden forms to make the columns that will support the walls.

At 5:30, some of us knocked off for the day to attend a demonstration in Jerusalem outside Sheikh Jarrah, where the Hannoun and Ghawi families had been evicted that morning. Their houses were part of a group of 28 that had been bought by Jews in the late 19th century. The previous occupants had abandoned them in 1929 after violence erupted against the growing influx of Zionist immigrants into what was then the British Mandate of Palestine. Israeli courts have ruled that the property should be returned to Jewish ownership. “If they really wanted to be just, they should also return the homes in the rest of Jerusalem that were owned by Palestinians in 1948, and there are a lot more of them,” says Meir Margalit, a staff member at the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions.

In November 2008, another family was evicted. Um Kamel, whose husband died of a heart attack two weeks after the event, erected a tent outside her home, which was occupied by settlers. This summer, activists from the International Solidarity Movement were staying in the threatened houses 24 hours a day, but they failed to prevent the evictions. Two hundred police and soldiers participated in the raid, in which eleven internationals and two Israelis were arrested. Charlie Wood, an ISM activist who was arrested and released, described how he watched from the back of the police wagon as settlers streamed into the empty houses, shaking hands and joking with police.

Yesterday’s demonstration began as a somber gathering of 100 or so outside the barriers police had erected in front of the entrance to Sheik Jarrah. Things heated up when chanting began and some people knocked over two of the metal racks, although no one entered the cordoned-off area. The knot of five or six police who had been huddled near the entrance was reinforced by another dozen, all carrying machine guns. They got into a formation and rushed toward the end with the downed barriers, pushing the demonstrators back a few yards, and a small group of police remained outside the barriers on the sidewalk.

A dance ensued for the next hour, in which police periodically pushed the protesters to the traffic island and then across the street and then retreated. At least three people were arrested.

Eventually we were joined by two more ICAHD staffers who had been to the vigil in Tel Aviv outside the lesbian and gay center. Our first full day, and our stay here is already marked with actions commemorating lives lost and broken.

Welcome to Israel indeed.