Maximum Empty Land

Kareem Jabran and Sue Swartz

The late Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai (z”l) began his poem “Jerusalem Ecology” with these words: The air above Jerusalem is filled with prayers and dreams. It is difficult to visit the city without being overwhelmed by its complex history, rich symbolism, religious overtones. So too is it difficult to visit Jerusalem without being brought low by reality – how division, discrimination, and suffering have become an intricate part of the city’s fabric. Our three -hour tour with Kareem Jabran of B’Tselem, The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, began near the Bethlehem checkpoint outside the city and followed the winding structures – cement, wire, and yellow checkpoints – that make up the Separation Wall and the de facto boundary between Israel and the West Bank.

“Maximum empty land and minimum Palestinians” has been Israeli policy since 1967 when Israel annexed the six square kilometers of East Jerusalem and an additional sixty-four square kilometers that were part of the West Bank, explained Jabran. The borders were re-drawn to include sparsely populated Palestinian areas, with residents given the option of “permanent resident” status or Israeli citizenship. Most chose the former, a status which allows them to work in Israel and have access to Israeli health and social benefits – though the whole arrangement is illegal under international law.

A PARTIAL LIST OF THE “SITES” ON OUR TOUR

The Wall in Abu Dis

• Outside the wall surrounding Bethlehem are the olive fields of Beit Jala. The route of the wall (which does not, suffice it to say, adhere to the Green Line) has made the land inaccessible to the villagers, and the Israeli authorities are allowing only owners to access the fields – which is to say, no workers may come to care for the trees , which lay in the shadow of the red-roofed settlement of Gilo and the rectangular apartments of Har Homa, slated for expansion by 3500 units into the groves.


• The Palestinian villages of Nu’man and Sheikh Sa’d, both of which sit at the unfortunate crossroads between the Jerusalem municipality, as defined by Israel, and the rest of the West Bank. Nu’man has one checkpoint outside the village, and its residents can no longer go to Jerusalem; each day the children walk nearly a mile and a half to school. Like Nu’man, Sheikh Sa’d can only be entered through a yellow metal checkpoint guarded by six rifle-toting soldiers. Because of the trajectory of the Wall, this village is also cut off from Jerusalem. Trash is piled precariously outside the checkpoint – there is no garbage collection within the fences.


• We see several demolished homes, piles of cement blocks, wire, and unidentifiable rubble. Since the beginning of the year, there have been 40 home demolitions in Jerusalem, including a seven-story structure, all for building without a permit that the Jerusalem Municipality more often than not refuses to give Palestinian residents.



Separation barrier in Issariya

• We travel the road to Ma’ale Adumim, past the Mount of Olives. Once the main road out of the area into the West Bank, it is now a secondary road that takes us to Abu Dis, a town sitting on the path of the Separation Wall, though it is a significant distance from West Jerusalem. We stand for several minutes at the huge cement section of the Wall that runs around and through Abu Dis and its surrounding fields. “Welcome to the Wall of Tears”, a piece of graffiti reads. “From the Warsaw Ghetto to Abu Dis” reads another. There are Geneva Initiative stickers, Meretz stickers. We are watched over by the remains of huge black and white photographs from a project by Face 2 Face, Israelis and Palestinians making funny and distorted faces.


• The wall surrounding Isawiyya, near Hebrew University. The sound of construction. A Palestinian man herding goats near the roadside. Another wall, this one of wire, surrounding the refugee camp of Shuafat, with the telltale yellow checkpoint fence.



Home demolition

• The Jewish settlement of Pisgat Ze’ev, a non-ideological settlement – established as a Jerusalem neighborhood, rather than by activists working to expand Israel’s borders –  with a green park and municipal buses sporting ads for Passover products. Though most Israelis now longer think of Pisgat Ze’ev as a settlement, it in fact sits well inside the West Bank .


• Barbed wire where a woman walks with a small child. Trash piled up on the inside of a fence. Al-Quds University, split in two by the logic of the Wall. Two soldiers eating sandwiches outside a checkpoint.


• The construction – by Palestinian laborers – of the E-1 tunnel linking Jerusalem to the rest of the West Bank, intended for Palestinian traffic only, and situated on farmlands seized from the Bedouin.

CAN’T ANYONE STOP THEM?
This question comes from our youngest tour participant, a 10-year-old American girl on the tour with her parents. No one has the heart to answer her, as we turn to Kareen Jabran to thank him. He tells us that the fieldwork for B’Tselem is intensely stressful, documenting the daily frustrations and inequalities, traveling this route to speak to people whose lives are directly affected by the occupation. He’s taken up smoking, he admits, three packs a day, as he drops us off and lights up another cigarette.