Israel trip part 4 - Day 5, Friday

Israel Trip, Part 4 - Day 5, Friday

Today we started by visiting a house that had been demolished & re-built. On the way there we passed the (current) end of the wall and could see that on the Israeli side this bit it is skinned with decorative stone covering (it is right beside a new settlement!), while the Palestinian side is plain concrete. We also stopped at a house in the lee of the wall, beside which were 2 demolished houses - both somewhat further from the wall (and further down the hill). This house is built on the side of the hill and has 2 stories below street level, and the corner uprights to support a roof for an extra floor above, but the day they were to put the roof on they were ordered to stop, not because they would be higher than the wall, but because it would spoil the view from the houses inside the wall which do come up above it! Opposite this house the wall is ridiculously high – partly as a retaining wall admittedly, but it must be about 40’ high (about 7 times the height of a man), and immediately across the road from the house… not a pleasant outlook. Carrying on through the village we came to the demolished/rebuilt house. The first house got demolished - (no building permit) - and the family were in a refugee camp for 7 years before Amos & The Holy Land Trusts rebuilt it for them. As soon as it was rebuilt a demolition order was put on it and 5 other houses in the village with 72 hours’ notice for an appeal - on a Wednesday evening, i.e. after the courts had closed, and they only work a half day on Thursday with Friday & Saturday off... There is your 72 hours gone! Thursday is really busy so the Holy Land Trust got onto their lawyer in Jerusalem - Drop everything and come and sort this please!.... well, he did manage to and they raised the funds to pay him - but the cases are still in the courts several years later. We then saw a house which is just the wrong side of the road that’s being built for the settlers to get in & out of a settlement just beside the village (the one overlooking the wall). This owner also refused to sell his land despite being offered a blank cheque, so they had to put a tunnel under the road to connect him to the village (costing an extra £1million) and are going to surround his house with an electrified fence 4m away from it all round except for the side connecting to the tunnel, which will have a locked gate which only his immediate family will be allowed through except by prior arrangement with the military... The road going past his house did go to Bethlehem, but is now closed off with a barrier meaning the whole village is going to be surrounded by the wall with only one way in & out. Incidentally the settler road comes into the sight line of another settlement across a valley, so half way down the slope, when it would come clear of some trees, the wall turns into an electric fence in order not to spoil their view!

From there we went to another house that was demolished and is being rebuilt. One day during the first Intifada the wife of the owner was visiting her mother in hospital in Jerusalem, her husband was at work and the kids at school when the bulldozers arrived without warning and started to demolish it. The woman's sister saw it across the valley & phoned her. She came & tried to stop them but could not get to them through military and police blocks - net result one destroyed family life. They have been staying with the in-laws in the meantime. The new one is not yet habitable (no windows or plumbing fittings for example) but well on the way... still the piles of rubble from the old house to clear, etc. Looking across the valley from it, we could see the most stupendous palace – turns out the owner was a Palestinian with dual American citizenship who had gone to the States as a young man and built up a chain of 26(?) 'gas stations' from which he was making a very nice pile. Net result this house, and a LOT of support for the village & neighborhood. These two re-builds have been done with help from Amos Trust/Holy Land Trust, and are a protest against the illegal occupation and control of planning permits by the Israelis.

Our next port of call was lunch in Battir public park - the next village across with the fancy palace. The locals said it was a 40 minute walk so most of us decided to walk. It turned out to be 40 minutes once we had reached an old road at the bottom of the valley, but to get to that involved crossing a lot of scrub, then terraced olive groves with the ground plowed and steep 'slides' down from one terrace to another - which took just under an hour to complete! Before we hit the terraces we crossed a trench dug by the Israeli army for their protection during one of the intifadas. The Israeli’s are trying to destroy the terracing around Battir (which goes back to Roman times) for another new settlement, but the Palestinians challenged this and have managed to get the area declared a World Heritage Site…. Looking out from the terrace of the restaurant we could see the railway in the distance (which follows the ‘Green line’ and, somewhat closer, the new ‘settlers only’ road with a swathe of land either side which has been ‘grabbed’ from Palestinian ownership.

After a very late lunch we went to an open air mass in the olive groves of Cremazon monastery which is about to lose them all to the Israeli bulldozers for a road to a settlement, and from there to a talk by Combatants for Peace - two Israeli ex-soldiers and a Palestinian ex-militant. As the Palestinian said - everyone wants peace but they all want their own peace - and everyone’s ideas about what constitutes a just peace is different, but they are trying to do something about that. So far the only person who is not prepared to negotiate has been the settler... but unfortunately there are a many more like him, and they have a lot of power in the Knesset. From there we went to what looked like quite a popular eatery on the edge of Beit Sahur called The Eagles Nest for a very welcome beer or three and our evening meal - excellent food, and then back to the hotel.

Reflection: The house demolitions are a very nasty way of making life as hard as possible for the Palestinians, in the hope that they will just give up & go, but it seems to be back-firing in much the same way as the Blitz backfired on the Germans by making the British more determined to resist. Roads to the Settlements (which are for Jews only) are taking huge amounts of farm land from the Palestinians – not just the width of the road but a wide ribbon either side as well – far wider than is needed for the wall itself, because they are not allowed within ‘X’ feet of the wall.