Hello from Occupied Palestine

[snip]

Getting in:
The most remarkable thing about going into Israel is
that there is one line for people holding Palestinian
ID cards, and one line for everyone else. One line for
Palestinians, and one for everyone else ...

The second thing that was remarkable for me was that I
was questioned for over four hours, and nearly turned
away. Very scary!

Traveling to and fro:
The first thing to know about traveling in Palestine
is that it is as likely that you will not be able to
get where you are going, and there is ~nothing~ you
can do about that. There are over 200 checkpoints and
roadblocks in the West Bank alone. Some of these are
permanent, established checkpoints with strict rules
about who passes and who doesn't, others are random
roadblocks with concrete barriers, piles of dirt and
stone, and still others are what they call flying
checkpoints, where the Israeli army puts their jeeps
in the middle of the road, and starts to check the IDs
of everyone traveling.

The first checkpoint I went through was the Kalandia
checkpoint. Everyone going into and out of Ramalla has
to pass through it. Going into Ramalla, you simply get
out of your taxi, pass through a very narrow
turnstile, and get into a new taxi on the other side.
At first it seemed like a small annoyance. But going
out, people wait in lines of four hours or more to
simply leave the city.

The second checkpoint that I didn't go through was the
Huwara check point, leading into the city of Nablus. I
am not allowed into Nablus, so a I took a taxi up a
road which only allows settlers on it, sprinted up the
side of a hill, and at the top another taxi picked me
up and shuttled me over some mountains. This is how
anyone who doesn't ~live~ in Nablus gets into the
city.

Then there was the checkpoint getting out of Nablus
where I saw a man who was blindfolded and standing in
a toilet stall. He has been there for 7 hours.

I spoke with one man named Mohammed Ayesh, who was
traveling from Nablus to Ramalla, which should take
about an hour, I guess. On his trip, he was detained
four seperate times. Once for four hours, once for
three, once for one half an hour, and once for an
hour.

And this has been the biggest lesson about the
occupation, to me, so far. The occupation is
absolutely people walking around with guns, people
dying stupidly, for no reason, women giving birth and
dying at checkpoints, and these sorts of high level
crises. But the occupation is also about thousands of
people waiting in line every day, to leave their
houses, to get to work, to go to school, to return
home in the evening. About stupid annoyances,
harassment for no reason, senseless complications.

Budrus:
I went to a demonstration against the wall in Budrus.
Budrus is a small farming village, which stands to
lose a little over 1000 dunams (4 dunams to an acre)
of land to the wall. In the area, there are 9 villages
in valleys, and 10 settlements up on top of the hills.
The proposed path of the wall would completely
encircle the 9 villages, cutting them off from
everything.

The village of Budrus is one place that succeeded, via
its protest, in moving the wall back to the Green
Line.

The resistance on the part of the villagers is fierce
and inspiring. As the Israeli army shot sound bombs
and rubber bullets and tear gas in to the crowd, young
boys and girls sang songs and chanted, and really old
women passed out cut up limes, to help people with the
tear gas.

Nablus:
Nablus is a tense city which has been cut off from all
outside contact for over two years. It is home to the
largest refugee camp in the West Bank, the Balata
Refugee Camp. The suicide bomber who killed 4 people
in Tel Aviv on Monday November 1st was from the Ashkar
refugee camp in Nablus, and when I arrived the entire
city was locked down. The home of the suicide bomber
had been demolished. Israeli special forces had gone
under cover as Palestinian women, and assassinated 3
people in the Ashkar refugee camp. A 14 year old boy
was shot in the neck and later died. The army blocked
off the hospital, not allowing anyone, including
ambulances in or out. There were house to house
searches in the old city in the middle of the night. 6
or 7 houses close to where I stayed were occupied for
several hours one night. The army threw the families
into the streets at 2 in the morning, and searched
each house until four in the morning. All this was
called "Operation Tel Aviv".

Kufer Tulth:
Maybe I see this village as a microcosm of what it is
like for farmers to live in the West Bank. Kufer Tulth
is a small farming village on very fertile and
beautiful land. It had a rich agricultural industry.
Right now it is facing many problems.

First there is the wall. It has grabbed up to 6000
dunams of land and caused the destruction of many
olive trees and other crops. Also, the main city in
the area is Qualquillya (sp??) which is completely
surrounded by a towering concrete wall. This makes it
impossible for the farmers to get their produce to
market there. It also makes it impossible for the city
dwellers to come to jobs in the village farms. There
is only one checkpoint through which you can get into
Qualquillya, and it is only open a few hours a day.
There are two roads that access this checkpoint, and
these roads are right on top of each other. One is for
settlers. One is for Palestinians.

The other problem that Kufer Tulth is facing is the
settlements. The village is nearly surrounded by
settlements, and they are constantly expanding. The
settlers harass the farmers in many ways including
shooting at them, uprooting their olive trees, cutting
them down, and putting chemicals in the soil so that
nothing can be grown. When the farmers do access their
land they are often chased off by armed settlers, who
are backed up by the Israeli army.

In addition, most of the roads on which you drive to
get to Kufer Tulth are closed off by one checkpoint or
another. It's difficult to get anywhere. One villager
I spoke with said the situation facing people living
in Kufer Tulth is "like waiting for death."

That's my report for now. I hope everyone is doing
really well! I'll try to check back in a week or so.
*******************************************************

Sarah Olson is a local independent reporter whose work has appeared on Free Speech Radio News, Making Contact, the Radical Tea Party and KALX's Amandla!