Refugees in Jerusalem

After passing through a small checkpoint, your senses are immediately assaulted by the heavy stench of burning garbage coming from the dumpsters that line the main road into the heart of the camp. The interior is a concrete jungle. It’s a tangle of cement structures suffering from neglect and poorly constructed additions to make room for the ever growing population. The streets and alleys are narrow and littered with waste, and a mess of telephone cables dangle above. The wall is visible from the edge of the camp, as is the surrounding settlement of Pisgat Ze’ev, a stark contrast to the chaos of Shu’fat.

The Shu’fat refugee camp lies just north of Jerusalem and is the only one in the West Bank inside its municipal boundaries (meaning many of its residents are blue ID holders and are not restricted by the Israeli closures in the West Bank). The camp was created in 1966 when the Jordanian Government and the UN attracted the initial inhabitants from their homes, in what is now the Jewish Quarter of the Old City, with promises of new houses and lands to cultivate. More refugees came in 1967 when Israel occupied Jerusalem and the West Bank, and the camp quickly became overpopulated. Today, the problem of overpopulation continues for many reasons: high birth rates, people can no longer afford the cost of living in East Jerusalem, or have been forced out and want to retain their Jerusalem IDs. Current population figures suggest the camp hosts around 20 to 22,000 residents, 10,290 of which are designated as refugees by the United Nations.

As in most refugee camps, there is little infrastructure and high unemployment, and with the building of the wall, many of these problems are getting worse. The influx of people from different places means that Shu’fat is increasingly a place of anonymous urban life with a lack of authority; all of which is evident upon visiting the camp.

Then there are the children. Everywhere you go in Shu’fat you see children: boys kicking beat-up soccer balls off old buildings, girls chatting on the steps outside their home, and brothers and sisters returning from the corner store with treats in hand. Everywhere, groups of children. Some of them greet us with smiles and say “shalom, or hello” while others look at us with a mixture of confusion and curiosity. What is evident upon a trip through the camp is not just that a large portion of the population consists of children (almost half we are told), but that they have no place for recreation. The creation of the wall has cut off expansion of the camp leaving little space for these kids to run and play.

Fortunately, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) is very active in the camp and there are quite a few international NGOs who sponsor activities and programs as well. One of the highlights is the community center where children come for after school activities including arts and crafts, English lessons, and other recreational activities. The center has a very dedicated staff of volunteers led by Dr. Salim (pictured below in the middle), a family practitioner who splits his time between his clinic in Jerusalem and work at the center. It is through places like the community center where you see the hope in the otherwise dire story of Shu’fat. It is a place where the chaos of the streets is confronted by the community building and fellowship of the many programs offered by Dr. Salim and his team of volunteers. Most importantly, the children are not idle, and left to their own devices. They are taking part in something that will help shape their futures in a positive way. Unfortunately, however, these children are a few hundred out of thousands living in the camp. So more needs to be done, and, hopefully, as more and more people here about the positive stories like this, the more and more positive changes will take place.

Bridging the Divide: an Israeli Volunteer in Shu’fat Refugee Camp

Anne comes every Wednesday from 9 to 2 to the community center in Shu’fat refugee camp to help the Palestinian women and men undergo physical therapy treatment. She has been a professional physical therapist for twenty three years, specializing in a technique called integrative manual therapy. She is also an Israeli.

Anne came to Israel via New York in 1974. She was a Zionist, served in the military, and later moved to the settlement of Pisgat Ze’ev. Things changed for her, however, after her first trip to the States in over thirty years. On the suggestion of a friend, she decided to attend a peace camp in Yosemite. Of the 250 people who took part in the peace camp, 50 were Israeli, 50 where Palestinian, and the rest were Arab and Jewish Americans. This was her first face to face contact with the “other,” and she came to realize, despite the depictions in the Israeli media, they were people, they were human.

In 2007, she moved from Pisgat Ze’ev to the Palestinian-Israeli village of Abu Gosh where she met a German nun who told her about the community center in Shu’fat refugee camp. Up to that point, her only experience of Shu’fat was the smoke she could see from her neighboring home in Pisgat Ze’ev billowing from the camp after incursions, and the stories of terrorists she heard on the news. Despite warnings from friends of the dangers of the camp, she decided to go and see for her self and learn more about the community center. Dr. Salim, the director of the camp, and his staff were very welcoming, and, in February of 2007, she began volunteering once a week.

Over the past year and a half that she has been going to the center, word of mouth has gotten out about an Israeli physical therapist in the camp, and the response has been great. The Palestinians really appreciate her work and they get to experience a different side of the Jewish people, a contrast to soldiers and settlers. Many of her patients have said that just her coming there means a lot, and while most of the Palestinians from the camp can go to Israeli clinics, this is the first time an Israeli has come to the camp to treat people.

Although she is just one person, her story is not unique, or rather her motivations are not unique. Many Israelis that I have met like Anne say they decided to get involved after they have met Palestinians and come to realize that they are human beings just like anyone else. Unfortunately, the mutual hatred, fear, and ignorance that people on both sides of this conflict have, compounded by the construction of the separation barrier, makes the leap between cultures and people very difficult. But it can be done, and Anne is a shinning example of it.

Breaking the Silence in Hebron

Our bus, full of internationals and Israelis, drove through the paved roads of the Jewish Settlement of Qiryat Arba on our way to Hebron. We were all there for a tour conducted by a group of former Israeli soldiers who are now active in speaking out about the horrors of occupation. Their organization, aptly named “Breaking the Silence,” has been giving tours of Hebron for the past four years. That day, however, we never made it into Hebron.

Hebron is the only city in the West Bank with a Jewish settlement in its center. It consists of two areas: H1, home to around 120,000 Palestinians and under the control of the Palestinian Authority, and H2, where 30,000 Palestinians remain under the control of the Israeli military who protect the 800 settler inhabitants. At the center of the old city of Hebron is the tomb of the patriarchs where Abraham and his descendants are believed to be buried, and is thus holy to all three Abrahamic faiths—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. H2 remains the source of much tension and conflict between the settlers and Palestinians who live there.

We could not make our destination because of the large crowd of settlers who blocked our bus from entering. At first, it was a small crowd of children but soon grew to include women and older men, along with the leaders of the extremists who live there. Several police were there to escort us (Breaking the silence had just won a decision in the High Court to continue conducting their tours with the cooperation of the local authorities), but they were not enough. At one point, our tour guides got out of the bus to speak with the police and document the situation for the court. It was a circus. Our guides were filming the settlers and the police response, or lack thereof, and the settlers were filming us while the police filmed everyone. The children tried to block Yehuda, one of our guides, from filming but he was crafty and tall enough to evade them. One of the men had a bullhorn and began preaching to us in Hebrew, but I didn’t get what he was saying. The police couldn’t move them out of the way because they are not allowed to physically contact the children, or the babies whom some of the settlers placed in carriages in front of the bus.

These are the most extreme of the settlers. They are ideological settlers who want the Palestinians to be expunged from the land they believe was given to them by God. For the EAs in Hebron, most of their time is spent protecting Palestinians from settler harassment, including walking the children of Cordoba school to and from school each morning in an effort to dissuade the settler children from throwing stones and attacking them, although not always successfully. Most settlers, on the other hand, are not like this. They are economic settlers who are living in the West Bank because of the subsidized housing provided by the Israeli government, and they do not present a physical threat to the Palestinians.

In the end, after waiting over two hours, we were told we could drive a few hundred meters into the old city of Hebron, but our guides declined because they didn’t want to give the authorities the satisfaction of allowing us to conduct a partial tour, which would not have been beneficial when they bring their case to court, yet again.

But the day was not totally lost. We went with Yehuda to the South Hebron hills and heard from a family who have had there olive trees uprooted and wells poisoned and have courageously stayed their ground in the face of consistent settler harassment. And we got to hear Yehuda, a three year veteran of the Israeli Defense Forces who spent over a year stationed inside H2, give his testimony of what he saw. We heard about the IDF’s policy of constant presence through things like incursions, with or without intelligence of a threat, into homes so as to make sure the Palestinian communities fear them. We heard about the IDF using Palestinians as human shields to inspect suspicious objects on the side of the road thought to be bombs, or to approach homes of suspected militants. And we heard about the strategy of urban warfare whereby the military blows holes through the homes of Palestinians so they don’t have to walk through the streets where they might be vulnerable to attacks. Finally, we heard why he helped start “Breaking the Silence.” He said he was deeply disturbed at how what he saw and did became normalized; how soldiers lose their humanity by slowly and consistently crossing the lines of morality; how decent human beings become monsters, with serious mental health consequences after leaving service; and how all of this can happen without even noticing it.

Of course, those serving in the IDF are not unique. Decent people involved in military actions around the world experience the same thing to be sure. The question is can something be done to end the suffering of the Palestinians and the young IDF soldiers who become dehumanized because of occupation. I personally think that something can and must be done to end the cycle of violence and dehumanization. Thankfully, people like Yehuda are forcing Israeli society and soldiers to question what occupation does to them. They have been to over 1,000 classrooms telling children about the ugly side of occupation, a contrast to the heroic images they are inundated with from an early age. They are doing important work and their story needs to be heard.

Checkpoints in Jerusalem

One of our main, weekly tasks as EAs is to monitor the checkpoints that connect the West Bank to Jerusalem. These checkpoints pose a major challenge for many Palestinians in and around the Jerusalem area trying to gain access to the city. This is a potential problem for all Palestinians and especially for those without blue Israeli identity cards (a blue ID means the holder has a residency in Jerusalem while a green means that he or she is from the West Bank). Palestinians with green ID cards can travel into Jerusalem only if they have a valid permit (e.g. work or medical). However, even a valid permit will not ensure passage when there are closures for security and other reasons. For instance, from May 6 to 17 there was a closure imposed on the West Bank during which Israel’s Independence Day, Al Nakba Day, and President Bush’s visit to Israel all transpired. So Palestinians with valid working permits were out of work for a period of 12 days during the closures.

When there are no closures, we try to go at least 4 times a week to two separate checkpoints: Zeitun (pictured above), a pedestrian only terminal down the hill behind the Mount of Olives where we live, and Qalandiyah, the main checkpoint between Jerusalem and Ramallah.

Zeitun opened at the beginning of 2006, and is a main crossing point for many children who go to school in Jerusalem. We have been going there early in the morning from about 6:30 when the children begin showing up for school and the men and women head to work. The traffic there is quite small (about 200 people any given morning). Qalandiyah, on the other hand, connects two major population centers, so it experiences a much higher volume of people and is therefore much bigger than Zeitun and accommodates motorists as well. At Qalandiyah, there are two, initial lanes for cars (pictured below) that lead to a four or five lane toll booth looking structure where guards check cars and passenger’s IDs (only blue ID holders can pass by car or bus while all green ID holders must go through the pedestrian terminal).

However, the basic layout of the pedestrian terminals at both sites are similar. They both have an initial gate with several steel turnstiles and high, wrought iron fences topped with razor wire. Just inside the first gate is a guard box with bulletproof glass where, usually, a female guard communicates with the Palestinians through a loud speaker. Then there are five or six additional gates with turnstiles that lead you into the metal detector section with machines much like you would see at airports to check baggage, and where more guards sitting behind protective glass check IDs (more recently, many of these gates have been equipped with fingerprinting identification systems as well). After passing inspection through the metal detectors there is a final corridor leading to the last turnstile before reaching the other side. In all, you pass by two guard booths and through four steel turnstiles, waiting in two separate lines, before you reach your destination.

Up to this point I have been referring to the checkpoints as terminals, but they are anything but. When I think of terminals I am reminded of the minor annoyance of passing through airport security before boarding a flight. Qalandiyah and Zeitun, on the other hand, look like special military zones, complete with concrete walls, razor wire, and guard towers. The area is patrolled by military vehicles and armed personnel, and a constant barrage of commands seem always to emanate from the loud speakers which can be heard at quite a distance from the source.

For many thousands of people, the checkpoints are part of their morning routine. And after only a month of checkpoint watch, I cannot fathom how anyone could internalize an experience like this making it routine, or normal in any way.