Most of the families have received demolition orders from the municipality and now are waiting for the army and bulldozers to come and destroy everything, what they have managed to gain throughout their life. It might happen anytime as the orders are obeyed randomly and they never expire. That means that your children may go to the school and when they came back, they would see nothing but the ruins of the house they have grown up in. On the other hand, you might wait ten years for the demolition, but what kind of life is that? Home should be a place where you can find peace and safety and how can it be like that, if you are living in the constant fear of becoming homeless?

 Sometimes the soldiers come in the morning and tell you, that you have ten minutes to leave your home. How can you decide what to take with you in ten minutes? But you don’t have a choice, they have guns, they are Israelis, they follow ‘the rules’.

Some families can’t stand the pressure and decide to move out. Their houses straight away are taken by settlers and the demolition order expires as it only applies to Palestinians. Other are evicted and in those cases, settlers also take over the place.

According to the Israeli law, since 1967 (the annexation of East Jerusalem to the West Jerusalem) Palestinians need a permission to build the house in the East Jerusalem. Since 95% of applications are being refused, Palestinians decide to build without permits. 50% of houses have been considered as illegal and either have already received demolition orders or will receive them in the near future.

Israelis obey 100 house demolition orders a year, which means that almost in every three days one house is being demolished. In every three days, one family loses it’s memories, dreams, the place where children can grow up and old men can wait for their last days to come. Moreover, the municipality can’t afford so many demolitions and  it is the owner, who has to cover the costs, which means that instead of getting compensation, you have to pay for your own house to be destroyed.

There is no other name for such actions than etnic cleansing. Israeli policy is simple: more land with less Arabs. Expropriation, creating constant fear and destroying the only place where people can feel safe – their own home, is the fearfully effective tool to acheive this goal.

Everytime I hear about house demolition, I think about my father who built our house with his own hands, like most of the Palestinians, and try to imagine his reaction if one day he comes back from work/shop/church and sees his creation has been destroyed. But for me it is only the imagination, not the reality you have to cope with every third day.

Not only the electricity, but also water resources in the Palestinian Territory are limited, and controlled by the Israeli authority. Here are some numbers. Of the water available from the West Bank aquifers, Israel uses 73%, Palestinians 17% and 10% goes to illegal Israeli settlers.  Statistics show that per year, each Israeli consumes as much water as four Palestinians.

Wells are considered the most important source of water in Palestine. Yet,  many of them have been confiscated for Israeli use. Israeli authority not only does not allow new wells to be drilled, but also set quotas on how much water can be drawn by Palestinians from the existing wells. The second source of water, is Israeli Water Company Mekorot, which sells Palestinians their own share of water. During the summer, when water supplies are low, Mekorot closes the valves, which supply Palestinian towns and villages so as to preserve Israeli supplies. In real life it means that, while illegal settlers are swimming in their pools and watering their lawns, Palestinians don’t have enough water to drink or cook. One of my friend asked me today if I have a water at my place, as she doesn’t. I still have it,  just because I am lucky to live with a family that uses water from the tank.

Illegal settlements are built on the very source of water and settlers destroy Palestinians’ water supplies by polluting wells with sevage, perforating  water roof tanks, vanadalazing the connecting pipes, just to name a few.

The Apartheid Wall isolates Palestinians not only from their land, but also from many important underground wellsprings.

Expropriation Palestinian water for the use by Israeli citizens and illegal settlers and controlling the electricity in the Occupied Territories are just examples of numerous of violations of the interantional law. Since water and electricity are crucial for wellbeing, it’s  hard to belittle such violations in everyday live here in Palestine.

The owners, two sisters and one brother, of this field used to own 9 dunum of land  (1 dunam is equal to 10 acres) planted with olive trees.  Yet, the constrution of the poles of the bridge left them with no more than 2 dunum and like any land confiscation case, they never got any compensation. Olive trees were uprooted from the confiscated area and sold in Israel as wood. Even though the family still owns 2 dunum of  land, it  is beyond the fence with a barbed wire and a gate. The gate has been locked since 2005 and to enter their own land the farmers need a permission,  which they have been constantly denied. Since olives are their only source of income, last year they decided to bypass the locked gate and they climbed up the hills so as to pass the barbed wire on the top but they managed to pick only a few kilos of olives. This didn’t work this year as  the wire has been hightened.

The military zone is still inhabited by Palestinian families, but only some of them were lucky enough to get the key, the rest have to call the guard every time they need to get in or out. Cameras and other military sensors are all over the place so letting us in was too risky for the people, who own the key. Time was passing by and instead of picking olives we were waiting by the fence until two Israeli soldiers came. We were trying to persuade them to unlock the gate, but I guess the only expression they knew in English was ‘that’s the rule’.

The owner of the land, Adel Mustafa Srour (50) , got frustrated with their arrogance and started to shout in Arabic: ‘why am I not allowed to enter my own field? I just want to reap my harvest‘, which drove the soldiers completely mad. They started to pull Adel towards the car, while we were trying to verbally stop them. It didn’t work, they took him and sent him to the detention. Fortunately he got released after a couple of hours with no health impairment.

Anyway, soldiers’ reaction was completely out of proportion. Eleven international witnesses were watching it completely helpless while the soldiers were jerking, pushing and abusing an innocent man as if he was a real criminal.

What can an unarmed man do to soldiers? And can we still consider such treatment as following ‘the rules’ or  ’for security reasons’ (the most common excuse in Israel)?

To cross the checkpoint, one has to pass three points of checks. The first: checking permissions, IDs and passports. The soldier girl that was sitting in the boot did not seem the nicest. She turned away many people and when we asked Patrick why it could be so, he said she might not have like the way they showed it or the way it was printed, or they were in the wrong lane, and so forth. What if she has a bad day, will she turn away all of them?!

Queuing to the metal detectors

Next station are metal detectors. That is where most of the time is lost. Above the corridor leading to them, there are metal walkways for soldiers and private security staff who watch over people on the ground. Patrick told us that there were instances when these soldiers/security guards spat on Palestinians or threw coins. Indeed, a very professional behaviour!?

Back to the metal detectors. If you’re a foreigner, you just wave your stupid passport, even if the gate beeps, you can move on. Yet, if you are a Palestinian, you have to take everything out of your pockets or take stuff off you, until the gate does not make this annoying sound anymore. Some of the Palestinians got really quick at taking stuff off, well practice makes masters.

This stage can be actually pretty stressful. Imagine that there are 500 people behind you, rushing to work, and the gate does not stop beeping. It happened to one Muslim lady. She took everything out of her pockets, took off her watch and anything that can possibly cause beeping, yet the gate still did it. The crowd behind her was getting really impatient and she was getting really stressed. She knew what it was – her bra. Completely covered as her religion demands, it is a shame for her to show even a bit of her body in front of other men. However, she was so desperate that she pull up her dress and showed the bra to the soldier in the boot. Are you able to realize how much it actually cost her?!

While we were passing through this terminal, we saw pictures on the walls with headings such as: ‘Come and feel the glory of Israel’.

Come and feel the glory of Israel

You know what, I felt like tearing this piece of thing apart and throwing it into one of soldiers face.

And you know what, only one passage was open. Imagine if there was another one working how much quicker it would all go. It is not due to shortage of stuff, because in the last stage, the least busiest one, there were three or four boots open with soldiers sitting and doing nothing!!!

Anyway, once the metal detectors were crossed, there were boots with soldiers checking the IDs and fingerprints. The problem there was the fact that most of the men were working on the construction and their hands got quite damaged due to the manual labour. So at times it took a while for them to cross it.

After four hours, the men leave the checkpoint, literally run to buses in order to save these few minutes and get to work on time. Yet some stop, not to chat, not to drink coffee or tea, but to get sick…. after so much pressure.

Just imagine crossing it every day on the way to work…

Please read this article by an Israeli human rights activist and a Holocaust survivor about religious fundamentalism in Israel. I think it is very interesting. Just follow this link: http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2009/961/focus.htm.

Checkpoint tower

All over the West Bank, there are checkpoints restricting people from moving around freely. Interestingly, Palestinians do not cross the checkpoints exclusively when they wish to enter the territory of the State of Israel, but also when they travel within the Palestinian territory, for instance from Bethlehem to Ramallah. Without any reason given, they can be denied entry, kept waiting for hours, humiliated or questioned.

Many Palestinians can tell you stories of how bad they were treated while crossing the checkpoint. For instance, one man was driving his car through the checkpoint. He was stopped by a soldier and asked to give him car keys and his ID. So he stopped the car and did what he was asked to. The soldier took his car keys, threw them under the car, and told the man to take them out without moving the vehicle. This soldier could be the man’s son, in the normal situation, he is meant to show him respect, but at the checkpoint he thinks he is allowed to do whatever he wants. In the end of the day, he is the one with the gun.

Crossing the checkpoints makes me feel strange and sometimes even a little bit scared, one is completely dependent on how a soldier will behave. It might not be justified as my European passport guarantees better treatment and an easy passage. Believe me it is very weird and uncomfortable to be treated in a special way while Palestinian friends undergo a different treatment. One asks oneself: How am i different from them?

Anyhow, checkpoints look differently depending on the time of the day, in the mornings they are usually very busy, while in the afternoons, they are quite empty. Here, I want to talk about the early mornings as I believe that is when one can see a truly ugly face of the Israeli occupation.

We went to the checkpoint in Bethlehem at 5.30 am guided by an Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme in Palestine and Israel (EAPPI) staff member. It is a part of the EAPPI’s work to be present at the checkpoints and write witness reports from them after.

So early in the morning, we saw about 400 people queueing in narrow cattle-chute passages.

Palestinians queueing for hours in the early morning

We were told that that morning was unusually quiet and normally there are about 200 people more. They were mostly men going to work in Jerusalem or nearby settlements. It takes up to 4 hours to cross the checkpoint at this time. Patrick, let’s give our guide this nice Irish name, told us that some of the man stay at the checkpoint or close to it overnight sleeping on the ground since if they live in a village far from Bethlehem, there is no point for them to go home. It is to an extent understandable during the summer time when nights are warm and it is actually pleasant to sleep outside, but during the winter when it is cold, it actually is very sad that they have no choice but to stay overnight in such poor conditions, far away from their families. But yes, they do not have much choice as otherwise they  risk losing their jobs due to being late.

Patrick told us that one day some men at the back of the queue got really impatient and started pushing the rest. One man was pushed into these metal bars with such strenght that he felt his ribs breaking. So his friend climb the bars in order to be seen and called the guards to get some help for the injured. The soldier came and instead of helping hit the man with his radio.

Of course, we were allowed to use ‘the humanitarian lane’ because we are internationals. The group of 400 men, waiting patiently, did not even say a word of complaint to us while we were clearly jumping the queue, they simply accepted it, which I think made us feel even worse. The humanitarian lane is for women, Palestinians with special, medical permissions and internationals. It is usually empty.

‘There are problems with Muslims. In every country you come from there are extremist Muslims. There is more hatred from Muslims towards Israeli Jews than from Christians.’

7. Yaser Arafat

‘The late terrorist Yaser Arafat’

‘Psychopatic serial murderer’

8. Judaism

‘Judaism is not a religion, we are a peoplehood. It’s a combination of religion, culture, attachment to a specific land, with shared history. It’s a combination of social elements’

9. Gaza

‘We took out settlements, we left factories and equipment there. We locked the door and left it. And what happened? Hamas destroyed everything and started throwing rockets.’ One person from the group said that actually Israel literally ‘locked the door’ as Gaza has been since then under an economic blockade. Our speaker responded to that in the following way: ‘So you advocate murder!?’

He didn’t answer some of the questions, if he didn’t like them. He used interesting ways to avoid giving us a response, for instance, he said: ‘I wish I could invite you to my house and we could talk about it the whole day long. But let’s move to another question’. At some point, he also tried to avoid answering the question, and out of the blue asked the person who posed the question: ‘When did you start to beat your girlfriend?’. Well I still don’t understand what it was all about, but John managed not to answer an uncomfortable question, so it worked.

An important thing to remember is that he gets paid for meeting with us, I don’t believe he would do it for free. So in a way, he is making a business out of being controversial.

Also, when you listen to some of his opinions that are quite offensive and often very racist, you feel like leaving the place. In fact, in both groups I went with there were people that couldn’t stand him talking anymore and just left the room. It is really understandable, if someone calls Palestinians terrorists and one has been there and met a lot of nice, welcoming and peaceful people, he/she gets really wound up. Or when he claims that Muslims cause more problems and are more difficult to deal with than Christians, it is clearly racists. Or when he states that Palestinians lie when they say they own the land that is going to be confiscated for the expansion of Efrata, and someone, like me, knows people in the village next to this settlement that lost their land or are about to lose their land to it.

At the beginning of the talk, he asked not to make assumptions and nor to resort to name calling. Yet, he is quite hypochritical as during the talk, he started calling names, eg. late terrorist Arafat.

All in all, it is hard to listen to the settler speaking. Firstly, we will never ever agree on most of the things: he just sees the history very differently, actually he views it the way it suits his current reality. Secondly, he is really offensive and hypocritical: he preaches how we should treat him, but he acts the opposite way towards us. Thirdly, he meets with groups regularly so he is well prepared for all kinds of questions and well prepared also to avoid giving direct answers. Lastly, although a tough experience, well worth it.

Recently, I had an opportunity to meet with one of the settlers from Efrata settlement on the western side of Bethlehem. There are between 9 and 10 thousand people living in Efrata, which could be described as ‘a bedroom suberb for commuters to Jerusalem’. It was built in the early 1980s and currently, it comprises of middle class, religious and traditional community.

This settler, let’s call him John, was born and grew up in the United States. Altogether he lived in there for thirty years. He moved to Efrata with his wife and kids about twenty years ago. He regularly talks to groups of internationals interested in hearing the settler’s perseptive, obviously not free of charge.

At the beginning John said: ‘I guarantee you won’t change my mind and I don’t want to change your mind’

1. West Bank

He calls the Occupied Palestinian Territories – the Disputed Territories and that’s why he claims that the Geneva Conventions do not apply here as it is not an occupation. He does not feel that the land which Efrata is built on has been stolen from anyone as according to him it was not owned by anyone and even if Palestinians state they have papers confirming their ownership they lie.

John: ‘It’s land of the Jews. Who lived here 2000 years ago? What upsets a lot of people is that we have come back. During this 2000 years other people have moved to our house, but we eventually came back. We have historical and religious claim to this land. And if the day comes, Palestinians and Arabs will recognize the right of Israel and the Jews to have a home here’

2. Ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948

So we asked him if he acknoledges the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestinian people. He said:

‘Many Palestinians fled then because Arabs came in to kill the Jews. They also fled because of the war, not because of the ethnic cleansing.’

3. Education

The topic changed quickly to the education. John reckons that good education is needed on both sides for mutual respect. He thinks that two generations of Palestinians have been thaught to hate Jews and not to make peace with the Jews because they stole their land. ‘There is no peace curriculum in the Palestinian schools. There are no peace groups on the Palestinian side, only terrorists with keffiyah scarfs and guns’

4. Human rights

‘The greatest violation of human rights is taking place in Gaza right now. Muslim women are treated inhumanely; children are used as weapons. There is no freedom of press. Christian churches are bombed. All this is done by Muslims themselves.’

5. About us

‘When groups like yours come, they are not helping Palestinians. You make charges and accusations, you make yourself feel good. You verbally harass me. You have a fixed point of view with a focus on human rights’