Sumaya Farhat-Naser was born in 1948 in Birzeit, not far from Jerusalem. She attended the German boarding-school Talitha Kumi in Beit Jala near Bethlehem. She studied biology, geography and educational science in Hamburg and has a doctorate in applied botany. She taught botany and ecology at the Palestinian University of Birzeit from 1982 to 1997, and was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Münster in 1987. From 1997 to 2001 she was Director of the Palestinian Jerusalem Center for Women, and since 2000 she has been on the board of the Global Fund for Women in San Francisco. She resumed her teaching at Birzeit in 2002.
Her biography Thymian und Steine (Thyme and Stones) was published in 1995 by Lenos Verlag. Further publications: Disteln im Weinberg (Thistles in the Vineyard, 2007) and Im Schatten des Feigenbaums (In the Shade of the Fig Tree, 2013).
She has received many distinctions for her work for justice and peace: the Bruno Kreisky Award for Services to Human Rights (1995), the Protestant Book Prize of the German Association of Protestant Libraries (1997), the Mount Zion Award for Reconciliation (1997), the Augsburg Peace Prize (2000), the Hermann Kesten Medal of the German P.E.N. Center (2002), the Bremen Solidarity Prize (2003), the Profax Prize (2003) and the AMOS Prize for Civil Courage in Religion, Church and Society (2011).
Foreword
Introduction
Life in an occupied country
Women work for peace
‘Dear Daphna …’: a dialogue between unequal partners
Struggling over fundamentals
Conflict in public, coming closer in private
New dimensions of dialogue
Conflicting myths and realities
Forgotten by all: Palestinians in Israel
Struggling for political structures in Palestinian society
In a state of war
Mourning in Palestine
Refusing to be enemies
Ron Pundak – From Oslo to Taba: a process derailed
Marwan Bishara – Palestine/Israel: peace or apartheid
Appendix
The editors/the translator
Palestine is the country of olive trees. They have left their stamp on the landscape, and to us they symbolize home and our ties to the land. Olive trees grow very old. They live for centuries, have very modest requirements and yet give most generously. They bestow on us fruit, oil, soap and wood. Steadfastly and with pride they preserve their knowledge and wisdom. We feel safe in their shadow, we admire and love them, we tend them and make songs about them. Olive trees are blessed trees. They are part of our lives.
‘The Middle East is in flames.’ ‘The spiral of violence goes on and on.’ ‘Hope for peaceful co-existence between the Palestinian and Israeli peoples has receded into the far distance.’ While we were working on this book, it was sentences like these, heard and read countless times, which determined the way we thought, since the situation was escalating all the time.
The continuous experiences of violence have fixed an image of the other side as enemies firmly in the minds of those involved, their relatives, friends and neighbours. The traumas suffered extend beyond individual lives or generations and create collective experiences. These experiences, which lead to a distorted image of ‘the enemy’ and his intentions, are an enduring obstacle to a neighbourly co-existence of the two peoples. They not only block peace negotiations, but also render daily rapprochement and understanding between individual Palestinians and Israelis more difficult.
Few have dared to break through the logic of the conflicting parties. Those who seek dialogue with the other side for the sake of peace must be prepared to question their own schemes of interpretation and their own understanding of history. Some Palestinian and Israeli women have tried to do so in the face of opposition from all sides, including that in their own minds. In her accounts of what she has gone through with the Israeli women peace activitists Daphna Golan, Gila Svirsky and Terry Greenblatt and the conflictual talks she has had with them, Sumaya Farhat-Naser shows what creative strength lies in the act of questioning one’s own authentic experience and its context. At the same time, her perception necessarily remains subjective, onesided and partial, despite her sympathetic understanding of the other side. She cannot claim to be neutral and objective – nor should she have to. For she describes from her own point of view an asymmetrical relationship, the one between the Israeli military occupation and the occupied Palestinian people. Sumaya Farhat-Naser is aware that she is walking a tightrope. But she knows that work for peace is based on accepting and bearing in mind not only the history of one’s own side’s suffering but also the suffering of the other side.
In the negotiations for peace in the Middle East, hardly any attention has been paid to the voices of women peace activists in Palestine and Israel. They offer no solutions in black and white, no instant peace. Their exchanges are grave and rich in conflict, onerous endeavours to create networks which render an end to violence conceivable and hold out a prospect of dealing with the traumas on both sides in a manner appropriate to peace.
Through our work we hope to have contributed to giving these voices a hearing. We would like to thank Chudi Bürgi for collaborating on this book, the late Rosmarie Kurz for contributing ideas when it was in the making, Willi Herzig for his advice, Matthias Hui for providing us with contacts and information, and Ron Pundak and Marwan Bishara for their afterwords.
February 2002
Manuela Reimann, Dorothee Wilhelm
A year ago an Israeli called Udi Levy rang me up. He said he had read my article ‘Warum habt ihr zugewartet’ (Why did you wait and see) in a Swiss newspaper. He found it impressive and asked if he could publish it in Hebrew. Udi had heard about me from tourists and had contacted me then. Now that he had read what I had written, it had stimulated him to do something himself. And he did indeed translate the article and publish it in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.
He has been asking about our situation regularly for more than two years and is always shocked at how different the worlds are in which we live, although his house in a kibbutz near Beersheba is only three hours’ distance from me. He rang up recently, appalled at what he had seen on TV; he wanted to know how I was. I began to explain and he invited me to visit him.
He said: ‘You just need to get a taxi to Beersheba and I’ll collect you there.’
‘I’m not allowed to move more than two kilometres from here,’ I answered. ‘And I’d have to get through at least fifteen checkpoints on the way to Beersheba. If I were to arrive there at all, I’d be committing a punishable offence. I’d even be putting my life at risk.’
He couldn’t believe it. He said that he could travel anywhere and didn’t have to stop at the checkpoints.
‘You belong to the group which I don’t belong to,’ I said to him. ‘You can drive along roads which I’m not allowed to use, you have a car with number plates which I’m not allowed to drive with.’
A friend gave him my book Thymian und Steine (Thyme and Stones). He wrote saying that he had read it in a single night and he was grateful to me for opening his eyes. He expressed his dismay at not having noticed so many things and also at the fact that it had been impossible to prevent them. He wanted to arrange for my book to be translated into Hebrew and then he would write a review of it. He wanted us to get to know each other and work together for justice and freedom. Udi has become a friend. He rings me up regularly and sends me emails. We both look forward to the time when we will be able to meet, perhaps in Jerusalem.
My family has been living in Palestine for centuries. I was born here in 1948 in the village of Birzeit near Jerusalem. The name Birzeit means ‘well of oliveoil’. I was born in the year the State of Israel was established, which is also the year of the Palestinian catastrophe (nakba), when 700,000 Palestinians, men and women, were forcibly expelled and made refugees and their villages destroyed. Large parts of my homeland, Palestine, were occupied by the Israeli army at that time. The West Bank of the Jordan, including my village, came under Jordanian rule, and many people, especially from the part of Palestine that was occupied, had to flee.
Life was hard for those who had to flee but also for those who remained. My childhood was marked by poverty and insecurity. We had to work hard to have enough to eat. It taught us children to share and be satisfied with little. As a child I received a lot of love. I learned to take responsibility and to be grateful. My mother always managed to make us forget our hunger by telling us stories, singing and playing games. When we went to bed hungry, we looked forward full of hope and excitement to the hen having laid an egg in the morning.
I grew up in a patriarchal society. My grandfather tried to marry the girls off as soon as possible to free his family from responsibility for its daughters. When I discovered that I was to be married off at fourteen, I put up a successful resistance. I stayed in the girls’ boarding school Talitha Kumi near Bethlehem and only returned when I had finished school and my plans to study in Germany were ripe. Life in the boarding school left a deep impression on me and made me realize what my vocation was – to stand up for people and humanity. With the help of my mother, my aunt and the school, I was able to study biology, geography and educational science in Germany. I worked at the same time and could help out my family in Palestine with what I earned. This showed my grandfather that a daughter, too, is capable of caring for the family and taking responsibility. I gained in selfassurance and my family began to respect women more. As a result, three of my sisters were able to go to Germany and complete a professional training.
As a Palestinian in Germany I was very quickly confronted with the history of Germany and the Jews, which I had not known of till then. The Germans’ grappling with the Holocaust and anti-Semitism left no place for Palestinian history. When I tried to talk about our experiences, I often had to listen to prejudices against Palestinians. This was very painful to me. But it also aroused my curiosity and encouraged me to interest myself in history. The more I read, the more I identified with the Jewish victims. I realized how much Palestinian history is a part of the history of Germany and its Jews. I was deeply moved by the testimony of Holocaust survivors and of victims like Anne Frank. Thanks to these accounts I learned much about how communicating one’s own feelings can impress and influence others. I learned increasingly how to recount my own history and speak of our oppression. I was able to demonstrate that we Palestinians are struggling for independence and freedom, for our own country and security, just as the Jews are.
When I returned to Palestine after finishing my studies, the West Bank had been occupied by the Israeli army following the 1967 war. I experienced all the injustice and reprisals of the occupation. It is often hard to see occupiers as human beings, when families, including one’s own, are mistreated, their land is confiscated, and children are exposed for years to the danger of being shot. It is not easy to distinguish between the occupation and individual members of the occupiers’ nation when everyday life is marked by oppression. One often feels great anger, and the transition to hatred happens imperceptibly. But in the meantime I had got to know Jews, both men and women. I had even made friends with some of them, and I had learned that we can on no account allow ourselves to give way to hatred and bitterness if we want to live together in peace one day.
Besides being a lecturer in botany at Birzeit University, I became involved in feminist and pacifist activities and working for human rights. I got in touch with many Jews in Europe and gradually came to know Israeli women peace campaigners. I began to undertake projects with them. This cooperation was anything but easy. Despite the political education and commitment on both sides, we had to learn to talk to each other and endure many insults. Sometimes it seemed almost hopeless. We had regarded each other as enemies for decades, we didn’t know each other, and for too long we had accepted the barriers which were intended to prevent us from becoming acquainted with each other. Mistrust and fear dominated our relationships. Yet we won through to each other nonetheless, because we believed that peace was possible and wanted to prepare the ground for reaching it. And so we have worked together since the mideighties, despite all the obstacles.
But the failure of the political peace process between our governments has put a stop to the whole work for peace and even called it into question. Since the beginning of the uprising, the so-called Second Intifada, in September 2000, the contact between us peace activists has been broken off. Today, a few days before the end of 2001 and the printing of this book – which has taken shape thanks to the inten sive cooperation of my Swiss friends Manuela Reimann, Dorothee Wilhelm, Chudi Bürgi, Rosmarie Kurz and Willi Herzig – the political situation seems hopeless. The dream of being able to travel unhindered in our own country has receded into the far distance, like the dream of Jerusalem and our own state. The spiral of violence goes on mercilessly. But violence cannot wipe us off the face of the earth. It cannot exterminate the olive trees either.
As I looked for new ways to put my commitment to peace into practice, I decided to write this book. I would like to put on record my experiences of recent years, since the Oslo Agreements between the Palestinian leadership and the Israeli government. I want to document all that I have gone through in working for peace, not only the many times when I felt fear, hurt and irritation, but also the many small successes towards a measure of understanding between our two peoples. This book is not meant to be a political analysis of the situation in Palestine. It is simply about my work as a peace activist, a woman in Palestine.
It means much to me to begin with the recollection of a day of hope. We were delighted when the Israeli soldiers withdrew from Ramallah on 27 December 1995. Tens of thousands stood in the streets to witness the historic event. Senior officers on both sides took their stand opposite each other and held out their hands to each other. Songs, music, whistles and honking horns drowned the sound of the car engines. ‘Go home! Go!’ people shouted at the Israeli soldiers. ‘Never set foot on our land again! Your hands are stained for ever with our children’s blood!’ And to the Palestinian policemen they called: ‘Welcome to Palestine!’
The Palestinian security forces were bewildered, moved and keen to carry out their duties. First they had to discover Palestine. Many had just returned from exile.
The next day the prison and the building which housed the Israeli military administration in Ramallah were evacuated. From all directions people arrived to throng into the prison building. We could now enter this symbol of the occupation, which we had so loathed and dreaded, for the first time without fear. Much of it was unrecognizable. The Israelis had removed the traces of horror before they withdrew. The walls of the torture chambers and the interrogation rooms had been pulled down and the rubble shovelled into a tidy pile in front of the gate. Some visitors tried to find their former cells. Pacing through the rooms they cursed, beat on the walls with their fists and wept. They were torn by conflicting feelings – the painful memory of humiliation and degradation through torture, and the boundless rejoicing that it was over.
A hope of returning home
Many Palestinians, men and women, had decided to return in order to take part in building a Palestinian society and state. They began to construct houses, set up businesses, open shops and restaurants. A mood of optimism spread, and people took heart.
My sister Hiyam, who had been living in San Francisco for fifteen years and had a good job there, decided to come home. She and two of her children were allowed to return, but her husband Isam and their other three children were not. Isam had studied in the USA and had failed to renew his permit to live in Palestine in time. He owns two houses and hundreds of olive trees in Birzeit. His fate showed that the occupation was by no means at an end, but that it continues inexorably to determine the lives both of the Palestinians who want to return home and of those who have not been expelled. As the peace process advanced, however, my sister and her husband went on hoping that they would be able to return home. They had given up their business in San Francisco and spent four years in Jordan, waiting. But then they were forced to realize that the Israeli government would not let them come home. The family is now in the USA. They have given up all hope of returning.
The peace process had also put new heart into my husband Munir and myself, and our three children too. We wanted to invest in the future. We bought a plot of land which was destined for our son Anis and my sister Ibtisam. Anis was studying medicine in Innsbruck and Ibtisam has been living for years in Berlin, where she works as a dentist. She still longs to come back home. If they both returned, they could build a clinic on this plot and earn their living there. We were delighted when we took this step and often went to the piece of land, which is only two kilometres from our house, to feast our eyes on it. Two years ago the main road which passes it was declared a road for the exclusive use of settlers. Consequently we are not allowed to travel along it or cross it. We are completely cut off from our land. And we have found out in the meantime that this plot has not been allotted to the territory of the Palestinian Authority. We are not allowed to work it or make any plans for it. We fear that we will lose this property of ours, as has often happened to us in the past.
An autonomy which is not autonomy
Most Palestinians rightly take a sceptical, wait-and-see attitude to the peace process. We knew that a difficult period awaited us. The peace negotiations did not progress as we had hoped, and our mistrust increased. Even during the negotiations we formed the impression that what was involved was a kind of conflict management, a new form of control over both the country and the people.
The negotiations which ended in the Oslo Agreement of September 1993 were based on the principle of land for peace. The Palestinians recognized the State of Israel within the 1967 boundaries, in other words 78% of Mandate Palestine. By making this historic compromise the Palestinians hoped that in return they would obtain the end of the occupation and establish a state in the remaining 22% of the country. This compromise has been a great sacrifice for us Palestinians, since we number almost as many inhabitants as the Israelis.
But it was soon clear that the Israeli government had no intention of giving back the Occupied Territories. In the subsequent negotiations it considered them ‘contested territories’, of which it wanted to keep as much as possible. The Oslo Treaties turned out to lend themselves well to this aim. It was obvious that after so many years of enmity and with so many areas of friction not every conflict could be solved at once, but with every new agreement the rights which the Israelis were prepared to grant the Palestinians decreased further. New treaties brought new definitions and additional details which invalidated earlier agreements. The UN resolutions, a legitimate basis for a just peace, were bypassed. While the world celebrated each of these new agreements, Palestinians became increasingly dismayed and disillusioned.
The Oslo Accord brought us no proper state, only an autonomy which is no autonomy. In 1998, after half a dozen agreements had been signed, the Palestinian Authority had not even acquired complete control over 10% of the occupied Palestinian territories. Autonomous Palestine is a patchwork divided into three areas. Only 3.5%, the socalled Area A, is entirely under Palestinian administration. Area B (23.5 %) is under the control of the Israeli army, with the Palestinian administration taking care of civil affairs only. Area C (73%) has remained entirely under Israeli military administration. The breaking up of our country into these three areas has limited the perspectives for Palestine as a national territory. The expansion of the Israeli settlements, which are often constructed round Palestinian towns or villages and thus separate them from the rest of the country, enables the Israeli government to retain complete control over our areas even after a great variety of agreements have been reached. Internal isolation has developed, for the Israeli army can close off our towns and villages without difficulty at any time.
We live in four prisons separated from each other: the Gaza Strip; Jerusalem and its surrounding area; the part of the West Bank lying north of Jerusalem; and the part lying south of it. In each of these prisons are smaller prisons, which themselves contain cages and within the cages smaller cages. It is very difficult to travel from one prison to another. The Israeli military authorities control the population’s movements, economic development and education. That is what occupation means.
Birzeit was classified as part of Area B. That was extremely regrettable both for the village and for the university, since Area B remains subject to Israeli security checks, and so soldiers can appear at any moment and carry out arrests. We waited joyfully for the moment when Birzeit would come under full Palestinian sovereignty. The soldiers were less in evidence since the peace agreement, a certain sense of relief and calm was spreading, and confrontations were less frequent. But every so often students were arrested.
One night in the spring of 1997, we were woken by helicopters, and suddenly the village and the surrounding valleys and hills were lit up as bright as day by soaring flares. Frightened, we listened: the sound of soldiers’ footsteps, shots. A loudspeaker announced: ‘Inhabitants of Birzeit, a curfew has been imposed! Whoever violates it puts his life at risk.’ Hundreds of soldiers marched through the streets. They went first to the police station. The fifteen Palestinian policemen had to line up against a wall, and they were detained like that for several hours. Meanwhile about a hundred paratroopers landed in different places and began a roundup. They arrested more than 350 students. Every house was searched. The whole village panicked. We could not believe that something like that was possible. The occupation was showing its true face. The claim was that they were pursuing terrorists. But a week later all the students were released; they were not terrorists after all.
For the Israelis it seemed to be simply a military exercise, but for us it was a bitter reality. The Israeli army was giving us a fright and making clear who controlled our lives. The curfew lasted for ten hours. People were scandalized; they considered this action contempt for the peace process and a humiliation for the Palestinian policemen and the Palestinian Authority. Was that what we had achieved in Oslo, we asked ourselves?
A dismembered country
The socalled bypass roads break the country up and divide it into many enclaves. The Israeli government claims that they are necessary to allow the settlers to get from the settlements to their places of work in Israel without fear of Palestinian incursions. They are well constructed, wide roads, which cut up our country and for which more land is being confiscated all the time. They connect the settlements, which have been illegally constructed, with each other and make detours round the Palestinian towns and villages, from which they cannot be reached. North of Birzeit, only a kilometre and a half from my house, runs the main road from east to west, from Nablus through the villages to Tel Aviv. This road is forbidden to Palestinians because it connects the three settlements of Bet El, Ateret and Halamish. For fifteen years I have been looking out from my balcony in a south-easterly direction towards the settlement of Bet El, which is only three kilometres away. The village of Jifna lies like a garden in the valley in front of it, and on the hill is the refugee camp of Jalasun, which has been sheltering refugees from the coast since 1948. The lands from which they were expelled then are only 40 kilometres away. In Jalasun 11,000 people live in an area of one square kilometre. Only the north-south road leading to Nablus divides this refugee camp from the settlement of Bet El. It forms the narrow line dividing poverty and deprivation of rights from villas, wealth and luxury.
In recent years I had seen from my balcony how the lights of Bet El were increasing. At first they were only on one hill, a few years later on two, and then they spread to three and today to four hills. The settlement has been built round the village of Doura, which is really surrounded by it. Doura is a breathtakingly beautiful village that used to live from terrace market-gardening. The village women used to work on the terraces every day, singing and telling stories, and the next day before the sun was up they would take the vegetables to market in Ramallah. I was often in this village working on projects for the women, for instance literacy courses. ‘We are like parsley. The more you cut it, the stronger and sturdier it grows.’ That is how a woman from Doura once described herself and the other Palestinian women who wanted to learn something despite their many difficulties with the Israeli authorities and their own families. I often went to Doura to visit my friends Izz, Jamila, Umm Muhammad and others and to buy vegetables.
When a large plot of land belonging to the village of Doura was confiscated five years ago, there was a big protest. I was among the demonstrators and had to look on with the others as settlers shot at students, killing two of them. One was Ibrahim, my friend Izz’s cousin. After the deaths of the two students it was reported that a committee would investigate the incident. A week later we were told that it was only a water reservoir which was being built and the agitation over the confiscation of land was unnecessary. Today the second hill behind the water reservoir has already been built on. At the moment the settlement of Bet El is being connected with other settlements by a road. It runs through the fields of the farmers of Doura and is destroying the foundation of the village’s life. I, too, can no longer go to Doura, although it is only three kilometres from Birzeit.
The land for the nearby settlement of Ateret was confiscated mainly from the village of Atara and also from Birzeit. The settlement is only five kilometres away from Birzeit on the hillside, and we can see daily how it, too, is growing. We inhabitants of Birzeit are very worried about our olive groves. The connecting road between the settlements runs between us and our fields, and so we are no longer allowed to go to plough, sow and harvest them. They lie fallow, and many of us are losing the economic basis of our livelihood. The settlement of Halamish is ten kilometres away, beside a beautiful forest which I love. For more than twenty years I have been going there with my students on scientific excursions and with my family on outings. But now Palestinians are forbidden to do anything like that. The roads, the forest and the soil are for the settlers alone.
The destruction of olive trees
One of the collective punishments which not only harm us economically but also and above all strike at our symbols is the destruction of olive trees. This crime against nature wounds our very soul. The sight of destroyed olive groves is incredibly painful.
Olive trees are the heart of Palestine. They symbolize the country, our way of life, the ties between people and land. We have been cultivating olive trees for centuries. The production of olive oil is still an important economic activity. It is illegal to uproot olive trees. Despite that, entire olive groves are being destroyed by excavators and tractors. Sometimes the trees are just mangled or topped, the explanation being that the security of the settlers requires it – the security of settlers in settlements which have been built illegally on Palestinian land. This hostile act is often also carried out as a punishment. If a boy standing in a field which does not belong to him throws a stone, the owners of the field lose their trees.
Tens of thousands of olive trees have been uprooted by the Israeli army and settlers since the first year of the new Intifada, since September 2000. Furthermore, farmers often cannot get to their trees to harvest the olives because villages and towns are cordoned off. The harvested olives can often not be sold because of the comprehensive blockade. The economic losses are enormous and lead to unemployment and poverty. The farmers are terrorized and then driven out because the basis of their livelihood has been destroyed. In this way the settlements can be extended. There is hardly any space left for economic development.
This policy aims first and foremost at destroying Palestinian society and its foundations, at humiliating people and depriving them of their rights.
Checkpoints as harassment
The inhabitants of the thirty-five Palestinian villages round about no longer have any possibility of taking a direct road to Ramallah or even Birzeit, which is only a few kilometres away. They are forced to walk eastwards on paths across country, often through several villages, as far as the roads in the Jordan valley and then again northwards. The journey to Birzeit now takes two or three hours, instead of ten to fifteen minutes. Every morning I watch the people in the collective taxis with their tense faces, on the alert, cursing and wailing. But there are always others who say a prayer, counsel patience and say something encouraging. At a certain point I feel myself called upon to reassure the people in the taxis and cheer them up.
Separate roads are built for the settlers. Everywhere where the settlers’ roads cross Palestinian roads there are checkpoints. Soldiers bar the way and carry out inspections; they are a serious obstacle to everyone on the road.
Once I was in a collective taxi with four men on the way to work. A soldier stopped us and demanded our papers. The men did as he asked. I didn’t move. The soldier gave me an enquiring look. I said: ‘I’m a woman.’ He nodded. Then he asked one of the men: ‘How old are you?’ ‘Thirty.’ ‘Are you married?’ ‘No.’ ‘Why not?’ the soldier persisted. The man answered, embarrassed: ‘I don’t know. I’ve no money.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘I’ve no time either.’ ‘What? No time? What do you do all day? Don’t lie, answer me. Why aren’t you married?’ The man began to cough, blushed, shrugged his shoulders and turned away, while the soldier, aiming his gun at him, shouted and demanded he give a convincing answer immediately. I realized that this argument could end in bloodshed and that I’d have to do something. So I opened the taxi door and got out. The soldier turned on me. ‘Why are you getting out? You’re not allowed to.’ ‘I have to go to work and I’ve no time to wait for you to end your argument.’ ‘You work? What sort of work?’ ‘I’m a lecturer.’ ‘You don’t say. Are there any such people?’ ‘Oh yes,’ I replied, ‘There are. And there are lots of things you don’t know about. Are you married?’ ‘Yes. Why do you ask?’ the soldier wanted to know. I said: ‘Why do you ask this man if he’s married? What’s the idea? Isn’t everyone free to decide for himself in this matter? One really ought to be ashamed of asking this question, oughtn’t one?’ Suddenly the soldier seemed embarrassed, and he ordered the driver to drive on.
Sometimes there is a checkpoint in the middle of a Palestinian village or town where Israelis never come. For instance in Samiramis, the first checkpoint before Ramallah, soldiers block the road. On the 14-kilometre long stretch to Jerusalem there are also the checkpoints at Qalandia and al-Ram. It is pretty well impossible to drive round the checkpoints; any way round them is blocked off with concrete obstacles. Yet thousands of cars try to find another way, for instance across fields and through the labyrinth of streets in Kufr Aqab and the Qalandia refugee camp, between houses and along unasphalted roads. Cars often have to reverse back along the road from the point they have struggled to reach because a lorry or bus is coming from the other direction. There is a danger of plunging over the unfenced verge into the fields below. And all the time we see before us the settlements which are expanding from one hill to the next. In the evening the increasing number of lights from the nearest confiscated hill proclaim their presence over a wide area.
One feels enormous pain and rage when one arrives back on the road beyond the soldiers’ checkpoint, only fifty metres after all those detours. For fifty metres we have to accept a delay of thirty to forty minutes.
One Friday I, my husband Munir and our daughter Ghada had to drive to Ramallah to do some shopping, get an exit visa, go to the bank and do other things which had been accumulating for weeks. We were glad that that day travelling by car was permitted. But on the way back there were hundreds of cars and people waiting at the checkpoint; no car was allowed to pass. I went over to one of the soldiers and said: ‘This morning you let us through. Now we want to go home.’ He replied that new regulations had arrived that the journey was only allowed in one direction. No argument helped, no entreaties. The people stood there furious. A few were weeping.