Israel / Palestinian Territories 2008-2009

Rebuilding in the Bedouin village of Omel Kher in South Hebron Mountain

The traffic from East to West Jerusalem, as it is every day, was bad. I sat at a standstill with my cabbie, Ahmed, as the clock struck noon. The phone rang, and of course, who else would be calling but Jonah Michael Seligman. “We’ll come meet you. Get off near the YMCA.” Ahmed made a Village People joke in response to my directions, and we parted ways. My next step was hopping into the wobbly, white pick-up truck of Noa, our guide for the day.

El Doctor Khalidi por el podio.

In order to compensate for my sub-par blogging habits in recent weeks, this report is a prompt one. I have just arrived back at the Augusta Victoria after a long day of running around the West Bank with Jonah. With it being Shabbat in Jerusalem with little to do during the day, Jonah and I made other plans.

In light of my imminent attendance at the Jerusalem Conference at Birzeit University (Ramallah) this coming Saturday, I would like to honor one of the keynote speakers:

Ahmed Qurei, a well known Palestinian figure and a former Prime Minister of the Palestinian Authority, served under Yassir Arafat at the height of the 2nd Intifada in 2003. Qurei filled Abu Mazen’s (Mahmoud Abbas’) shoes after he decided to resign at that point in time.

I have just completed my fifth week as an intern at ANERA, which means I only have three more weeks to learn as much as I can while I’m here in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT). After my splurge of blogging about my trip to Gaza, I fell off the wagon for a bit, and found it more useful to seek experiences that were worthy of my recounting at a later date.

Well that date has now arrived, and I sit before my computer, an insomniac. It is 3am, and I have work tomorrow, but I can’t sleep tonight for some reason. I figure that I might as well take advantage of my extended waking hours to write about this last week, about which I have kept all of you in the dark.

A protest last Tuesday in Beit Jala brought together Christian, Muslim, and Jewish groups to both sides of a gate in the security barrier, where we passed gifts through the fence and joined in song and dance.

I went to the Israeli side of the fence, which required a steep climb down a hill of olive groves.

Paraska already wrote a beautiful summary of two house demolitions in East Jerusalem (7/13/09).  It is impossible to recreate the emotional intensity of a demolition, but I hope to show something more human than zoning law statistics. 

The power can go out at any moment in Gaza. You could be sitting at your computer, working on an email, or a grant proposal, and then the entire grid shuts down. Every neighborhood is without power for at least 8 hours per day, a conservation technique on the part of the government. The lucky ones have generators, and the smart ones have devices called UBS which maintain a charge for your electronic devices (i.e. computers), allowing the user to turn off the device properly. Nonetheless, this is a frustrating reality for many Gazans.

In the Jordan Valley, a strategic West Bank area for Israel both agriculturally and militarily, closed military firing zones are surrounding Bedouin communities, restricting movement and resources while also endangering Palestinian lives.  Last week (7/6/09) I attended a conference on house demolitions, and took a UN led tour of the area.  The Jordan Valley is beautiful but remote; much like the South Hebron hills, interactions between Palestinians, settlers, and the IDF happen largely beyond the public eye.

A few kilometers from the Gaza Border, Sderot, small Israeli town in the Western Negev shutters every time it hears a whistle. Wherever it be an old man pushing a cart of oranges, the strong dry winds of the desert, a child humming along to his walkman. For eight years now the Israeli city has born through daily attacks emanating from the Gaza Strip. Behind the police station rusty rockets are piled one on top of each other, rust sticks them together. The heads are bent on all sides, which gives them the appearance of large metal flower, overflowing with metallic trash.