Children on the rooftop of the Shuruf family home. Credit: P. Klochendler/IPS.

By Walter García and Pierre Klochendler
AR-RAM, Occupied East Jerusalem, Oct 15 2012 (IPS)

Ali Shuruf turns on the lights, that shine into a gaudy living room. Beyond the window, the dominant colour is uniformly grey: the house stands literally against a wall. Not just any wall – the infamous eight-metre cement wall separates Palestinians from Israelis.

“From the salon, see – the wall; from the kitchen, from the terrace – always the wall. The wall encircles us east, west, and south,” says Ali Shuruf, a successful Palestinian building contractor, appropriately pointing at a budgie hopping in a cage. “We’re like birds in a cage.” His is a golden cage.

“Freedom stops here,” he notes. From the rooftop of the three-story mansion which he built with his brothers (each family has its own floor), Shuruf points at the shimmering lights beyond the eastern side of the wall: “Here, separation between Arabs and Jews.”

Neve Ya’akov, the adjacent Jewish neighbourhood, is, like Ar-Ram, located within Jerusalem’s municipal boundaries. Whereas Neve Ya’akov lies within the intramural perimeter, Ar-Ram’s on the outer side of the wall.

After Israel’s conquest of East Jerusalem during the 1967 war, urban planning involved the building of community, commercial, medical and sports centres, as well as schools, playgrounds and synagogues – for large-scale housing projects that were intended for the Jewish population.

As suburbs like Neve Ya’akov are rooted in the occupied part of town, what’s also required is a protective wall.

“We played soccer together. Now, we’re disconnected from each other,” says Fadhi Hijazi, a friend of one of Shuruf’s sons.

The separation wall was erected in the wake of the Palestinian Intifadah uprising (2000-2005), as protection against potential suicide bombers.

Ten years on, a 142-kilometre long barrier surrounds much of East Jerusalem, with only four kilometres of its completed length running along the pre-1967 ceasefire line. Israeli soldiers operate checkpoints to the city on both sides of the wall – none on that ceasefire line.

The new concrete ‘border’ not only separates Jewish neighbourhoods from West Bank towns and villages; it also cut through Palestinian neighbourhoods located within the city’s limits, leaving many residents who, like Shuruf, hold Israeli blue residency cards, on the other side of the wall, without access to Jerusalem.

“To visit my next-door neighbour, it takes an hour,” says Shuruf.

From this side, the wall isn’t just about security; it doesn’t only impede freedom of movement – it’s a policy, aimed at maintaining a Jewish majority in Jerusalem.

“The wall’s a racist thing that encourages hatred,” chimes in Muhammad Turman, Shuruf’s brother-in-law. “The problem isn’t the Israelis per se – we could live together in peace. No, the problem is who controls the city.”

The battle over Jerusalem is one for demographic control. While East Jerusalem is nowadays home to roughly 200,000 Israelis, it’s home for 300,000 Palestinians. But whole Arab neighbourhoods have de facto been excluded from the city by the wall.

Located on the route to Ramallah in the West Bank, Ar-Ram, with its 10,000 inhabitants, is such a neighbourhood. To reach the Shurufs by car from the intramural part of town is an exhausting haul.

One must either bypass the Jewish suburb Pisgat Ze’ev through the Hizme checkpoint, or drive along the wall for some ten kilometres towards the Kalandia gateway to Ramallah, and then make a U-turn and drive back along the wall’s other side.

“We don’t enjoy municipal services due to us – in healthcare, in education.” Shuruf explains that he had to enrol his children “in a local, poorer, school because of the wall.” “What do you tell your children?” asks Hijazi. “Al-Yahud, the Jews…” Shuruf awkwardly giggles.

Palestinian neighbourhoods suffer from chronic neglect, but the wall has exacerbated the grim socio-economic reality. According to the Association for Civil rights in Israel, 78 percent of the Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem – including 84 percent of children – are poor. About 40 percent of the men, as well as 85 percent of the women, are listed as unemployed.

When two years ago Shuruf suffered a major stroke, “the Israeli ambulance didn’t accept to come because of security reasons; neither did the Red Crescent ambulance, because it’s Israeli-controlled area,” recalls Hijazi. Eventually, as last resort, Shuruf relied on his family to be taken to the nearest Israeli hospital.

During the 1990s, the Oslo peace agreement divided the West Bank into three zones: Area A (under the Palestinian Authority); Area B (under Israeli security control and the Palestinian municipal authority); and Area C (under full Israeli rule).

De facto annexed by Israel, East Jerusalem was excluded from the Oslo division.

Palestinians who are walled in suburbs such as Ar-Ram have been left in limbo – in “Area B13”, as graffiti scribbled around the neighbourhood by local youth scornfully notes the undefined situation.

The wall further severs vital connections between East Jerusalem and West Bank Palestinian economic centres such as Bethlehem to the south and Ramallah to the north.

Traditionally a hub servicing the West Bank, East Jerusalem is now inaccessible for Palestinians without an Israeli permit. “Our life was in Jerusalem – not in the Palestinian part,” says Hijazi.

If disconnecting Palestinians from Jerusalem was a goal in putting up the wall, it’s actually bringing the opposite effect – pushing them back towards Israel. They don’t want to wait in queues at checkpoints. They want to work, to benefit from municipal services, to shop in the Israeli part of town.

Shuruf may pay municipal and other Israeli taxes, but he protectively rents another house inside Jerusalem proper just for keeping his Jerusalem ID, and thus enjoying medical healthcare – now a privilege – to which he was entitled as Jerusalem resident before the wall’s intrusion into his life.

“For us, it isn’t about wanting to be absorbed inside Israel which is at stake, but survival – holding on under Israeli occupation,” says Shuruf.

The railway line at the bottom of the historical Battir village. Credit: Jillian Kestler-D’Amours/IPS.

By Jillian Kestler-D'Amours
BATTIR, Occupied West Bank, Oct 1 2012 (IPS)

Dating back to the late 1890s, the historical Jaffa-Jerusalem railroad winds in a U-shape at the base of the valley. Olive groves adorn the bottom of one steep hill. Further up the slope, pine trees and an Israeli army patrol road lead westward towards Jerusalem.

On the adjacent hillside, a Roman-era irrigation system feeds picturesque agricultural terraces; olive trees, eggplant, peppers and other vegetables sit among the different levels, around a flowing spring. Dozens of stone houses are tightly squeezed onto the top of the hill, where a steep, winding road links this historical Palestinian village, Battir, to Bethlehem and the rest of the southern West Bank.

“It’s not an issue of land only. It’s more than that; there’s a cultural heritage that exists in the ground,” said 27-year-old Hassan Muammar, a civil engineer and Battir native who works at the Battir Landscape Eco-Museum. “The continuity of landscape and the nature will be affected very much by imposing the wall in this area.”

Israel plans to build a section of its West Bank separation wall through the lands of Battir. About 5,000 Palestinians currently live in the village, which sits just south of Jerusalem in the occupied West Bank. Over 75 percent of Battir is considered Area C, which under the Oslo Accords agreement is under full Israeli military and civil control.

According to village residents, the wall would cut them off from one-third of their farmland, or approximately 3,000 dunams. They are currently fighting Israel’s plan to build the wall through their lands in an Israeli court, and are awaiting a decision.

“This land is very important. It’s mainly olive groves and orchards, which people depend on as one of their resources for their life,” Muammar told IPS.

In mid-September, the Israeli media reported that for the first time, an Israeli state agency expressed opposition to the route of the separation wall. The Israel Nature and Parks Authority (INPA) reportedly withdrew its support due to the damage the wall would cause to the landscape and local wildlife, and to Palestinian residents of Battir.

“No matter how narrow the route of the fence, it will be a foreign engineering element in the heart of the agricultural terraces, and separate the village from its lands among which are plots irrigated by spring water,” the INPA wrote in a letter to the Israeli Defence Ministry, according to Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz.

“It must be protected because the Battir area possesses all the criteria to be a World Heritage site. It has also an urgency because that heritage is under threat,” said Giovanni Fontana Antonelli, culture programme specialist for the UNESCO office in Ramallah.

Palestine was admitted to UNESCO, the UN cultural agency, in November 2011. The Nativity Church – a Bethlehem church where Christians believe Jesus was born – was the first place to be recognised as a Palestinian heritage site, earlier this year.

According to Antonelli, the Palestinian Authority (PA) government in Ramallah is still deciding whether to submit Battir for consideration as a UNESCO World Heritage site. The deadline to apply is Feb. 1 of next year.

“The next three months are critical,” Antonelli told IPS. “The wall will have an irreversible impact (on Battir). But it is possible to prevent this damage through negotiated action for the preservation of these heritage values. This landscape deserves more attention and has unexplored potential.”

Israel began constructing the wall in 2002. Still in construction, it is expected to span over 700 kilometres; 85 percent of its length will be built within the West Bank itself. According to Palestinian human rights group Al Haq, when completed, the wall will annex 530 square kilometres of Palestinian land, equivalent to the area of Chicago, the United States’ third largest city.

In 2004, the International Court of Justice found that the Separation Wall was illegal under international law and advised Israel to stop building it, to compensate Palestinians for damages, and dismantle its existing sections.

This provides little comfort for the residents of Battir, however, who are anxiously waiting to see whether the wall – which would irreversibly alter their traditional agricultural practices and the historical landscape – will indeed be built through their village.

“Ten percent of people depend entirely on agriculture; the rest of the people take agriculture as part-time work. You find a lot of people, in the afternoon after they finish work, coming to cultivate the land,” said resident Hassan Muammar.

“The wall will be something imposed on the landscape. It’s urgent. We have to think about the quality of life.”

The Shuafat refugee camp can be seen across the separation wall from the Israeli settlement Pisgat Ze'ev. Credit: Jillian Kestler-D’Amours/IPS.

By Jillian Kestler-D'Amours
JERUSALEM, Jul 20 2012 (IPS)

As Israel continues to build walls and fences along virtually each of its borders, analysts say the country’s isolationist policies and unwillingness to deal with the Palestinians and other Arab neighbours through anything other than forceful means spells disaster.

“On the one hand we’re walling the Palestinians in but on the other hand if you kind of zoom out and look at the Middle East, you’ll see that Israel is the one that’s walled in. It’s this island that is losing touch with its neighbours,” says Israeli academic and author Neve Gordon.

Israel’s eight-metre high “Separation Barrier” with the West Bank – referred to by most Palestinians as the Apartheid Wall – is now in its tenth year of construction. As of April 2012, 434 kilometres, or almost 62 percent of the total length of the wall, had been completed.

In June, Israel announced that construction would resume on a section of the wall in the Gush Etzion settlement bloc near the West Bank city Bethlehem. Building of the section around Ma’ale Adumim near Jerusalem, one of Israel’s largest settlements, is expected to start next year.

“Whatever is on the other side of the wall is a monster, is an unknown, is something you fear. So it does definitely increase the level of animosity, hate and so forth because it is an unknown and it’s a frightening unknown,” Gordon tells IPS.

The Israeli government promotes the wall as a way to protect Israeli civilians from Palestinian violence. Palestinians say that the wall, which cuts deep into the occupied West Bank, is a means for Israel to seize more Palestinian land.

When finished, the wall is expected to annex 530 square kilometres of Palestinian land, equivalent to the area of Chicago, the United States’ third largest city, according to the Palestinian human rights group Al Haq.

But Israel’s push to erect walls and fences around itself doesn’t end at the Separation Wall; construction of a 230-kilometre fence along Israel’s southern border with Egypt is moving forward at a frantic pace, in an attempt to keep African asylum seekers out.

Ironically, asylum seekers in Israel who now number approximately 60,000 are themselves involved in the building of the fence and its infrastructure. Most of them have reached Israel through the Egyptian Sinai desert.

“I feel like I’m doing something against myself,” says 29-year-old Mohammad Anur Adam, a refugee from Darfur who spent eight months building a road that the Israeli army and police will use to patrol the fence.

“There is no work, that’s why,” Adam tells IPS from his home in Eilat, Israel’s southernmost city, only a few kilometres from the Egyptian border.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says the fence is necessary to maintain peaceful relations with Egypt. “To continue the peace, there must be security and to this end a fence is necessary,” he has said. “Its rapid construction is important for both peace and security.”

Netanyahu announced early this year that once the fence along the Egyptian border is completed, Israel would build one along the Jordanian border.

Even before this announcement, Jordanian King Abdullah II said in interview with the Wall Street Journal in September last year that “Israel has to decide; does it want to be part of the neighbourhood or does it want to be fortress Israel?”

Israeli historian Ilan Pappe says Israel’s “fortress” mentality is nothing new, and is a product of early Zionist thinking.

“The main Zionist and later Israeli impulse was not to be part of the Middle East but to belong to Europe,” Pappe tells IPS in an e-mail interview. “Whether they have real or imaginary enemies in their own state or on the state’s borders, the Israeli Jewish society voluntarily wishes to be gated so as not blend with the ‘primitive’ Palestinian or Arab environment.”

Pappe says the Israeli siege mentality forces the state to deal with its neighbours only through force, which in turn isolates it even more from the larger Middle East.

“Breaking down the real and imaginary walls can only be done when Israel, absurdly the strongest military power in the region, will be courageous enough to give (up) some of its privileges and make Israel and Palestine a more equal state and accept that (it is) part of the Middle East, its problems and solutions.”

In June, the Israeli authorities completed construction of a seven-metre high wall separating the country from Lebanon. The wall equipped with cameras and motion detection sensors covers approximately 1,200 metres.