Al-Khadr: Daily brutality in a West Bank village strangled by the Wall

Date: 12 / 11 / 2008  Time:  20:59
Bethlehem - Ma'an -

The symbol of the village of Al-Khadr it is its grapes. There are fields upon light green fields of them. They hang in heavy bunches. About a third of the 10,000 residents of the town earn their living from cultivating grapes and other crops.

Yet Al-Khadr is a shrinking preserve. Once a 22,000 dunum (1 dunum is 1,000 square meters) swath of territory spreading southwest from Bethlehem, some 5,000 dunums have already been confiscated for the construction of four major Israeli settlements. More land is pending confiscation. According to Mayor Ramzi Salah, 90% of the village’s landed is slated for confiscation, between the expanding settlements and outposts, the nearly complete Israeli separation wall.

Welcome to ground zero of the refugee-campization of Palestine. The people of all Khadr are being severed from their land, from their agricultural culture, from their personal and collective history. They are becoming displaced people without physically moving. Rather, Israel is rapidly remolding the physical environment around them, enveloping them in concrete, hemming them in with concrete walls and modern hilltop suburb-cum-settlements.

Al-Khadr is being forcibly transformed from an agricultural village to a ghettoized, densely-packed urban space, heavily targeted by the Israeli military, not unlike the concrete slums and alleyways of Palestinian refugee camps, home to people and their descendents displaced in the 1948 creation of Israel, which Palestinians remember as the Nakba (Catastrophe).

A city surrounded

Nowhere is this physical-political reality more visible than in Al-Khadr’s Old City, which is home to some 200 families. The twelve-meter concrete wall wraps around two sides of the neighborhood. The wall itself thrusts upward and then bends at a 60-degree angle, forming an arc over the settler bypass road. Two schools and a large football stadium stand in the shadow of the wall.

According to residents of this neighborhood, the Israeli soldiers who patrol the route of the wall have made a routine of invading the village center, harassing school children, shopkeepers and pedestrians, occasionally beating and arresting people, each day for the last 22 days. A 16-year-old student was abducted by soldiers from his home overnight on Monday.

Last Wednesday afternoon a shopkeeper named Nasr Dar Isa was arrested from his convenience store just down the street from the girl’s school in the Old City.

“The brutality was different this time,” explained Dar Isa's brother, Khader, an imam who took leave of his job at the Palestinian Ministry of Religious Affairs to watch the shop.

It was just after school. “When the soldiers came, there were 70 girls who all wanted to buy things in and around the shop,” said Dar Isa. “The girls were scared and took shelter inside the shop.

“One of the soldiers said ‘you have ten seconds to close this shop,’ and then without throwing he threw a sound bomb among the girls,” he said, gesturing to the broken window of the freezer case, which he said was shattered by the flash-bang grenade.

“My brother was irritated. He speaks Hebrew, and started a heated argument with the soldiers.”

Nasr was then roughly handcuffed and marched away. “They didn’t even give him time to empty his pockets. He’s a shopkeeper; he probably had tens of thousands of shekels and checks with him,” Dar Isa added.

Dar Isa seemed resigned to his brother’s fate. The family contacted the local Israeli authorities, the Red Cross, and the Palestinian Prisoners Society, but they still had no information on his whereabouts after three days. Dar Isa is concerned that his brother may be in prison for the long term. Even if he is released, he will face curtailed freedom, and is unlikely to be issued a permit by Israel to travel to Jordan, or even to Jerusalem on the other side of the wall.

Curfew

Israeli troops imposed a curfew on the town again on Sunday (the last curfew was the previous Friday). When reported in the Israeli media, the stated justification for these curfews and incursions is stone throwing. The soldiers claim they are searching for the throwers of stones and occasional Molotov cocktail.

None of the residents of the area near the wall and the bypass road witnessed the alleged stone and bottle throwing. The physics of such an act are indeed puzzling. The highway itself is hidden from view by the wall. The barrier curves at such an angle a stone would have to travel up into the air, then double back like a boomerang in order to hit anything in the vicinity of the road.

“It’s impossible to throw stones there,” said Ismail Issa, a municipal council member who works with the schools.

Issa explained that in response to the alleged stone throwing, the soldiers have intensified their harassment of the civilian population in Al-Khadr, particularly near the schools.

“This happens every day now,” he said. “Last Thursday about 50 soldiers came. They made a curfew, threw teargas, and sound bombs.”

“They also occupied a house [belonging to Abdullah Dadua] for more than five hours. There is an 11 month old child in that house that went without food, without milk. We called the Red Cross to help the family but the army prevented them from going there,” he added.

The soldiers came again on Monday afternoon, beating four of Issa’s coworkers at the Al-Khadr municipality. One, 23-year-old driver Rajai Subeh, was arrested and taken to the nearby DCO (the local army headquarters) and later released.

Like other residents of the village, Issa says the soldiers’ brutality has worsened over the last five to six months, since the section of the wall.

“My five-year-old daughter told me yesterday that she would not go to school because she is afraid of the soldiers,” he added. “People are frightened. I expect the worst … maybe someone will get shot.”

Determination

Bassam Jabir, the headmaster of the Boy’s Secondary School vigorously denied that any student from the school could have thrown stones at the times when Israeli soldiers claimed. During school hours, he said, no student is allowed outside. “If any person threw stones there before one o’clock, they did not come from the school. The soldiers know very well.”

“Even if they threw stones, they would go over the road and not hit anything,” he said.

He said the Israeli army installed cameras along the wall that should have captured the alleged stone throwing. If released, he said, the videotape would show that no student threw the reported stones.

Every day, Jabir said, the soldiers come, “for no reason,” to beat and arrest people, and to “point their guns in the windows of the school.”

Nonetheless he said he’s determined to resist the soldier’s harassment simply by keeping the school open and functioning. “We will go ahead and study all the time, he said.”

In countering the tyrannical behavior of the Israeli troops, there is little the residents of Al-Khadr can do themselves, aside from defiantly carrying on with their daily lives. The shops remain open whenever they are not forced to shut. The students go to school. The teachers teach.

International organizations have also mobilized in support of Al-Khadr. The Ecumenical Accompaniment Program in Palestine and Israel (EAPPI) has sent international observers to witness and hopefully reduce some of the brutality. The Red Cross has also intervened during periods of curfew.

People in Al-Khadr have also taken political action. Since 2006 the villagers have held demonstrations on Fridays against the construction of the wall on their land, even as the barrier has further constricted the town. This year’s protests involved holding the Friday Muslim prayer on the Bethlehem-Hebron road, which is slated to be severed, then re-routed when the wall is completed.

'Like a refugee camp'

The principle organizer of these protests, Al-Khadr resident Samer Jaber, is wary of the political and social effect of the wall. “All of Al-Khadr will become like a refugee camp,” he said, “People have lost their land as a source of income. They have lost the right of owning this land, all for the benefit of Jewish colonial settlers.”

The situation in Al-Khadr, while extreme in many ways, is also indicative of life in numerous villages and towns along the “seam zone” created by the snaking, multilayered path of the wall. The partial Israeli withdrawal of the Olso accords began the process of carving the West Bank into an archipelago of Palestinian communities surrounded by areas of full Israeli control.

The wall cements this process. Instead of creating a stable political boundary, the wall creates thousands of individual “frontiers” that in effect surround the Islands of Palestinian jurisdiction. Al-Khader is an example of a community that finds this new frontier imposed on it. Lying at the edge of the Bethlehem ‘island,’ it is bearing the worst effects of Israel’s unilateral re-shaping of the physical and political landscape of the West Bank.