Death zone puts family life in limbo, Chris McGreal

Opinion, July 2003, www.aljazeerah.info

Death zone puts family life in limbo

30/07/2003

Palestine Media Center

Chris McGreal

Israeli security fence cuts Palestinians off from their village, school and relatives

From her backyard Khadija Bdarat can point out the roof of her children's school a few hundred metres up the hill in the Palestinian village of Ras.

The problem is how to get there. In the way stands Israel's "security fence", which runs across the back of the Bdarats' home, cutting it off from the village. When the motion detectors are switched on and the latest section of the fence is declared operational on Friday the house will fall inside a "closed military zone.”

After that the Bdarats' adult children will need a permit to come to visit their parents, and at night the family will be under curfew and not allowed to use the only road from the house.

"It's going to be very difficult," Mrs Bdarat said. "We will be isolated, all on our own. We can see everyone but we are so far from them now."

Before Ariel Sharon arrived for talks at the White House yesterday, President George Bush described the "security fence" as "a problem" in the search for peace.

The 200 mile barrier is part fence, part wall, and is being built at a cost of £1m a mile. The Israelis say it is needed to reduce terrorist attacks.

It is widely assumed by the Palestinians to be more about grabbing land, given that it runs deep into the West Bank in places and separates thousands of Palestinian farmers from their property.

The Israeli government says it will cause "minimum disruption" to the daily life of the people living on both sides, but in places whole villages have lost their primary access to water and cropland. Others are entirely caged by it.

The biggest worry for Mrs Bdarat and her husband Yusuf is how to get their four youngest children, aged from seven to 12, to school.

"Before the fence, the children could go by foot. It was just up the hill," she said. "There's a gate in the fence about 2km away - but we do not know if the Israelis are going to open it for the children to go to school every day.

"That's still a trip of about 5km [3 miles]. If not, we have to go all the way to the checkpoint." Travelling from the Bdarat house via the Israeli army checkpoint near Tulkarem and back to Ras is a journey of 7 miles to reach a school formerly 10 minutes away on foot.

"Maybe I will rent a small house in Ras, and they will stay there with their mother during the week to go to school," Mr Bdarat said.

The Bdarats also have three married daughters and two adult sons. From the end of the week they will need a permit to visit their parents.

"The army won't issue a general permit that can be used at any time," Mrs Bdarat said. "Every time my daughters want to come I have to apply for a permit for a specific day for them to visit. To do that, I have to go to the army in Tulkarem. They are not always helpful."

Where it runs past Ras, a village of about 500 people, the fence 2.5m (8ft) high. The barbed wire is interlaced with motion detectors.

On the village side is a second wave of barbed wire coils, a small trench, and an open area the Palestinians call a "death zone" - the army is free to open fire on anyone who sets foot in it.

Until now the Bdarats have been allowed to drive along the new road the army will use to patrol the fence, but once the detectors are switched on the road will be sealed off and Palestinians found on it will be presumed to be "terrorists.”

There is no alternative road for Mr Bdarat's car. The army said it might bulldoze a dirt track through his olive groves; so far it has not done so.

Nevertheless, he refuses to move.

Mr Bdarat was a sanitation worker in Tulkarem until he took early retirement five years ago and bought an acre in Ras. He built a house and planted grapes and vegetables.

The bitter experience of fleeing their land in Israel in 1948, in the mistaken belief that they would return when the Zionist state was destroyed, has produced a generation of Palestinians determined not to leave what is theirs unless forced to at the point of a gun.

"I will never sell and I will never go of my own will. If they want to get me out, they will have to confiscate the land and destroy my house," Mr Bdarat said.

"One day an Israeli officer came from Tulkarem. He told us that if anything happens to the fence, if there is any trouble or attack in the area, they will throw me out and demolish my house. I think that is what they want."

The Bdarats only remaining neighbours are the Hindawi family whose house intrudes into the "death zone.”

Azmi Hindawi is not optimistic.

"I haven't a hope that we will be able to remain here. They will tell us we are too close. I'm already fighting a court battle because they say the house is not legal," he said.

When the bulldozers arrived to begin clearing a path for the fence neither family was over bothered. They began clearing a route which left their houses on the same side as the village.

Then the bulldozers abruptly abandoned that route in favour of one which leaves about 800 hectares (2,000 acres) of farm land belonging to residents of Ras on the wrong side of the fence but in easy reach of a Jewish settlement.

That has only reinforced the popular Palestinian view of the fence, that it has less to do with security than expropriating land.

"The other day a soldier told me I was on Israeli land," Mr Hindawi's wife Amal said. "They told me I couldn't bring my mother from Tulkarem because this is Israel now."

*Published by The Guardian on Wednesday July 30, 2003

Earth, a planet hungry for peace

The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03).

The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers in the West Bank (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03).