No, this is not about security

All Palestinian adults from the West Bank or Gaza require a special permit to enter Israel. The permit often specifies the roads they are allowed to use, the window of time in which they can travel, how many hours they may remain at their destination, whether they can stay overnight (a rare privilege), and so on. Riding on Bus 21, the Palestinian bus that goes between East Jerusalem and central Bethlehem, I have witnessed soldiers boarding the bus and detaining passengers who had overstayed their allotted time in Jerusalem by half an hour. The rules on permits form an intricate web, but so far children have been relatively free of its tangles. The rule was that any child under sixteen could travel freely within the Green Line providing they were accompanied by a close relative who had a permit. But not any more.

Permit issued to a neighbourhood child for Palm Sunday 2011. Photograph by Jenny Baboun.

Last year we noticed the changes creeping in. In April 2011, a toddler in our neighbourhood received his own permit. I burst into incredulous laughter when I saw Jenny’s photograph. I was sure that it was a spoof.  But it wasn’t. This Christmas, my colleague Toine’s two children – the youngest of them nine years old – also received permits. Many of their classmates were left out. This week, Toine’s wife Mary noticed that a permit had been issued for a two-year-old when she checked the lists to see if she and her family would be celebrating Easter in Jerusalem this year.

The use of the permit system to divide up families during what should be times of celebration is nothing new. As I wrote in my last post about checkpoint fun, it’s the norm for everyone in the family to get a permit but the grandfather and the eldest daughter, or the mother and the uncle. It’s arbitrary. The one consistent thing is the pitiful agitation that descends on each Christian family as Easter or Christmas draws near. (Muslim families experience the same thing during Ramadan and Eid.) They’ve got friends and relatives on the other side of that wall. Will they be visiting them, or won’t they? It lies in the hands of the military. And the justification for this is that it is essential to Israeli security.

Is it for security that permits are being issued to Palestinian children? This measure has not been implemented during a time of heated conflict. It has not been preceded by a wave of atrocities against Israeli civilians, masterminded by nine-year-old Tamer and perpetrated by two-year-olds who are barely toilet trained. It has been quietly implemented during a time of quiet. No one can look at this and justify it in the name of security, because if the two things were remotely related, why is it only happening now? And it has not happened without thought. It has been phased in slowly, smoothly, as is normal with so many of the rigid laws that govern every aspect of Palestinian daily life. “The method creates uncertainty,” Toine told me. “It gets people used to the new law before they implement it fully, it softens the will to resist.”

When a Palestinian Christian couple are given permits to celebrate Easter in Jerusalem, but their young children are not, what will they do now? Find babysitters and celebrate the holiest days of the Christian calendar away from their children? Choices like this make it harder to move around even when you have permission to leave Bethlehem, and the ties between West Bank Palestinians and their families, friends, and holy sites on the other side of the wall are slowly and quietly being eroded.

This is what military occupation looks like. And no, it’s not about security.

Graffiti on the separation wall in Bethlehem.

When Jenny saw the toddler’s Palm Sunday permit last year, she wrote, “I thought ‘speak now, or forever hold your peace’. If we, Christians of the Holy Land, do not stand up and defend our rights to enter Jerusalem just like Jesus Christ did, then our children and grandchildren will never have the chance of even walking in the Old City. If a child needs a permit now, the worst is yet to come.” Her decision has been to boycott the permit system entirely. This means either sneaking into Jerusalem illegally, or confronting the soldiers over her right to pass.

Many people in Bethlehem have become desensitised to the occupation. I have good friends who are too afraid to fight for fear of losing what privileges they have. They cling to their permits like lifebelts; they don’t want to end up on the blacklist by confronting a soldier. Others just don’t see how a fight is even possible. They’re numb. But now a murmur of dissent is rising in Bethlehem. As I heard Palestinian friends discussing the new rules this evening, a song from Les Miserables came to mind:

Will you join in our crusade?
Who will be strong and stand with me?
Beyond the barricade
Is there a world you long to see?

At AEI we are responding to the change in the rules by designing permits for tourists, which will look exactly as Palestinian permits look, and give the holders the privilege of visiting the Church of the Nativity between the hours of three and five o’clock on alternate Thursdays or some such thing. This is to raise international awareness of local people’s difficulties; many tourists breeze through Bethlehem in their chartered coaches without learning much about the inhabitants’ lives.  I would like people to take the opportunity to issue permits of their own design to the occupying soldiers at the checkpoint too, but this idea has been met with fear. I may have to do it myself. My Hebrew is almost up to it now. “I’ve noticed you sitting here, day after day, never having permission to go anywhere! And it’s just not fair, when you are so kindly allowing all these Palestinian people to walk through this gate (or be pushed through, like that one-year-old whom you’ve just cleared to go). Now you can have a permit too, instead of being restricted to this box! Go and see your friends! Look, we’re allowing you to reach them on one of two highways, and we’ve been generous with the time – you have a six-hour window for travel. Break it and you’ll get blacklisted.”

I outlined this plan to a Palestinian friend. She practically choked on her coffee. “Vicky, are you trying to get yourself deported?”

“No,” I said serenely. “I don’t think they’ll do that. You have to be assertive and sincere, that is key. But it would be much better if you did it, as you’re the one whose movement is restricted. Lots of people need to do it for it to be effective. And we could do to have the women’s choir marching with us, singing that song from ‘Les Mis’…”

This is not the first time I have suggested that the Sumud Choir sing in the checkpoint. Music and resistance go together very naturally. Once again, my suggestion was blackballed. “Vicky, I told you before, if you sing in the checkpoint then I am sorry for the army. For the first time in their life they will have a real security threat.”

“Certain high notes can shatter glass,” I said thoughtfully, choosing to ignore this inconsiderate slur on my abilities. “I wonder what it takes to bring down concrete?”

On the separation wall near my house, someone has left a pair of red handprints on the wall, with the optimistic instruction ‘push hard’ scrawled underneath. As of tonight we don’t have an answer. But we’re going to find one.

From Bethlehem to Rwanda

Just after Christmas I started to feel restless. I was dissatisfied with how things were going with the youth group. Late last year we lost our youth house in Bethlehem (one of three premises) because we couldn’t afford the rent and upkeep, and now the youth have to squash themselves into what was originally an office and practically sit on each other’s laps when they want to meet. I decided that they needed something to perk them up a bit. A field trip seemed in order.

The writing on the wall

If you are a tourist or pilgrim who arrives in Bethlehem via Checkpoint 300, the first thing you will see as you turn into the street is the concrete barrier that slices it in half, severing the neighbourhood from Rachel’s Tomb and the military base that lies adjacent to the holy site. Get closer to the wall and you will find the women of the neighbourhood waiting to meet you.

One of the simplest but most important aspects of my organisation’s work is providing a space where people can tell their stories. One day Toine had an idea: why not turn the wall itself into that space? We could collect short vignettes from the women who use the centre and hang them on the concrete. The stories would be like windows: tourists on their way to see Nativity Church or eat dinner at the optimistically named Bahamas Fish Restaurant would be able to catch a glimpse of Palestinian life.

Through a child’s eyes

Some graffiti by Banksy in Bethlehem: A Palestinian girl frisks a soldier.

One evening late last summer, as I walked home from a day spent in Dheisheh refugee camp, I was stopped at a flying checkpoint. (These are blockades that pop up unexpectedly for a few days, or even a few hours, as opposed to the permanent checkpoints.) I took off my jacket so that they could search the pockets and waited patiently. This wasn’t anything out of the ordinary. What was unusual was the age and appearance of the ‘soldiers’. The eldest of them was nine. She is a little girl who lives just round the corner.

“Shoes!” she said imperiously, in a magnificent imitation of our local IDF, and I removed my shoes. She had a long wooden stick slung across her body in the manner of a gun. She made the motions of scanning my shoes, and then demanded, “ID!” To my horror, I didn’t have my ID on me. I stood and waited while they discussed what to do with me – would they just refuse to let me pass, or would I have to be interrogated first? Should I be arrested? In the end, needing the toilet rather badly, I bribed the occupation army by proffering a squashed packet of Oreos that I may or may not have sat on at some point. They accepted cheerfully. After I had dashed in to the bathroom, I came back out to them, and we spent a happy evening playing tag and hide-and-seek.

What ‘retards’ have taught me about peace work (and people)

“Are you mentally handicapped?”

“He’s too low IQ to give a proper response.”

“I’m sure you’re retarded.”

The use of cognitive disability as an insult has always bothered me. It’s demeaning and hurtful to people who have such disabilities, and it shows a lack of understanding of how these conditions actually affect a person. When these insults are flung about in a discussion on the conflict in Palestine and Israel, my usual distaste is tinged with a sense of something very like irony as well.

Before I started work in Bethlehem, I had a job in a residential college for young adults with learning disabilities. Most of the students were eighteen or nineteen when they came to us, although the college could accept any student between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five. It was a marvellous place, set in one of the wildest and most beautiful counties of England, with a river flowing beneath it and a ruined castle in the grounds. Also dotted about were several little cottages (once the houses of farmhands) where the students lived together in groups of half a dozen.