Silent Spring |
Peter Lagerquist
Ahmed Mardawi was barely two months old when the first Iraq war started in 1991. That winter the Israeli army imposed a curfew on the West Bank and moved in force into Hable's streets, where the first Intifada still smoldered. A sound bomb was detonated just outside the house where the Mardawis sheltered with their newborn. The baby started crying and developed a fever; when his father tried to take him to the hospital in nearby Qalqiliya, the local army commander army refused. Ahmed survived but lost his hearing.
Now a slight, shy 12 year old with liquid brown eyes and pale, freckled cheeks, Ahmed hears the world dimly through a conch on his left ear. His own voice is a stranger to him, his enunciation labored, nearly unintelligible. On weekdays, he attends a special school a few kilometers down the road in Qalqiliya, but over the past year Israeli closures and curfews have made the commute increasingly difficult.
It will soon get worse. Since July last summer, a massive Israeli "Security Fence" which will eventually stretch the length of the West Bank, has started to envelope the village. In order to annex the nearby settlement of Alfe Menashe to Israel, it will permanently sever Hable from Qalqiliya and the rest of the West Bank and expropriate thousands of dunums of land from the village, impoverishing most of its families, including Ahmed's.
Gulf Wars have been sometime portents of disaster here and the Israeli army's record during the second Intifada has sparked fears of what would come this winter. But in Hable as in scores of other communities along the Green Line, whose inhabitants have watched their lives being slowly but inexorably dismantled over the past months, reality has already eclipsed the imagination. As bombs again crash over Iraq, the village is slipping quietly into oblivion.
Shrinking horizons
Hable was once a well off place. Construction jobs in Israel were accessible well into the Intifada and Israelis - Arabs and Jews - came to shop and fix their cars; the streets are still full with Hebrew lettered signs. The village also had water and land, some of the most fertile in the West Bank, and before the Intifada sold produce both to Israelis, and to Palestinian wholesalers in Nablus and Ramallah. The villagers say curfews, harassment, arrests and beatings have since become routine, but at least their livelihoods were secure.
A year ago however, the IDF intensified patrols along the border, and it became more difficult to cross. A few score men still steal across by foot every day, making their way across open fields and returning wearily at sunset. But they are few; the threat of arrests, beatings and heavy fines deter most. Though agriculture has since become the mainstay of the local economy, it will not be for much longer. 3500 dunums of land registered since the British Mandate will be expropriated by the fence, along with five wells that water the village fields.
Many families will loose everything, including Ahmed's. Most of the agricultural land belonging to his father Khaled will either be expropriated for the construction of the wall, or left inaccessible on the other side of it. "There will be no work left," says Khaled bitterly. Some 300 families in the village will suffer a similar fate. And the jobs in Israel will also be lost. "One day you are thriving, the next day you have nothing," says Al Haj Muheir Jiddah, father of ten. All his land will go, 25 dunums in total. "I will be like a refugee. I will ask for a refugee card and get food from Norway," he jokes bitterly, shaking his head.
All is Israel
Abu Muhannad, father of eight, is in a particular bind. His summer house and 15 dunums of greenhouses sit on the outskirts of the village, beyond a 40 meter wide path dug by the bulldozers. This will become "Israel" once the wall is completed, he says. The Israeli Civil Administration has told him that there will be a gate in the wall, through which he will be able to reach his land during the day. But they warn that they will close it "if there is any trouble at all."
Abu Muhannad is not impressed. "And if so? What do they want us to do: fly by helicopter?" On the village slopes he traces the arc of plowed earth curving around the village. "This is not about security," he says, "They want the land," he points to the villas of Alfe Menashe, a settlement perched on hilltops east of Hable, land that once belonged to the village. The mayor of one of the nearby villages claims that on the walls of the Israeli District Coordinator's Office in Kedumim, he has seen plans for a new settlement, to be built on the expropriated land.
In their fields, the farmers watch impotently as the bulldozers clear over more ground. Two gruff private security guards with submachine guns slung across their shoulders lounge nearby. "We don't dare approach them. "They say that if we come close, they will shoot," says Abu Muhannad.
There are several guard teams patrolling along the path of the fence, and they think of the fence only in terms of what it will mean for Israelis. "I think the fence is good because people will no longer blow themselves up in Israel," says a young man with a goatee and modish glasses. "Does it matter that Israel is westwards, and the wall runs east of the village?" He laughs. "Ah, 'Where is Israel?', that is the million dollar question! To me, all of this is Israel."
Only the dead leave
The problem of Hable and other nearby Palestinian communities is that "Israel" has grown to envelop them completely over the past three decades. Just north of the village is the road that connects it to Qalqilya, but also links Israel to the Ariel, Itamar and Kedumim settlements in the center of the West Bank. Cars with Palestinian Authority license plates are not allowed here; at the only entrance to Hable, the IDF has installed an iron gate, wrapped in barbed wire. On a small hill across the road, tanks and a guard tower overlook the village and the entrance to Alfe Menashe. Army jeeps patrol below, stopping regularly to search Palestinian vehicles with yellow Israeli license plates venturing out from villages further up the road. Gleaming settler sedans with loud bumper stickers weave past them, driving towards different horizons.
Nothing makes it past the gates. In mid March this year, a 50 year old woman named Adli Jabr had a heart attack. The villagers called an ambulance from Qalqiliya but she died at the road side by the gate. "The soldiers wouldn't let it through," says Hussein Mardawi, Khaled's brother, and the local director of the Palestinian Red Crescent Society.
"They only let the ambulances in to collect the dead," says Abu Muhannad. He has no illusions about the future. "Hable will become a prison. After they close the village, half the people here will leave. There will be no life here."
There is already a somnambulant and forlorn air about Hable. In the morning, the otherwise busy streets are nearly silent; most of the men have no work and see no point in going out early. Later perhaps, they will try to scrounge up some make do work.
Ahmed's father Khaled says he is trying to obtain a machine to mend shoes, so that his son can learn a trade, and the family gets an extra source of income. He is excited by the prospect, but struggles to make it come alive for his son. "He will help us," he says suddenly, pointing hopefully to the foreign journalist, making sure Ahmed can see his lips. A shy grin lights up the boy's face and Khaled jostles him playfully.
Later, on the edges of the village, the farmers try to salvage what they can from their vanishing fields: greenhouse steel supports, water pipes and olive trees uprooted and pruned for replanting. Occasionally an Israeli surveyor in a small white Toyota drives up to the edge of the advancing construction works and takes a few unhurried measurements. There is no rush. Unseen and unheard behind the advancing wall, as the bombs fall again over Iraq, a silent spring dawns slowly but surely on Hable.
-- Al Jazeera
Friday 04, April, 2003
Ahmed Mardawi was barely two months old when the first Iraq war started in 1991. That winter the Israeli army imposed a curfew on the West Bank and moved in force into Hable's streets, where the first Intifada still smoldered. A sound bomb was detonated just outside the house where the Mardawis sheltered with their newborn. The baby started crying and developed a fever; when his father tried to take him to the hospital in nearby Qalqiliya, the local army commander army refused. Ahmed survived but lost his hearing.
Now a slight, shy 12 year old with liquid brown eyes and pale, freckled cheeks, Ahmed hears the world dimly through a conch on his left ear. His own voice is a stranger to him, his enunciation labored, nearly unintelligible. On weekdays, he attends a special school a few kilometers down the road in Qalqiliya, but over the past year Israeli closures and curfews have made the commute increasingly difficult.
It will soon get worse. Since July last summer, a massive Israeli "Security Fence" which will eventually stretch the length of the West Bank, has started to envelope the village. In order to annex the nearby settlement of Alfe Menashe to Israel, it will permanently sever Hable from Qalqiliya and the rest of the West Bank and expropriate thousands of dunums of land from the village, impoverishing most of its families, including Ahmed's.
Gulf Wars have been sometime portents of disaster here and the Israeli army's record during the second Intifada has sparked fears of what would come this winter. But in Hable as in scores of other communities along the Green Line, whose inhabitants have watched their lives being slowly but inexorably dismantled over the past months, reality has already eclipsed the imagination. As bombs again crash over Iraq, the village is slipping quietly into oblivion.
Shrinking horizons
Hable was once a well off place. Construction jobs in Israel were accessible well into the Intifada and Israelis - Arabs and Jews - came to shop and fix their cars; the streets are still full with Hebrew lettered signs. The village also had water and land, some of the most fertile in the West Bank, and before the Intifada sold produce both to Israelis, and to Palestinian wholesalers in Nablus and Ramallah. The villagers say curfews, harassment, arrests and beatings have since become routine, but at least their livelihoods were secure.
A year ago however, the IDF intensified patrols along the border, and it became more difficult to cross. A few score men still steal across by foot every day, making their way across open fields and returning wearily at sunset. But they are few; the threat of arrests, beatings and heavy fines deter most. Though agriculture has since become the mainstay of the local economy, it will not be for much longer. 3500 dunums of land registered since the British Mandate will be expropriated by the fence, along with five wells that water the village fields.
Many families will loose everything, including Ahmed's. Most of the agricultural land belonging to his father Khaled will either be expropriated for the construction of the wall, or left inaccessible on the other side of it. "There will be no work left," says Khaled bitterly. Some 300 families in the village will suffer a similar fate. And the jobs in Israel will also be lost. "One day you are thriving, the next day you have nothing," says Al Haj Muheir Jiddah, father of ten. All his land will go, 25 dunums in total. "I will be like a refugee. I will ask for a refugee card and get food from Norway," he jokes bitterly, shaking his head.
All is Israel
Abu Muhannad, father of eight, is in a particular bind. His summer house and 15 dunums of greenhouses sit on the outskirts of the village, beyond a 40 meter wide path dug by the bulldozers. This will become "Israel" once the wall is completed, he says. The Israeli Civil Administration has told him that there will be a gate in the wall, through which he will be able to reach his land during the day. But they warn that they will close it "if there is any trouble at all."
Abu Muhannad is not impressed. "And if so? What do they want us to do: fly by helicopter?" On the village slopes he traces the arc of plowed earth curving around the village. "This is not about security," he says, "They want the land," he points to the villas of Alfe Menashe, a settlement perched on hilltops east of Hable, land that once belonged to the village. The mayor of one of the nearby villages claims that on the walls of the Israeli District Coordinator's Office in Kedumim, he has seen plans for a new settlement, to be built on the expropriated land.
In their fields, the farmers watch impotently as the bulldozers clear over more ground. Two gruff private security guards with submachine guns slung across their shoulders lounge nearby. "We don't dare approach them. "They say that if we come close, they will shoot," says Abu Muhannad.
There are several guard teams patrolling along the path of the fence, and they think of the fence only in terms of what it will mean for Israelis. "I think the fence is good because people will no longer blow themselves up in Israel," says a young man with a goatee and modish glasses. "Does it matter that Israel is westwards, and the wall runs east of the village?" He laughs. "Ah, 'Where is Israel?', that is the million dollar question! To me, all of this is Israel."
Only the dead leave
The problem of Hable and other nearby Palestinian communities is that "Israel" has grown to envelop them completely over the past three decades. Just north of the village is the road that connects it to Qalqilya, but also links Israel to the Ariel, Itamar and Kedumim settlements in the center of the West Bank. Cars with Palestinian Authority license plates are not allowed here; at the only entrance to Hable, the IDF has installed an iron gate, wrapped in barbed wire. On a small hill across the road, tanks and a guard tower overlook the village and the entrance to Alfe Menashe. Army jeeps patrol below, stopping regularly to search Palestinian vehicles with yellow Israeli license plates venturing out from villages further up the road. Gleaming settler sedans with loud bumper stickers weave past them, driving towards different horizons.
Nothing makes it past the gates. In mid March this year, a 50 year old woman named Adli Jabr had a heart attack. The villagers called an ambulance from Qalqiliya but she died at the road side by the gate. "The soldiers wouldn't let it through," says Hussein Mardawi, Khaled's brother, and the local director of the Palestinian Red Crescent Society.
"They only let the ambulances in to collect the dead," says Abu Muhannad. He has no illusions about the future. "Hable will become a prison. After they close the village, half the people here will leave. There will be no life here."
There is already a somnambulant and forlorn air about Hable. In the morning, the otherwise busy streets are nearly silent; most of the men have no work and see no point in going out early. Later perhaps, they will try to scrounge up some make do work.
Ahmed's father Khaled says he is trying to obtain a machine to mend shoes, so that his son can learn a trade, and the family gets an extra source of income. He is excited by the prospect, but struggles to make it come alive for his son. "He will help us," he says suddenly, pointing hopefully to the foreign journalist, making sure Ahmed can see his lips. A shy grin lights up the boy's face and Khaled jostles him playfully.
Later, on the edges of the village, the farmers try to salvage what they can from their vanishing fields: greenhouse steel supports, water pipes and olive trees uprooted and pruned for replanting. Occasionally an Israeli surveyor in a small white Toyota drives up to the edge of the advancing construction works and takes a few unhurried measurements. There is no rush. Unseen and unheard behind the advancing wall, as the bombs fall again over Iraq, a silent spring dawns slowly but surely on Hable.
-- Al Jazeera
Friday 04, April, 2003