conversation with a farm woman near Hebron

5/29/30  near Hebron, southern West Bank/Palestine

            We sit with Zabaede in her farm house and drink tea as we listen to her stories.  She tells of their house being demolished by the Israeli military a few years ago.  The reason: they didn’t have a permit to build it.  When they came to demolish it, they gave the family ½ hour to get anything out of the house they wanted.  They beat Zabaede’s husband and bulldozed the house.

Zabaede and two CPTers visiting over tea

            The West Bank has three types of areas.  Area A (18% of the land) is under Palestinian control (though Israelis will intervene whenever they see fit).  Area B (22%) is controlled jointly by Palestinian police and the Israeli military.  Area C (60%) is controlled by Israelis.

            Zabaede’s house is in Area C, which means that to get a building permit she must apply to the Israeli authorities.  Most Palestinians don’t bother, because it is almost impossible to get such a permit.  There are 150,000 Palestinians living in Area C; over the last 10 years, 150 building permits have been issued to Palestinians in Area C.

The re-built house of Zabaede and her husband

A well on the farm -- destroyed by the military

            We are in the house she and her husband re-built.  She points to things they haven’t bothered to finish properly because the house could be demolished again at any time, and they don’t want to lose all the money it would take to fix things up more.  The house is a combination of stone and cement block.  A demolition permit has been issued for it, but the permit has not been acted on.

            This is a common pattern here.  The Israeli military uses demolition permits as threats – do what we say, don’t protest, don’t stand up to us, or we’ll act on that demolition permit.

            Just for background: the West Bank is part of Palestinian territory taken by Israel from Jordan in the 1967 war.  It is considered occupied territory by the U.N.  Israel doesn’t seem to see it as completely a part of the state of Israel, but it doesn’t see Palestine as in independent state, either.  As an occupying force, Israel has legal obligations to care for the welfare of the people in the occupied territory and it is against international law to re-settle outsiders in occupied territory.  Nevertheless, about 300,000 Israeli settlers live in the West Bank. 

  

          While we are sitting in Zabaede’s house, Hami, the Palestinian man (in picture above) who is our host for the afternoon gets a phone call.  His olive trees have been set on fire by settlers – for the seventh time.  We ask if he needs to go.   No, he says.  Because of all the checkpoints and closed roads, by the time he could get back to his farm there would not be much he could do.  He calls the fire dept., and later in the afternoon we hear that they thankfully were able to get the fire out with minimal damage to his trees.

Israeli soldiers are never far from sight

      

      I don’t quite know how to communicate to you the amount of control under which the Palestinians live.  Every aspect of their lives is under Israeli control – where they can go, when they can go, what they can build, etc.  The Israeli military makes its presence felt throughout each day.