Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, Pages 12-13

The Nakba Continues

In Beit Sahour, Squeezed Between a Rock and a Hard Place

By Awatef Sheikh

New housing towers being built in the ever-expanding Har Homa colony, on land confiscated from Said Zawahry for “public use.” (Photo A. Sheikh)

The only way to reach Said Zawahry’s house now is to go through Har Homa, a Jewish-only colony built on the confiscated Palestinian Abu Ghneim mountain, just between Bethlehem and Jerusalem. I reach a traffic circle that leads into this massive colony, a residential fortress accommodating 30,000 settlers, built on this imposing, once-green hill. I phone a friend who visited the Zawahry family last summer to get directions to the house. “Take the first dirt road you find and the house is just opposite the colony, standing alone,” he says. “You won’t miss it.”

I leave the wide, built-up road and follow the first dirt road that I find. I drive down a hill, but suddenly I’m face to face with a construction truck. Oh damn, I say to myself, they’ve started construction work on Said’s confiscated land. The driver in the truck, who ironically is a Palestinian laborer, looks at me, puzzled about my presence here. I drive past him and take the road down to overlook a huge space that’s been leveled. I wonder: have they demolished Said’s house?

The flattened area looks awkwardly naked and is covered with white soil. A weird feeling of dryness and exposure hits me. It’s an alien landscape. I call my friend again and describe what I see. Wrong spot, he explains; this is where the Israelis are constructing a campus. It’s all Palestinian land, but I’m at the wrong spot. I head back to the paved road that circles the colony from its southwest side. I drive by the edge of the hill overlooking Bethlehem and Beit Sahour, both very close. There’s still no sign of Said’s house to my right, where my friend says I’ll find another dirt road that is used by bulldozers and cement trucks. “You’ll be able to see Said’s home through two new housing towers,” he says. But I see nothing.

I drive a bit more, and there it is: a small, old house, glimpsed between two new buildings in this colony, their cement barely dry. I take the dirt road and drive up a hill. I stop there—but my journey through the family’s misery has just begun.

Walking toward their house I am stopped in my tracks by two striking scenes. To my right, there is a very old house that fits in naturally with its environment and the hill into which it’s built. Near it is a plot planted with vegetables. Opposite me, the hill is covered with the construction of housing complexes and towers, bare houses, just stone, blinding in the sunlight, no greenery in sight—that was concreted over a decade ago. It’s sunny and a very hot day.

Although my visit wasn’t arranged in advance and I arrive as a stranger, I’m welcomed with pleasure and hospitality. Said Zawahry, in his 70s, his wife, Fatima, a few years younger, and Samia, their shy but smiling 24-year-old daughter, show me to an outdoor, multi-function area that operates as a living room during the day and a bedroom for some family members at night. It is basic: thick canvas cloth provides shade and the walls are made of sheet metal. Around us are some bed frames and additional mattresses and a couple of old couches. It overlooks the colony and the new construction site. Said and Fatima sit by each other, facing me, and Samia brings us all a cold drink made from a concentrated juice. I can’t remember the last time I had a drink from a concentrate, but it hits the spot.

The extended Zawahry family has been living in this home since 1936—before there was a state of Israel. The old house stands as a testament to their existence and steadfastness. “It’s built from big stones and mud, which makes it cool in the summer and warm in the winter,” explains Said. The Israelis offered the family attractive sums of money to abandon their property, but they declined all offers. “We were born and raised here and don’t want their money,” Said adds. Israeli authorities turned up in 1993, photographed the home as it stood then and told Said that if he built onto the home, it would face a demolition order.

Like all West Bank settlements, the ever-expanding Jewish-only colony of Har Homa is being built in breach of international law. Work started in 1999, when, not surprisingly, the first Netanyahu government called for construction bids less than 24 hours after approving the Wye Plantation Agreement with the Palestinians. According to the Israeli Committee Against House Demolition, the goal behind this colony is to augment the Jewish presence in Jerusalem’s southeastern suburbs, with the objective of creating a Jewish buffer zone to prevent contiguity between Beit Sahour, Sur Baher and the Palestinian neighborhoods to the south of the city.

LEFT: Samia Zawahry outside her family home. RIGHT: Fatima and Said Zawahry. (Photos A. Sheikh)

It’s difficult to imagine the family witnessing the complete transformation of their neighborhood—the formerly verdant hill deforested and replaced with an austere façade and heart of stone and concrete. It’s even more difficult to imagine their astonishment and anger when, in 2007, they learned that Israeli authorities had expropriated five dunams of their land for “public use” in 1997 without their awareness. The Israelis maintain that they handed the confiscation order to some mukhtar (village or community head)—but which one? Although the family’s case is being fought in Israeli court, the contractors for the new neighborhood at Har Homa colony uprooted all of the olive and fruit trees on their confiscated five dunums and have begun work on new housing units. Nothing for public use.

Israeli objections to President Barack Obama’s call for a freeze on all Israeli settlement building, including “natural growth,” are particularly galling in light of the Zawahry family’s plight: Said and his wife, who in addition to Samia have four sons who are married and have a total of 24 children, are forced to live in inhumane and overcrowded conditions, making the most of two rooms and several shacks and caves. They overlook the new construction on their land of two housing complexes for Jews only.

Their lives were made much worse in 2006, when Israel constructed its separation wall behind their home, cutting them off from their extended family, schools and essential services in neighboring Beit Sahour and Bethlehem. The family had to apply for permits in order to travel to the rest of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. In order for the children to attend school, the family has had to rent a house in Beit Sahour, where the children and their mothers stay during the week, rejoining the rest of the family only on weekends.

Before the wall was built, it took the Zawahry family members five minutes and cost $1.50 to travel to Beit Sahour to reach their schools, clinics and do their shopping. Now it takes them approximately an hour and a half and costs between $20 and $27—each way. With no one working, the family has no income, and thus can’t afford the trip. Each family member has a “humanitarian” permit to enter Jerusalem, but these permits do not allow them to work in the city.

“Even if we could get a job in Bethlehem,” Said says, “we couldn’t afford the living costs, since we are not allowed to bring back essential food items from there.” Instead they must buy such staples as milk, meat, chicken, fish or eggs in Jerusalem, where the prices are considerably higher; on top of that, there is the cost of taxis, since their permit doesn’t allow them to drive in the city.

They can return from Bethlehem with very limited amounts of fruit and vegetables, a maximum of 2 kilograms—about four and a half pounds—per person. So in order to have an adequate supply of the allowed items for all the family members, the whole family would need to go shop in Bethlehem—something that is neither practical nor affordable.

Said didn’t always need to buy his vegetables—he used to cultivate most of what the family needed on his land. However, their water supply from Bethlehem has been cut since the construction of the Wall three years ago. “The land they confiscated for the settlement was very fertile and the best we had for cultivation,” says Fatima, adding: “They have moved the fertile soil, which is being used in the gardens of the settlement, and have covered it with white soil in order to prepare it for the construction.”

The heavy and sad silence that follows is broken by the sound of the construction just behind their backs.

With no water supply, the family is dependent on rainwater that collects in a well for their domestic use; once that is gone, they must buy water. According to Said, a 3,000 liter water container costs from $102 up to $128. While an Israeli illegal settler living 300 meters away uses an average of 282 liters per day, the 35-member extended Zawahry family is forced to carefully ration its use of water in order for the container to last them 15 days—about 6 liters per day per family member.

When I ask if I can take photos to accompany this account, Fatima’s reply hits me like a ton of bricks: “Sure, go ahead, many journalists have been here and have taken photos: will this change anything?” Why my initial surprise, I wonder. The U.S. vetoed two separate U.N. Security Council resolutions calling for Israel to stop construction at Har Homa. And the International Court of Justice’s 2005 advisory opinion declaring Israel’s wall illegal under international law and that the Wall must be dismantled and all further construction stopped has been flagrantly ignored by Israel and the international community alike.

Samia shows me around the property, and I observe how caves are utilized as homes for people in the 21st century. I decline her offer of one of her two cute kittens—perhaps her only friends in this enforced isolation. As I’m about to leave she looks at me with a sweet, despairing smile and asks me to “come back again.” I wonder how long this family, like the other 35,000 Palestinians trapped between the wall and the Green Line, can survive Israel’s suffocating policies before they “voluntarily” “transfer” themselves to the other side of the Wall and away from their homeland.

Awatef Sheikh, a former parliamentary aide to an Arab MK, is a free-lance consultant and journalist.