The Nakba Continues, Pages 14-15

Between the Wall and the Occupied Space: “To Exist Is to Resist”

By William Parry

Abdul Halim outside his home in Nazlit Issa. At right is the opening of his former well, into which the Israelis poured concrete, rendering it useless. (Photo W. Parry)

A PLAQUE DEPICTING Jerusalem’s Dome of the Rock stands over the main entrance to Abdul Halim’s unfinished three- story home, asking Allah to bless the house. It is dated 1999. The Israeli army took over the building in January 2003 and, ever since, has been stationed on the rooftop, with the family unable to complete and live in the building. It’s what you might call a mixed blessing, for in June 2004, Abdul Halim received notice that the home had a demolition order placed on it because it straddled the route assigned to Israel’s illegal separation wall. But the home’s military occupiers intervened, asking the Civil Administration to freeze the demolition order given the rooftop’s strategic value. “I’m happy for the army to stay on the roof, as long as it means they won’t destroy my house,” Abdul Halim says with pitiful gratitude.

The absurd reality that Abdul Halim and his family have had thrust upon them does not stop there, however. The concrete wall, about 15 feet high, slices its way through their property and, instead of detouring around the house, has been built right up to one side, so that the house actually becomes part of the separation wall before the latter continues in its brutal cement form.

The handsome, sandstone colored building now stands out in the village of Nazlit Issa, which is situated close to the Green Line in the northern West Bank. That’s not because of the camouflage netting that covers Abdul Halim’s rooftop and spills over the edges, or the mounted video camera that monitors everything and everyone in sight. What sets it apart is its stasis—life, growth and development unnaturally put on hold in a landscape that has since been strangled. I drove toward Abdul Halim’s home along a street that runs parallel to the concrete separation wall, past an unmanned military checkpoint with its concrete bollards, tower, fences and barbed wire—a desolate scene of latent tension and violence. Two homes to my left had been reduced to mounds of rubble and twisted metal cable. To my right were several rows of abandoned shops stretching a few hundred meters toward the village’s main road. At a t-junction I turned left and parked my car in what was now a dead end: the wall cuts across the street, severing a former artery between the West Bank and Israel.

A variety of images had been painted on this section of the wall: one depicts the Israelis as violent pigs with long, sharp tusks, dressed in helmets and military uniforms. Another is of a sabra cactus in the shape of a person wearing a Palestinian keffiyeh, punching the wall and creating cracks in it. “To exist is to resist,” reads the graffiti. Nearby homes, some partly demolished, exposing the tiles of what had formerly been a bedroom, perhaps, or a kitchen, stood their ground, damaged but still inhabited.

We sit in the shade of Abdul Halim’s unfinished home on plastic garden chairs. The youngest of his five children, one of his three sons, brings us sweet tea, water, homemade bread, cool, fresh tomatoes and olive oil that they produce themselves. The flavors are tremendous and the olive oil is one of the best I’ve ever tasted.

Abdul Halim takes the compliment in stride. “This area produces the best olive oil in Palestine,” he claims. “I used to sell most of mine to Jewish customers, before the wall.”

His main livelihood today is producing olive oil, but before the wall was erected he owned several lucrative shops: one a supermarket that formed the ground floor of what is now his unfinished home, and several other premises, including a pharmacy and a shop that sold carpets and furniture along the previously buzzing main road that linked Nazlit Issa with Israel. “This area was always busy with commuting traffic and Israeli and Palestinian customers from the Triangle in Israel,” he recalls. “Fifteen thousand people passed through Nazlit Issa each day before the wall cut us off.”

Faintly visible on his driveway are the lines demarking parking spaces that served his supermarket. A drive along Nazlit Issa’s main road testifies to the previous bustle that it serviced—but virtually all of the shopfronts and businesses are now boarded up and abandoned. It is a commercial mausoleum. “Those who could afford to relocate to other towns like Qalqilya, did; those who couldn’t, sold what they could and closed the doors,” he explains.

This aspect of economic isolation and strangulation is a calculated objective of the Israeli wall, Palestinians assert.

The wall has destroyed the family businesses and divided the family, Abdul Halim says, as he offers me a cigarette. A daughter and sister, married to Palestinian citizens of Israel, live on the Israeli side of the wall. Before the wall was erected they were a 15-minute walk away; now, a 48-mile drive separates them, not to mention the permits they must get from the Israeli authorities to visit their former home.

Abdul Halim’s home was slated for demolition to make way for Israel’s separation wall. Because Israeli soldiers occupy the rooftop, however, the home was “spared”—but is now part of the wall itself. (Photo W. Parry)

Abdul Halim takes me into the ground floor of the house. With two sons of marrying age—30 and 28—he has taken his chances with the army by preparing it as a home for his eldest son. It is tastefully decorated and furnished. The furniture in the living room—imported from Turkey, he says—remains covered in plastic. Everything looks freshly finished: life on hold. What will be—may be—the master bedroom is huge, but the view from the bedroom window is marred. Outside it is a concrete-enclosed staircase that the Israeli soldiers installed and use to access the rooftop.

In another large room, which serves as storage space, he shows me heavy, elaborate wooden doors and the windows that will be used in each room throughout the house. The army gave him permission to buy the windows but then decided they couldn’t be fitted, for “security” reasons.

He then leads me to the main entrance, holding a finger to his lips before leading me into the stairwell. He walks quietly and cautiously to the first landing and looks to see if there are any soldiers. He poses as I take a photo of him by coiled barbed wire more than waist-high. It runs up the entire stairwell. It’s been three years since he saw any of the other floors.

We get in the car and drive for 10 minutes from the village to a walled-in field with scores of olive trees. His family owns 84 dunams of land, he says. The Israelis have appropriated half of it without compensation and, given the wall’s route, the family now has access to just 42 dunams. Some of his land is where we stand, the rest is beyond the wall. The one gate to cross through is open for several hours a day.

For the first two years after the wall was built, Abdul Halim was unable to obtain a permit to access his land. Even now he has to renew it every six months—a tedious, bureaucratic exercise, with success never guaranteed. This, he believes, is designed to make Palestinians abandon their land. During the olive harvest, the family and laborers are hassled by Jewish settlers, he tells me. “When it comes to their security, they’re deadly serious. But for us, look how they treat us. If we go to our land, they harass us.” He points to his home. “The video camera can see everything, including us being harassed, but does anyone ever get prosecuted? No. Besides, the army also harasses us.”

Abdul Halim is passionate about his olive trees. He shows me how he prunes them and maintains the land around them. He regards them as his children. They are his connection to his land—an integral part of the family’s past and, he hopes, its future. When he could no longer afford his legal fees to fight his demolition order, his lawyer agreed to take olive oil as payment.

I’m baffled and humbled by Abdul Halim’s composure and hospitality. I ask him how he’s managed to cope with this unimaginably absurd and unjust reality. “I don’t have any other option,” he says matter-of-factly. “I have to cope and deal with it.”

Back at his house, he’s put a lot of time into cultivating flowers and fruit trees to hide the wall—“sanity” camouflage. “You wake up and see all of this,” he says, pointing to his home, garden and to his land. “I put all of my effort into it. I wouldn’t replace this for a castle. I want to keep my family around me.”

But, he adds, squinting in the midday sun: “People here are defeated. There’s no resistance. They want permits to get work to live. That’s the priority.”

As I leave Abdul Halim, in my rear view mirror I catch once again the graffiti on the wall: “To exist is to resist.”

William Parry is a free-lance writer and photographer based in London. His book, Against the Wall, will be published by Pluto Press this spring.