7. Resistance to demolition of villages and to displacement after displacement.
7). The resistance of displaced Bedouin communities to further displacement.
On the next day, we were taken to visit three different Bedouin villages near to Abu Dis.
The first one, Wadi Abu Hindi, has a population of some 33 families, or 350 people, though it varies throughout the year, originally from the Beersheba area, evicted in 1948 towards Hebron and then forced further north in the 1960s. Here, behind a fence, was a small school made of metal cabins which get very hot in the summer, built with international funding, and with a lovely small garden. This is on land owned by families from Abu Dis, but nevertheless the Israeli army have declared it to be on state land and demolished the school and the houses in 1997. The school has been demolished and rebuilt three times. Every year $25,000 has to be raised to pay lawyers to try to obtain an order staying further demolition for another year. On the side of the valley, overlooking the shacks surrounding the school, is a small Israeli settlement, containing French-speakers, who sometimes divert their sewage so that it pours down the hillside, and on one occasion when there was a tent set up for a wedding, they sent down flaming tyres. The Israeli army will not allow a paved road to be built, and the rough track which reaches the village from Abu Dis has to go through the gap at the bottom of the valley left in a barrier that supports the settler-only road that serves that settlement, to let the river water run through in rainy periods, when it becomes impassable. The track passes a substantial Israeli rubbish tip which pollutes the valley. These settlers in supposedly vulnerable outposts pay no tax, they are exempt from military service, and they do not have to pay for their security nor for their services. There were wells for the Bedouin village drilled with EU funding, but the Israeli army destroyed them, and will not allow new ones, so water has to be bought in Abu Dis and brought here in tanks drawn by a tractor. There is no sewage system. No electricity is allowed, but there is a generator for the school a few hours a day and some solar panels. The Israelis tried to confiscate some Palestinian land close to Abu Dis and offered the Bedouin money to move there, but out of solidarity with the people of Abu Dis from whom they rented their land and also perhaps their fear of urbanisation, they refused to move. One of the elders of the community came to talk to us, and gave us tea as we left.
Part of the village and the overlooking French settlement
Rubbish from Israeli settlements, discharged on Abu Dis land; Abu Dis is in the background, and some Bedouin homes above the tip.
Next we went to Jabal Al-Baba, where approximately 50 families live next to a hilltop next to a plot of land on a hilltop which is owned by the Vatican - a gift to the pope of King Hussain of Jordan in 1954. The Vatican was able to take legal action to secure a water and electricity supply to the hilltop, where there is a small community centre, with a women’s centre and kindergarten, which was demolished last year. The Israeli army has demolished most of the houses, some as many as five times, and will not allow them to be built again on the same spot; these demolitions tend to take place at night to avoid attracting international attention. The army has prevented the building of a properly made road, or any sewage system. This hill seemed to be more or less surrounded by the Separation Wall, and it is just to the west, across a steep valley and a road, as well as the Wall, from the large Israeli settlement of Ma’ale Adumim. These Bedouin were also deported from further south near the Negev desert, and they settled here because there was a spring and with permission from the landowners in nearby Ai-Eizanya, another Arab Jerusalem suburb contiguous with Abu Dis. After 1967 their freedom of movement was severely curtailed, and the Separation barriers have further drastically reduced the grazing area available so that instead of 4000 there are now only 400 animals. The spring has dried up due to the water being pumped up to Ma’ale Adumim. According to the Israeli E1 plan, made in 2005, this area is meant to be part of an expansion of Ma’ale Adumim , and later the “greater Jerusalem plan’ involves Israeli settlements being joined in a great ring from East Jerusalem, preventing Arab East Jerusalem expanding by creating a crescent of Jewish settlements and thus cutting off East Jerusalem from its Arab-inhabited suburbs not just with the Separation Wall but with a hostile population. A young woman associated with CADFA in the past, now working for the organisation that supports the community centre, who was not just articulate but, it seemed, already strengthened through struggle, showed us round.
A Bedouin home, with the large Israeli settlement of Ma'ale Adumim in the distance, across the valley.
The third village we went to had been much in the news last summer - Al Khan Al Ahmar - where there is an internationally-funded school made of old tyres covered with netting and daubed with mud. The hamlet where about 180 Bedouin live in huts and tents, including 92 children, is in valley leading down the slope of the West Bank down towards Jericho, near to East Jerusalem, and is in a corridor which the Israeli state wants to create to split the West Bank completely into three or more cantons, separated not only, as now, by Israeli army controlled land, but by Israeli-owned and physically occupied land; last summer the Israeli authorities issued an eviction order; these Bedouin shepherds were forced to move here onto Arab Jerusalemite-owned land from the Negev in 1952 by the Israeli army. Again it is one of the only remaining Palestinian areas within the E1 zone, and it was slated for demolition in 2010, with settler extremists from nearby settlements filing petitions since then to the Israeli Supreme Court to have the demolition order enacted. These same settlers also diverted their sewage outflows to pour into the valley until this practice was stopped by the army after the British Council objected to it. The UN and the EU and the International Criminal Court have all determined that demolition of the school and homes would be in breach of international law and might amount to a war crime; however, the Supreme Court in Israel has rejected petitions to set aside the demolition orders, as well as those to implement them, leaving the hamlet under constant threat. Solar panels donated by a charity in 2015 were confiscated, and there is no electricity, no water, and no sewage: the site is right beside a busy dual carriageway road that links the north and south of the West Bank. In 2017 the Israeli army instructed the villagers that their only option was to move to a site near the large Abu Dis rubbish dump, which would make their survival impossible; but last summer the Supreme Court ruled that the army could go ahead and re-locate the village; the judge was in fact himself a settler in the West Bank. The court ruled that the village was built without building permits, ignoring the fact that these are impossible for Palestinians to obtain throughout the Israeli-controlled parts of the West Bank known from the Oslo accords as Area C. In the summer there was a protest demonstration every day that blocked the main road, during which some 30 Palestinians were injured, but international attention meant that activists from abroad were able to come to Al Khan Al Ahmar, including a lecturer from the Sorbonne, who was arrested and jailed but on release came back to the activists’ camp until his visa expired. We met some activists from a Christian organisation who are staying there currently. Unfortunately during this time whilst international attention was on Khan al Ahmar, the Israeli army managed to destroy another Bedouin community at Abu Nuwar, on the outskirts of Jerusalem, along with its internationally-funded school serving 26 children, destroyed again because of the E1 settlement plan.
No one from Al Khan Al Ahmar came to speak to us, it is possible that the men were all out looking after their flocks in the surrounding area, or otherwise busy just surviving. The women and children looked at us from a distance.
These three visits impressed on me the fortitude of the Bedouin people who are determined to cling to their semi-nomadic ways of life, as well as to their identity as Palestinians, and to fulfil the role that their displacement has forced on them, of resisting further displacement and thus becoming key elements in the current struggle against Zionist expansionism. This way of life must involve an entirely different attitude towards material possessions, and the means through those possessions to live a comfortable life, which gives them the strength to continue in such conditions of severe deprivation of basic amenities. This liminal existence, being hemmed in and restricted by borders and fences, seeking always the freedom to move across the land and the freedom to stay when and where they want to stay reminded me of the struggles faced by Roma and other Travellers in Europe and their similar racist stigmatisation; here, though, the Bedouin do not seem to be stigmatised and hounded by the local Palestinian population, any such tension being submerged by the common Zionist threat. Whether or not the lives of the Bedouin are as permeated and indeed ruined by gender domination, as is the case in many European nomadic communities, we were never able even to begin to discover.
Nevertheless, in an increasingly militarised world fashioned to meet the profit accumulation needs of global corporations, fostering war and climate change regardless of the consequences for the majority of humanity, this kind of fortitude, the fortitude of the migrant, and at the same time the fences, the police and army assaults, and the state-fostered racism against which it is tested are set to be required of increasing populations across the world, as now in Central America for victims of the US ‘war on drugs’ and in Libya and the Mediterranean for victims of its wealth extraction from Africa via debt, and via the mining corporates’ thefts. Furthermore, since our ways of life in the West are built on extraction of materials from the earth that we cannot continue to extract, we all will need to learn again some of the skills that allowed past generations to enjoy a simpler life, much more focussed on community solidarity and on cultural performance rather than passive consumption, and we need to do this in the short time available before climate change is out of control. The gender politics of this reaction across the world to increasing inequality will be absolutely crucial as to whether we move towards a future of public luxury and private penury or alternatively towards barbarity and drastic population reduction by flood, war and famine.
I had a strong sense of the landscape, with its cities and towns on the heights of this long ridge, broken up by meandering steep valleys, between the Mediterranean and the parallel hollow in the earth that is the Jordan valley being ruined by development that was first and foremost the expression of a prolonged state of warfare. All along that ridge was the ugly scar created by the Apartheid wall, a gash with a road and a huge fence even in sections where it was not a massive concrete structure, like a massive sculpture expressing the triumph of militarism and hatred. Everywhere in the Arab towns houses were under construction, many of them part-inhabited and unfinished; but also from what we could see of the Israeli settlements, there were cranes and construction work, there was the terrible architectural conformity bespeaking the mass-production of housing, and there were settlers living on the edges, behind their barbed wire and fences, in portable temporary buildings. A once-lovely landscape is being tarnished with new towns where forests had been, great rubbish tips, and badly-planned buildings. Everywhere, rubbish, everywhere the skeletons of old cars, everywhere wire fences topped with barbed wire and everywhere massive walls, even in the little bit of Israel itself I saw on the way to Tel Aviv airport.
We all will increasingly need a sense of community, as the individualism imposed by consumerism and debt must recede if we are to have any hope at all of surviving the coming century. It seems to me that multiple, flexible loyalties and adherences are possible for all people, after all no one is only Jewish, only Palestinian or only black already, but the salience of these particular identities relates strongly to the present and historical abuse and domination which their holders face across the world. That ‘present and historical’ raises a key question, as to the relative weight of present and continuing domination as opposed to historical abuse - the strong mimetic potential of all the practices of domination suggest that the effects on the actions of its perpetrators and of its victims is prolonged and intergenerational, whether through psychological, cultural or epigenetic mechanisms, but if there is present justice there clearly can be some measure of recovery, but can it be sufficient and will it be soon enough?. These are questions we cannot answer, in the pervasive absence of justice of the current world-hegemonic regime.
What is happening in Palestine shows how right the French revolutionaries were after 1789 when after two and a half centuries of religious war and persecution, which continued to attest to the savagery of the monarchy in France right up to its overthrow, they demanded the separation of Church and State. They went further and sought to make religious affiliation a private, personal matter, even though religion is always associated with group affiliations. But the involvement of the State in prescribing, enforcing, or favouring religion leads to savagery, as here in Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza, and in Israel, just as in 17th century France and Germany. The State has to be there to support all populations in fulfilling their potential, quite irrespective of their religious, or indeed any other affiliations. Those other affiliations that should be disregarded include nationality, which is a penetration of the State into identity and belonging. To be present in a territory should be already to be a full citizen. The duty of the State has to be to everyone within the particular area for which it is deemed responsible, regardless of nationality and also to those who want to move into the area, and those who want to leave it. The State itself has to be multi-tiered, as well as accountable and democratic at each level.
The lesson I am learning here, as I learned at the moving demonstrations that I have attended in recent years calling for the closure of Yarls Wood Immigration Detention Centre, standing outside its high and impenetrable walls, as someone trained to see abuse as domestic violence, or bullying and neglect, and accustomed to seeing domination as exploitation of workers by the owners of the means of production, is that walls and fences and borders are all also strong manifestations of domination and abuse; likewise passports and identity documents, which are statements with regard to which side of a Wall we belong. On many demonstrations I have joined in the chant, “In our thousands, in our miliions, we are all Palestinians” - there is a long way to go yet, perhaps, but we are all heading for the same destination, in which our own land is a prison, with any residual ‘democracy’ completely eclipsed by the rights of ownership, the ownership enjoyed by the jet-setting elite who can go anywhere. We need walls for our houses, and some fences or hedges to keep unwanted feet off crops, even maybe to keep domesticated animals in their places, but most walls are just spacial representations of a regime of domination based on private property. They must all be torn down.
When we visited Bethlehem, and indeed later Jerusalem, and Hebron, it was impossible not to see those cities as very ancient tourist attractions, which through the stories associated with them had attracted visitors for a thousand years or more. People whatever their religion should be free to come to them and some of those visitors may want to stay, and should be allowed to, provided that they do not use any State-backed unfair advantage or other privilege of military-backed power, such as accumulated wealth that they could bring with them. Where neoliberal capitalism restricts the movement of people, unless they have wealth and privilege already, whereas it promotes the free movement of goods and capital, we need to strive for a different world in which wealth, that is, a claim on an unfair share of future production, is rendered immoveable and indeed worthless: for a world in which goods and services are sourced as locally as possible, but a world in which any people, whether Jews or Palestinians or anybody else, can move freely. This is the world embodied by the anti-nationalist values of migrants and nomads. Such a world, with appropriate collective governance, would rapidly become a more equal world, more equal between as well as within particular areas or territories.
The creation of Israel was a massive step backwards in terms of the separation of State and religion, as its Imperialist proponents, whether Zionists or anti-Semites in positions of power, like Balfour, had failed to learn the painful lessons of Europe’s history in attempting to set up a state which was supposed to be a homeland for the adherents of one particular religion. They acted at a time when eugenicist and racist convictions were given scientific and cultural approval, in the face of the threat to white imperialist domination of the globe both from the stirrings of anti-colonial struggles and from the internationalism of the socialist movement. Zionists were to be given the honorary status of whites, to be encouraged to embark on a settler-colonial project at a time when most of the other colonial projects across the world were in retreat, though many of its institutions and the deeply ingrained racism and patriarchy and assumption that the world was to be managed according to a distribution of military force were still going strong, as they are today even when their disastrous end is in sight.
The reason behind this failure was the pervasive influence of the idea of the nation-state - still the mainstay of many international organisations, the “United Nations” for example. Little as I know about the Ottoman Empire it seems from what I gathered about its rule in Palestine to have retained more or less to its end various features of a feudal world, in which property rights were somehow shared between distant land ‘owners’ and the actual occupiers and users of the land. It involved a different mode of expropriation. This sheds light not only on the terrible association of private property (and by property here I mean the use of land ownership to secure unearned income), with the nation-state and with the militarism that secures them both, but also on the way in which Zionists were even able to pretend that Palestine was “a land without a people”. It was just a land that was vulnerable, because the concept of private landownership was still in transition towards capitalism, and many of the land’s ‘owners’ were not there. Unlike Australia before settlers came it was not a land without Walls, but the walls were weaker.
Comments
Post a Comment