"Becoming Uncomfortable"

Sur Bahur*

Swollen bags, punctured bed foam,
mangled wires, blank bottles
The van gasps like a horse with broken pipes
Heaving us over hills
Along creeks of trash
There’s no-where left to put it these days
A guy with gelled hair sips a coke through a straw
The stoop of MacChicken is crowded
A tiny boy drops his notebook from a pile
heading for stairs
I knock and point through tinted glass
At the laminated cartoon faces
at blocky smiles
accidentally abandoned
He stares and goes.


* Sur Bahur is an Arab neighborhood in East Jerusalem

__________________________________
Hadera

The boy wanted to be confetti
and firework buried in sky
Spraying scalding oil, violet streaks of cabbage
Tomato pulp and cellophane seeds
in a cocktail of invisible enzymes

Now the men scramble for pieces of flesh
as if it were Bar Mitzvah candy

Headlines remember
those bound
by the covenants of their fathers
________________________________________________________________
"What the hell is going on in Jerusalem?"

Friday morning I joined the organization Ir-Amim (City of Nations) on a study tour of Jerusalem's tense and tangled borders. We drove along the municipal boundary of the city, observing the places where the "Jerusalem Envelope" portion of the Separation Barrier intersects with, swells beyond or contracts inside this political line. Ir-Amim was founded two years ago by some of the leading Israeli players in civil rights and legal advocacy. The organization operates with the understanding of the symbolic and political weight of Jerusalem in any future Israeli-Palestinian settlement. Ir-Amim seeks to expose and confront the realities on the ground in the shared city. They advocate for the cessation of settlement expansion in the city and work with political associations in Arab East Jerusalem to build infrastructure. They analyze each section of the barrier based on the criterion of security, human rights and long-term political implications.

As the bus first departed for the parts of the city Israelis rarely venture into, Amos told us that the tour would not provide answers and would most likely leave us more confused. The Jerusalem of ancient myth was the navel of the world, the source of creation, of law and order, of gurgling chaos. The city is at once fractured, with half of it hidden from view of most Jews, and economically, culturally and topographically impossible to sort. Ir-Amim works to problematize the Jewish mantra of an “Undivided Jerusalem.” They use the analogy of a divorce to describe their political work in pursuit of parity and pragmatics in a two state solution.

When the state of Israel gained control of Jerusalem in 1967, it also annexed 70,000 Palestinian people. Since that point, the government has strived to maximize its stake in land and increase the Jewish population. Today, Arabs comprise one third of the city’s population. In an earlier blog entry, I wrote a bit about the legal status Arabs of East Jerusalem. To reiterate, these non-Jewish Jerusalemites are known as permanent residents. They pay taxes to the Israeli government and are entitled to social services. They can vote in local elections, but not in national elections. Neither citizens of the P.A. or Israel, they are virtually nobody’s constituents. As I witnessed on the tour, there is a huge disparity in financial resources allotted to the Jewish and non-Jewish neighborhoods of the Israeli capital. Shredded tires, cardboard boxes and plastic bags line the roads of East Jerusalem, which are in dire need of paving.

When we boarded the mini bus for our tour, Amos Gil, the executive director of Ir-Amim handed each participant a map - a blur of green and blue and red lines, light-blue and yellow blotches depicting the Green Line (the pre-1967 borders), the Municipal Boundary, the Route of the Barrier, Israeli and Palestinian built-up areas as well as planned settlements.

We climbed out of the van at different vantage points where we looked at the impact of the security fence on people’s access to their communities, to employment healthcare and education. We also discussed the efficacy of the wall in preventing terror attacks and international reactions to different sections of the route.

A hole was left in the fence near Bethlehem so that Jews might have access to Rachel’s Tomb. In 2004, a man crossed through this gap to carry out the bombing of the # 19 bus in Jerusalem. Also vital to note is that no terror attacks have been carried out by residents of Israel/East Jerusalem.

Some interesting legal muddles have surfaced in village of Beit Sahur, which is just south of Jerusalem and adjacent to Bethlehem. The route of the fence annexed the tip of this village into the city of Jerusalem. Under this context, the Israeli government arrested people who had lived in this area all their lives for being in Jerusalem “illegally,” without Israeli resident status. Human Rights organizations are battling the Israeli government in court over a clause known as the Absentee Property Law. According to this doctrine, if land-owners are no where to be found, the government reserves the right to confiscate their land. Near Beit Sahur, the fence has blocked people from accessing their farms and olive groves.

In the North of Jerusalem, within the municipal boundary, there is a village called Kafr Aq’b. Its residents have always been Jerusalemites. The separation fence cuts the village off from the city, leaving the land linked, instead, to the area of Ramallah though the residents identify Jerusalem as their center of life. Everyday, 6,000 students must cross through checkpoints within Jerusalem to get to school. When the separation barrier is completed along its proposed route, like the residents of Kafr Aq’b, 55,000 of the 230,000 Arab Jerusalemites will be on the wrong side of the fence.

In some places the barrier is built of gray, concrete panels that jut out in a spine along the sandy hills. In other places, the barrier is a shorter span of barbed wire and chain links, fifty to seventy meters wide, with a road in the middle for military use. We saw the most famous chunk of the barrier, which runs along the hem of Abu Dis. Its image was slapped on front pages around the world when Israel began construction of the wall in 2004, creating an international public relations disaster. I remember seeing it in South Africa under the headline, “Apartheid Wall.” The monotone cement is covered in spray paint:

“From Warsaw Ghetto to Abu Dis Ghetto.”
“No for Another Wailing Wall.”
“Love Everybody. Hate Apartheid.”
“Seattle is with Palestine.”

It is the last Friday of Ramadan. Police jeeps and Israeli soldiers patrol a slot in the barrier as lines of people wait to get through to Jerusalem. Only the ones with blue identity cards can pass.

I like Ir-Amim’s rational approach, its focus on pragmatics, on people’s day-to-day realities amidst a conflict held hostage by zealotry. At this juncture, I think it is crucial for the Israeli government to provide infrastructure and adequate civil services to its East Jerusalem residents. Because of their lack of political clout, international pressure is a must. One of my goals in this blogging endeavor is to try and present the complexities of the situation in this country, frequently glossed over by the media and omitted from Hebrew School curricula. Please write me with comments and questions. I have volumes of my own. Brown President Ruth Simmons said that the only way we learn is by becoming uncomfortable. I’m learning like crazy.