A Balcony Over Jerusalem Page 13

  In October, after Gaddfai was found and killed, I travelled to Libya again and stood in a queue with thousands, waiting to walk into a meat refrigerator in Misrata where Colonel Gaddafi lay with a bullet hole in his head. Excited Libyans crouched next to him taking ‘selfies’. Gaddafi’s opponents wanted as many people as possible to see the body, to prevent any conspiracy theories that he was still alive.

  He’d been caught hiding in a drain before a mob of his own countrymen dragged him onto the bonnet of a Toyota pick-up truck and did unspeakable things to him. At that moment, all of the fear that his family’s gangster regime had instilled into Libyans, and the Gaddafis’ obscene wealth and power, counted for nothing. The man who’d been one of the Arab world’s dominant figures for four decades lay on a slab of concrete.

  As a cadet journalist in Melbourne in 1980, I’d watched television reports of Ronald Reagan preparing to bomb Gaddafi, his public enemy number one. He was seen as being behind the Lockerbie bombing in 1988. Yet here he was, the man who had obsessed the Reagan White House, lying in front of me like a big dead rat with a gold tooth covered in dried blood.

  The Arab Spring had come to this.

  CHAPTER 11

  Frankenstein’s Monster

  Early 2011

  MOST OF OUR FRIENDS WHO VISITED FROM AUSTRALIA wanted to go to the Dead Sea. They enjoyed caking themselves in mud, then floating on the water while looking over at Jordan. As a result, we found ourselves hopping into our Hyundai Getz and doing the 25-minute drive from Jerusalem to the Dead Sea frequently. Each time, we drove past a small structure that told the story of Israel’s occupation, but for two years we didn’t know it.

  The structure was a little school made of truck tyres and mud, perched on a hill in the Palestinian Bedouin village of Khan al-Ahmar. The Israeli Army would not allow the village to build with anything permanent, such as steel or wood.

  The children had not been allowed to attend the schools in neighbouring Israeli settlements, and the closest school they could attend was 14 kilometres away. Some children could not walk that far and for those who did, it meant crossing a four-lane highway. After four children were killed making the journey, the village decided to build its own school. In 2009, an Italian aid organisation offered to help, and working bees saw the school go up.

  The Jahalin Bedouins of Khan al-Ahmar were expelled by the Israeli Army in 1952 from their traditional home in the Negev in southern Israel and forced to settle in this part of the West Bank. In Khan al-Ahmar there was little water and the desert mountains barely provided enough grass for the shepherds. The army regularly arrived, making it clear that they did not want the 150 villagers to feel they were permanent residents; soldiers even took away playground equipment and 20 solar panels which provided electricity.

  In August 2012, Jack and I drove Sylvie to the village so she could sleep there overnight. She wanted to take dawn photographs to accompany a story I was writing on the village. The poverty of the village was obvious. Jack captured the moment in his diary:

  As my mum was sleeping the night at the Bedouin camp to take some photos for my dad’s article we went to drop her off. We brought some food for the head of the camp who had invited us, we walked in and these kids were all standing around looking at the food. We walked a bit further and they started tugging at our food and didn’t give up but we still let them [have it] because we felt sorry for them. My mother told me how the next day when she was walking around the camp, with the daughter of Eid the chief, the girl always stayed in my mum’s shadow. When my mum turned, she did too, so she was never in the sun, always in the shadow.

  The school was a major victory for the village. By using recycled tyres they had not breached any army prohibition. The 152 students appeared to be making good progress and many hoped to go to university. Above the village sits Kfar Adumim, one of the Israeli settlements that surround Jerusalem. Sometimes the settlers drove into the village of Khan al-Ahmar at night in trucks, spun in circles and screamed abuse.

  Khan Al-Ahmar has for years, with the help of NGOs, been fighting in the courts against demolition of its village and school and the expulsion of its community. Around Israel an estimated 80,000 to 90,000 Bedouins are fighting against being forcibly displaced and dispossessed of their land.1 The matter of Khan Al-Ahmar is still with the Supreme Court so its future is in limbo. One village lost its fight in the Supreme Court. The Bedouin village of Umm al Hiran will be replaced by the Jewish town of Hiran.

  One day, though, teachers noticed an Israeli official taking measurements. He said Israel had decided to build a 35-kilometre-long sewerage pipe from Jerusalem to the Dead Sea. Every few kilometres, the pipe needed ventilation outlets – known in Australia as ‘stink pipes’. Despite the teachers asking the official if the pipe could be located away from the school, it was built three metres from the main classroom – as close as was physically possible to the school. To me this suggested a level of nastiness – a nastiness that these days appears to characterise the Israeli occupation.

  One incident I witnessed seemed to demonstrate this vividly. Journalists in Israel get constant alerts from human rights groups when Israel is demolishing Palestinian houses. I received an alert that Israeli police were demolishing a Palestinian home in the Old City. Because it was the school holidays – and Sylvie was coming with me to take photographs – we took Jack along. The house belonged to 80-year-old Sayara Fakhouri, whose family had lived there for nearly 100 years. The authorities claimed that an extension to the house was illegal, while the family argued that they had repeatedly been refused a permit, in contrast to the Jewish residents of the Old City who were allowed to expand their houses.

  On this particular day, we arrived to find about 60 Israeli police supervising bulldozers demolishing the house. It was part of a plan by Israeli authorities to demolish 90 Palestinian homes in the area, increasing the Jewish presence and reducing the Palestinian presence, thereby re-weighting the demographic balance and ‘Judaising’ the Old City. Mrs Fakhouri sat on the footpath – most of the time looking at the ground but occasionally glancing at the bulldozers crushing her home. Once it was destroyed, the officer in charge walked across and whispered something to her. I was intrigued. I imagined the officer, at a personal level, might have expressed some sort of sympathy. After the police left I asked her what the officer said.

  ‘For every day that you don’t clean up the rubble you will be charged 600 shekels [AU$200],’ she said. Not only had her house been demolished but she had to clean it up. (Word went out around the Old City and children arrived with buckets to begin picking up the pieces of Sayara Fakhouri’s home.)

  That night Jack wrote in his diary: ‘I think that it was very unfair.’

  Another reality which to me suggested cruelty rather than security was Israel’s ‘cemeteries by numbers’. These cemeteries are located in military bases and are filled with small metal headstones with numbers but no names. Each number accords with the name of a dead Palestinian. Often if a Palestinian prisoner dies before their sentence is finished, Israel keeps the remains in these cemeteries until the full term is completed – sometimes a burial can be delayed for 20 years.

  Haaretz newspaper called for an end to the ‘necrophilic farce which makes Israel look delusional’, that is, Israel’s retaining of the bodies of dead Palestinians. Noting that the Palestinian Authority was ‘our only partner for resolving the bloody conflict’, it argued that a refusal to transfer bodies back to the Palestinian Authority would only strengthen that body’s rival, Hamas. ‘We can sympathise with the bereaved [Israeli] families whose loved ones were murdered by some of the terrorists whose bodies are at issue, and who are upset that these murderers will presumably be given heroes’ funerals … A society that ascribes special importance to the dignity of the dead should not adopt the practices of terrorist organisations when it comes to enemy bodies.’2

  The reality of the occupation is infinitely worse than the public realises. The more I s
aw of it, the more fascinated I grew. Each time I drove through the West Bank, I noticed it everywhere – Israeli Army jeeps encircling Palestinian villages, soldiers suddenly appearing in an olive grove in Bethlehem, the towering Israeli settlements on the hilltops. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis now live in the Palestinian Territories, protected by the best private security service in the world: the Israeli Army.

  Controlling another people under occupation is not easy. Israel and its lobby groups who arrange trips play down the optics of occupation. Before Pope Benedict’s tour in 2009, fake green grass was laid at the checkpoint between Jerusalem and Bethlehem.

  Most occupations have ended because the occupiers grew tired of the violence against them. The Americans in Iraq paid such a high price in casualties that they couldn’t wait to get out. The French realised they would never win over the Algerians, and withdrew. The Indonesians grew weary of the international criticism of their occupation of East Timor.

  In the modern age, how does a country – Israel – run a military occupation for 50 years?

  It was something that Sylvie witnessed at the checkpoint between Jerusalem and Bethlehem that pointed me towards part of the answer. She saw an old Palestinian man talking to a soldier. The man was coming from Bethlehem to visit his daughter in Jerusalem. He’d handed the soldier his permit. Palestinians often request such permits, and more often than not are refused. This man, however, had succeeded. He’d brought a pink bag containing hot food to have with his daughter.

  But the soldier said he couldn’t pass. A valid permit didn’t make any difference: the soldier had decided no, and in a military occupation the soldier is the law. ‘Mahar!’ the soldier told him – the Hebrew word for ‘tomorrow’. By now Sylvie knew the place well enough to realise that if the old man came back tomorrow, another soldier – or even the same one – might tell him that his permit was for the previous day.

  She watched the old man shuffle away with his pink bag.

  This incident made me realise that the tyranny of the occupation comes through the power of 18- or 19-year-old soldiers. These checkpoints are daily incubators of hatred, generation after generation. As long as there is an occupation there will be hatred. And, in some cases, a desire for revenge.

  And so, because of that old man whose name we never knew, I set about investigating Israel’s permit system. The more I saw, the more I came to realise that it was a massive case of remote-controlled social engineering. Dr Yael Berda, from the Harvard Academy for International Studies who specialises in the permit system, said: ‘The permit system is the world’s largest and most developed mechanism for filtering, identifying and restricting movement of a large civilian population.’3

  The most significant fact I discovered, which even most Israelis seemed not to realise, was that Israel has 101 different permits for Palestinians. Not one applies to Israeli settlers. The information about the permits was obtained by B’Tselem under Freedom of Information.4

  There are business permits, permits for religious purposes and permits for spouses of Palestinians who live in Jerusalem. There are permits for hospital visits, permits that a doctor needs to travel and permits to escort sick people in an ambulance. There are permits to travel to a wedding and permits to attend a funeral, permits for work meetings and permits for court hearings. There are permits under which a Palestinian must leave Jerusalem by 9pm. On one occasion, a meeting of Israeli and Palestinian business leaders was organised to try to develop better relationships. At the end of the day, they all sat down for a dinner. But at 8pm, all the Palestinians stood up, explaining that if they were not out of Jerusalem by 9pm they could be imprisoned.

  Israel’s web of permits largely runs on auto-pilot. ‘A population of two million people is dependent on the functioning and good will of sixteen clerks, said a major report by Israeli human rights group Machson Watch.’5

  Nowhere is Israel’s permit system better illustrated than in the Seam Zone. This is the Palestinian area that has been cut off from the rest of the West Bank by the wall. When building that wall, Israel cut into the West Bank, trapping these Palestinians between the Green Line – the armistice line that operated from 1948 until 1967 – and the wall.

  For the Seam Zone, Israel has created 13 special permits. In 2003, the Seam Zone was declared a ‘military zone’. This means that 11,400 Palestinians who live in 12 villages have to obtain permits to live in their own homes. B’Tselem reported that for the Seam Zone, Palestinians had to prove ‘needs’ and ‘connections to the land’. A permanent resident certificate required documentary evidence to show they had a right to the house and land. If a piece of land was owned by two siblings, only one would be given a permit.

  Research by other human rights groups documented the difficulties of living in the Seam Zone. ‘Only those who live in the Seam Zone can enter, meaning that the women who have usually moved into the Seam Zone to live with their husbands, are isolated from their own families, friends and community … even for funerals, where family and friends would normally come to the home of the deceased to pay respects cannot take place as family members cannot cross into the Seam Zone.’6 There is restricted access to health services and great overcrowding, as there have been virtually no building permits given and repairs are rarely allowed. The living conditions are dangerous, with zinc roofs and asbestos ceilings. Often the trucks to pick up the sewage are not allowed through the checkpoints and sewage overflows, causing skin and other diseases. The checkpoints are not regularly open and sometimes the men cannot make it home after work.

  In March 2017, the regulations were further tightened to deny permits for agricultural plots of 330 square metres or less, which can eventually lead to dispossession. One illustration of life in the Seam Zone is the ‘Lone House’. The Israeli wall goes straight through this family’s land. The family now live hemmed in by the wall and barbed wire.

  Human rights group HaMoked documented the case of SK and RK, a couple from Jenin in the West Bank who married in 2009. The distance between their homes was a few hundred metres, but Israel’s wall separated them. They sought to make their new home in the wife’s village. After the wedding, the husband updated his address to his wife’s address and applied for a ‘new seam zone resident certificate’. In Israel’s Orwellian permit system, the application was rejected on the basis that the applicant was ‘not a permanent resident’. To see his new wife, he requested a permit to visit the Seam Zone. The military issued ‘a personal needs permit’ that allowed him to visit his wife for three days over three months, and only during the day.7

  The genius of the permit system – from Israel’s point of view – is that it is silent and mostly invisible. The lives of Palestinians are being made difficult by a brilliantly masterminded bureaucracy. A lot of thought by a lot of very clever people has gone into this system, which is why, after 50 years, the occupation is more entrenched than ever. Israel says its permit system is for ‘security reasons’, but over time I realised that the security justification is the default position – sometimes justified, but often completely without foundation.

  If you are a settler, your life is free of regulations; you have the complete protection of Israel’s civil law code. If you are Palestinian, you live under Israeli military law. There are many roads on which Palestinians are not allowed, but on those where they are permitted to drive they must have a permit. If they do not, they can be taken for interrogation. This can mean remaining in prison, without charge, if an Israeli soldier says he believes they are a ‘security risk’. In 2010, Israel passed a military order that any Palestinian without an army permit in the West Bank was ‘an infiltrator’ and liable to seven years’ imprisonment. Palestinians are also liable to pay the cost of their own imprisonment and can be deported from the West Bank to Gaza.

  American journalist Richard Ben Cramer has written that the cost of maintaining this permit system is ‘mind-numbing’. ‘No one in the developed world can truly understand what these numbers mean
’, he wrote in How Israel Lost.8 In 2016, the International Monetary Fund estimated that Palestinian GDP would be between 40 and 130 per cent higher if the West Bank and Gaza had not yet years of political uncertainty and restrictions on the movement of people and goods. Israeli analyst Bradley Burston says the settlement movement has cost Israel some $100 billion in the past 40 years.9 The Israeli human rights group Hamoked concluded: ‘Violations caused by the permit regime have a destructive effect. They lead to creeping dispossession of West Bank residents from their land under the cover of a bureaucracy that operates pursuant to military law with the Israeli Supreme Court’s seal of approval, yet in breach of a number of norms accepted in both Israeli and International law.’10

  Israel uses the permit system to recruit informants. One source close to Israeli security told me there are about 20,000 Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem paid to inform. Payment often means giving informers permits so they can travel to Jerusalem for work. Palestinians who are approached to be informants but who refuse are often blacklisted, meaning they cannot get permits. Referring to them as ‘invisible prisoners’, Israeli group Machsom Watch has estimated that 180,000 Palestinians are ‘security blacklisted’. Most have never been in prison and have no idea why they are blacklisted. According to Machsom Watch, the majority are victims of a system that aims to maintain ‘a big pool’ of potential collaborators. It says blacklisting helps to keep the population ‘frightened, hungry, vulnerable and in continuous uncertainty’, and hampers social cohesion by fostering suspicion about who might be informing.11

  Israel has also established a network of secret units to infiltrate the Palestinian population. As early as 1950, Mossad set up ‘Ulysses’, whose purpose was to plant ‘deep agents’ among Palestinians. Yasser Arafat held his first meeting to plan the downfall of Israel in the apartment of an undercover Mossad agent.