Visit to Al Sawieh Village near Nablus

It was last Friday, one of our days off. The centre in Abu Dis is closed for the Moslem holy day. Abed has organised a visit to a village near Nablus which lies in the northern part of the territory. We set off in a taxi early at about nine. The taxi speeds along the main roads skirting Ramallah and the major checkpoints. We go past numerous settlements, some with biblical names like Eli and Shilo, which contradict their recent implanted origin. After about an hour and a half we reach the village of Al Sawieh, which is in the district of Nablus. It is a burning hot day. All around us we can see settlements like Eli. There are olive trees, and goats, and concrete houses and sheds.
Our contact here is a man called Arafat who is, like all the Palestinians we have met on our tours, incredibly gracious and hospitable. He shows us around the village and introduces us to the cruel Kafkaesque absurdities of life here.
The Palestinian territories are divided into three types of zones, as laid down by the 1994 Oslo agreement which set up the Palestinian authority (supposed to be a staging post for a fully-developed Palestinian state, which has not yet happened): Zone A which is under Palestinian civil and police control; Zone B which is under Palestinian civil control and Israeli police / military control; and Zone C which is under reserved Israeli military control. Abu Dis is in zone B, which means that the schools and other departments are under the Palestinian authority, but there are Israeli military patrols running around all the time. (Abed says that the distinctions between the zones are more apparent than real, because the Israeli army can go anywhere anytime they want, even into Zone A places like the Palestinian capital Ramallah. When that happens, the Palestinian police have instructions from their own authority not to show themselves in public.)
Some of Al Sawieh is in Zone B, but it turns out that the Israeli authorities have unilaterlly declared some parts of the village Zone C (closed military zones) 'on security grounds' i.e. that they pose a security threat to the surrounding settlements, which have been build on confiscated Palestinian land. So the village has a Zone B core, but is criss-crossed with Zone C bits. The houses that have been newly-designated as being in Zone C can be demolished, even if families have been living in them for 50 years.
Arafat takes us on a tour of the village. 'You see those houses on the left, they are Zone B, the houses on the other side of the road (it is a narrow track) are Zone C. That house is Zone B, the one next door is Zone C. This house is half Zone B and half Zone C'. There had been a big effort by the Israeli authorities (military backed by court orders) to demolish the houses in the areas designated as C, but the efforts of peace activists, Palestinian and Israeli had put a stop to this, at least for the moment. Nevertheless we saw some houses which were demolished or now inaccessible or unusable.
A lot of peace activists come to Al Sawieh, international and Israeli. Arafat is friendly with a lot of Israeli groups such as Gush Shalom, the Israeli-Palestinian group Mothers for Peace, the international group Seeds of Peace which works in India Pakistan and Afghanistan as well as Palestine and Israel. They seem to be able to get here quite freely, which surprises me. Also their efforts have been quite effective in stopping house demolitions.
Arafat works for the Palestinian authority. All his human rights activities are voluntary. He has been abroad on several occasions on speaking tours. He shows us a tablecloth from Wales where he has been. He is amazingly positive about the future, which is a great relief after some of the apocalyptic visions of the past few days.
'I want peace with Israel, within the 1967 borders. If we have that, then there will be peace'
I ask him about the refugees of 1948.
'It is not my right to make a decision about the refugees. Neither is it the right of Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas the president of the Palestinian Authority). It is for the Palestinian refugees themselves who have to decide. You know how hard their life is in Lebanon and other places' (In Lebanon they have never been given citizen rights unlike in Jordan, they cannot live outside the refugee camps, they are barred from most employent, have been supported by UN handouts for the past 60 years).

I wonder about the way Israeli settlements get established here on Palestinian land. Is there any legal pretext or procedure? Some of the settlements such as Ma'ale Adunim and Ariel are very large and there are numerous smaller ones. It seems that Palestinians who have been farming on their land for generations don't always have any written document that says it is their land, or if they do, it is a document that comes from the era of the Ottoman empire ie. at least a hundred years old. These documents are not recognised by Israeli courts as valid, still less any title by virtue of their customary use. So Israeli settlements are put down often as part of a government or local government plan to establish 'facts on the ground' as in the area to the east of Jerusalem where the idea is to make the whole area undivided Israeli territory. Sometimes the initiative comes from religious settlers, convinced that they have a mandate from God, arriving often unofficially at first in their caravans, establishing a presence, which is then legitimised by their being there, given protection by the military, access to cheap water, electricity, roads for their exclusive use. The Palestinian villagers whose rights have not been recognised, are then seen as a danger and a threat to these settlements.
In the evening on the way back to Abu Dis we go to a demonstration in a suburb of Jerusalem called Sheikh Jarrah, near the old city. This is a Palestinian area, within the eastern part of hte city, which was occupied and annexed by Israeli in 1967. In recent years there has been a push by religious settlers / local government / government to reduce the number of Palestinians living in East Jerusalem and replace them with Israelis. Palestinian families get expelled from their houses, or their houses demolished on the basis of supposed prior Jewish ownership or a breach of building regulations. Sheikh Jarrah is one of the areas this is happening. Every Friday there is a demonstration by Palestinians and some Israelis against the expulsions and demolitions. Today there are a few hundred demonstrators. There are about twenty soldiers on hand. It is mainly noisy but peaceful, but there is an outbreak of scuffling between some of the religious settlers occupying a former Palestinian house and some of the Palestinians. One of the placards spells out the danger that this could turn into another Hebron.

Abid says that every Friday there are over fifty demonstrations all over the West Bank protesting against the separation wall, the settlements, and the policy of displacement. These are getting more and more international participation.