09 December 2006
Ariel
On Thursday, the 30th of November, I travelled with Yesh Din to Ariel, the Jewish town situated at the centre of the northern West Bank. We were to meet with a Palestinian who claimed that his settler neighbour had decided to enlarge his garden and, in so doing, had fenced off half a dunam of the Palestinian's land. The Palestinian, who I'll call Mo, owns 26 dunam, and the land taken was not his most productive. But it was his land, on which he himself had planted two olive trees in 1957. Mo is a 64 year-old man who speaks good Hebrew. He had his settler neighbour's phone number and had called him a number of times on the issue. On each occasion the neighbour promised to remove the fence but never did. Then the settler stopped answering the calls. For two years Mo hadn't been on this part of his land. Now he wished to make an official complaint to the police about the theft. But the regional police are stationed in Ariel into which Palestinians, or "Locals" as the police euphemistically call them, cannot enter alone.
So early on Thursday morning I, Ruti and Racheli, two Yesh Din volunteers, met Mo by the side of the motorway. He wore a woolly hat and had a short white beard. He had already brought the case to the DCO (see previous post) where he had been told to bring all the relevant papers to the police. These he now had, organised and complete.
As we approached Ariel Ruti called one of the police commanders to request that we be given permission to enter Ariel with a Palestinian, and that a vehicle be sent to escort us from the road-block. The officer said that no vehicle was available. Eventually he told us that it would be alright for us to enter with a Palestinian without an escort. The road-block waved us through without even a cursory check.
On entering the station we were challenged in the corridor by a fat burly officer. He wanted to know what we were doing with a "local" in the station, didn't we know that it was criminal offence to bring a "local" into a settlement? (Actually he said "into the Land of Israel", but I'm sure this was a slip of the tongue as that would suggest that the parts of the West Bank where there are no Jewish settlements are not the Land of Israel, which historically and semantically they clearly are). We protested that we'd been given express permission and eventually he relented, seeming to see us as more trouble than we were worth.
We entered the box-office of an officer called Miri. She was pleasant and proper. We went over the case. It emerged that she had dealt with Mo once already. Exasperated, he had entered his land using wire cutters to cut the settler’s fence, presumably to harvest olives. The police had been called and he was arrested, taken away in hand-cuffs. It now transpired that he didn't know that he had been arrested and thought that he'd made an official complaint against his neighbour. But this was not the case. On that occasion Miri had advised him to contact Yesh Din. The question now arises: are Yesh Din becoming the alternative investigation branch of the Israeli police in The Territories? There have been more and more cases where they have advised Palestinians to seek Yesh Din's services. If this is the case, are Yesh Din merely becoming part of the system, another cog in the occupation machine?
Miri’s office is decorated with pretty pictures of pastoral scenes: rolling hills, a boat on a lake, a windmill. Not images of the Land of Israel. The symbol for the Judea and Samariah[1] Police was printed large and in colour on a notice next to Miri’s office. On the right it has the normal spikes of the symbol of the Israeli police. On the left there is the outline of the West Bank, in which there are a number of houses. In the foreground these are small and white with pointed red rooves; in the background there are larger buildings, one of which has a dome and large pointed windows: unmistakably a settlement with its synagogue. It seems that no one looking at this symbol should be left in doubt whom the Judea and Samariah Police serve. Unfortunately I was not able to find the full symbol on the net.
Our business complete we left Ariel’s police station. We began to drive on the four-lane motorway along Ariel’s south. The town went on and on. It seems that Ariel is the longest town in the Land of Israel, longer end to end than Tel-Aviv or Jerusalem. This with only 13,000 inhabitants, half the population of Tiberius. Ariel is what we might call a Sausage Settlement: it is thin and long. There are other Sausage Settlements, like Yitzhar, built in two lines of houses, zig-zagging, stop-starting, in a chain along the hill top. Like a chain of sausages, one following from the last. Building like this is clearly not good for communal cohesion, it is not a staple of town planning theories. But it is good for taking control of land.
A view has become popular in Israel that the land of Ariel should not and need not be returned to the Palestinians as part of a peace treaty, even that it cannot be returned. But the Palestinians find the idea of giving up any of the land conquered in 1967 difficult, and this when settlements build on the old border, the Green Line, or considered. The idea of Israel retaining Ariel and a peninsular of Israeli sovereignty permanently poking deep into the interior of a future Palestinian state would be anathema to Palestinians. Ariel is build to look and feel big. It takes up land, has big building, (many of which are empty), has a motorway connecting it to Tel-Aviv, displaying road signs that list it alongside old established towns like Herzelliah or Ramat Gan. Ariel can be removed. A certain Ariel Sharon (after whom Ariel is named) was responsible for removing the settlement of Yamit from the sands of Sinai when Israel returned the peninsular to Egypt. Yamit had 13,000 inhabitants. Sharon destroyed it. But Ariel needn’t be destroyed. It is not like the settlements of Gaza which took up a great proportion of land in the middle of the most densely populated Area in the world. The West bank in not especially densely populated. Ariel’s land can be returned, its buildings and infrastructure sold to the Palestinian people.
There is a good reason for my straying from the events of last week. Ariel was established as a road-block to a Palestinian state. Its hold on the land and the rhetoric that surrounds it, like the rhetoric about a united Jerusalem, attempt to sow in the minds of Israelis the view that it is permanent, and that it ought to be permanent. This while Israel’s leaders know full well that no Palestinian leader could agree to a state without then two areas. Ariel was build to prevent peace.
[1] Judea and Samariah being the biblical-geographical name for the West Bank.
On Thursday, the 30th of November, I travelled with Yesh Din to Ariel, the Jewish town situated at the centre of the northern West Bank. We were to meet with a Palestinian who claimed that his settler neighbour had decided to enlarge his garden and, in so doing, had fenced off half a dunam of the Palestinian's land. The Palestinian, who I'll call Mo, owns 26 dunam, and the land taken was not his most productive. But it was his land, on which he himself had planted two olive trees in 1957. Mo is a 64 year-old man who speaks good Hebrew. He had his settler neighbour's phone number and had called him a number of times on the issue. On each occasion the neighbour promised to remove the fence but never did. Then the settler stopped answering the calls. For two years Mo hadn't been on this part of his land. Now he wished to make an official complaint to the police about the theft. But the regional police are stationed in Ariel into which Palestinians, or "Locals" as the police euphemistically call them, cannot enter alone.
So early on Thursday morning I, Ruti and Racheli, two Yesh Din volunteers, met Mo by the side of the motorway. He wore a woolly hat and had a short white beard. He had already brought the case to the DCO (see previous post) where he had been told to bring all the relevant papers to the police. These he now had, organised and complete.
As we approached Ariel Ruti called one of the police commanders to request that we be given permission to enter Ariel with a Palestinian, and that a vehicle be sent to escort us from the road-block. The officer said that no vehicle was available. Eventually he told us that it would be alright for us to enter with a Palestinian without an escort. The road-block waved us through without even a cursory check.
On entering the station we were challenged in the corridor by a fat burly officer. He wanted to know what we were doing with a "local" in the station, didn't we know that it was criminal offence to bring a "local" into a settlement? (Actually he said "into the Land of Israel", but I'm sure this was a slip of the tongue as that would suggest that the parts of the West Bank where there are no Jewish settlements are not the Land of Israel, which historically and semantically they clearly are). We protested that we'd been given express permission and eventually he relented, seeming to see us as more trouble than we were worth.
We entered the box-office of an officer called Miri. She was pleasant and proper. We went over the case. It emerged that she had dealt with Mo once already. Exasperated, he had entered his land using wire cutters to cut the settler’s fence, presumably to harvest olives. The police had been called and he was arrested, taken away in hand-cuffs. It now transpired that he didn't know that he had been arrested and thought that he'd made an official complaint against his neighbour. But this was not the case. On that occasion Miri had advised him to contact Yesh Din. The question now arises: are Yesh Din becoming the alternative investigation branch of the Israeli police in The Territories? There have been more and more cases where they have advised Palestinians to seek Yesh Din's services. If this is the case, are Yesh Din merely becoming part of the system, another cog in the occupation machine?
Miri’s office is decorated with pretty pictures of pastoral scenes: rolling hills, a boat on a lake, a windmill. Not images of the Land of Israel. The symbol for the Judea and Samariah[1] Police was printed large and in colour on a notice next to Miri’s office. On the right it has the normal spikes of the symbol of the Israeli police. On the left there is the outline of the West Bank, in which there are a number of houses. In the foreground these are small and white with pointed red rooves; in the background there are larger buildings, one of which has a dome and large pointed windows: unmistakably a settlement with its synagogue. It seems that no one looking at this symbol should be left in doubt whom the Judea and Samariah Police serve. Unfortunately I was not able to find the full symbol on the net.
Our business complete we left Ariel’s police station. We began to drive on the four-lane motorway along Ariel’s south. The town went on and on. It seems that Ariel is the longest town in the Land of Israel, longer end to end than Tel-Aviv or Jerusalem. This with only 13,000 inhabitants, half the population of Tiberius. Ariel is what we might call a Sausage Settlement: it is thin and long. There are other Sausage Settlements, like Yitzhar, built in two lines of houses, zig-zagging, stop-starting, in a chain along the hill top. Like a chain of sausages, one following from the last. Building like this is clearly not good for communal cohesion, it is not a staple of town planning theories. But it is good for taking control of land.
A view has become popular in Israel that the land of Ariel should not and need not be returned to the Palestinians as part of a peace treaty, even that it cannot be returned. But the Palestinians find the idea of giving up any of the land conquered in 1967 difficult, and this when settlements build on the old border, the Green Line, or considered. The idea of Israel retaining Ariel and a peninsular of Israeli sovereignty permanently poking deep into the interior of a future Palestinian state would be anathema to Palestinians. Ariel is build to look and feel big. It takes up land, has big building, (many of which are empty), has a motorway connecting it to Tel-Aviv, displaying road signs that list it alongside old established towns like Herzelliah or Ramat Gan. Ariel can be removed. A certain Ariel Sharon (after whom Ariel is named) was responsible for removing the settlement of Yamit from the sands of Sinai when Israel returned the peninsular to Egypt. Yamit had 13,000 inhabitants. Sharon destroyed it. But Ariel needn’t be destroyed. It is not like the settlements of Gaza which took up a great proportion of land in the middle of the most densely populated Area in the world. The West bank in not especially densely populated. Ariel’s land can be returned, its buildings and infrastructure sold to the Palestinian people.
There is a good reason for my straying from the events of last week. Ariel was established as a road-block to a Palestinian state. Its hold on the land and the rhetoric that surrounds it, like the rhetoric about a united Jerusalem, attempt to sow in the minds of Israelis the view that it is permanent, and that it ought to be permanent. This while Israel’s leaders know full well that no Palestinian leader could agree to a state without then two areas. Ariel was build to prevent peace.
[1] Judea and Samariah being the biblical-geographical name for the West Bank.
