On Saturday, several of us from the guest house (there are a bunch of Birzeit University students living here, including some Americans, Europeans, and an Aussie who are studying Arabic) went to the center of town to meet up with the director of an NGO (non-governmental organization) that teaches English to Palestinian kids in the Al-Amari refugee camp. The Birzeit students are here for three months or more, and so wanted to volunteer. I was tagging along to volunteer and/or observe and/or make another contact in the NGO community; schooling in the camps is by and large left to the United Nations.
So we got to the designated meeting place, and after 15 minutes or so of waiting, we called to find out why the director hadn't met us. Well, it was Ramadan, and because this woman hadn't heard back from Birzeit that anyone would be volunteering, she had canceled everything. The Birzeit students are going to wait until after Ramadan and try again—during Ramadan, they do the English lessons in the morning, and that's when Birzeit has its classes.
But some of us (well, me and anyone who felt like following) weren't deterred. I had never been to an honest-to-goodness refugee camp, and so I decided to walk down to the camp to take a look around. To give you a very, very brief background, these are "camps" in only a very loose sense. Most of the refugee camps in Palestine go back to the 1948 War of Independence (called an nakba, "The Catastrophe," by Palestinians), when Palestinians fled the fighting in the North and West and took refuge in safer areas. The camps around Ram'allah are populated by Palestinians who lived in/near Jerusalem or Tel Aviv. The camps aren't collections of tents; for 60 years now, Palestinians have been building houses out of whatever materials they can get, and there is some very basic infrastructure (electricity, running water) that has developed over the years. Ultimately, the camps have the look of run-down, low-income areas. Some (rabid pro-Israelis) have a problem calling the residents of these areas "refugees," as the United Nations has an entire arm of the organization dedicated to providing services to the refugees (the United Nations Relief Works Agency, or UNRWA), and there is some semblance of infrastructure present. But the bottom line is that these camps aren’t recognized as legal residences, and the homes and shops are built on land that someone else owns.
I could write a lot more about the camps, but this was supposed to be a brief narrative. So I’ll get back to that.
Having walked around most of Ram’allah, relying on my geographer’s acute recall of the map back in my room, and periodically consulting my trusty keychain compass, I was able to navigate the 1.5 kilometers or so from the city center to the Al Amari camp. And, as promised, it was distinguished by two things: the generally run-down and low-income look of the area, and the UNRWA buildings. We—an American undergrad, a British Cambridge grad, two Germans, and me—walked through the camp, which was pretty quiet. The locals we passed treated us pretty much like all the other Palestinians we’ve met—a nod and a smile, a quick greeting, sometimes a curious stare—until we hit the “main street” cutting east/west through the camp. An older gentleman—probably in his 70s, wearing a kuffiyeh—greeted us, and started up a conversation with the American undergrad and the Briton. This Palestinian asked where they were from. Upon hearing “America,” the gentleman didn’t have any problem; but when the British woman told him where she was from, he got a little animated.
“This… Palestine is my land. Jews came and took from me! Britain… Balfour let them!”
He was referring to the Balfour Declaration of 1917, wherein the British “government view[ed] with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” The British were in charge of the Mandate of Palestine, and so this was widely seen as the opening of the gates for European Jewish immigration to the region, the fulfillment of the Zionist dream. Of course, most everyone forgets the rest of the Declaration: “it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.”
It was rather ironic to me, though; the guy gave a pass to America, despite widespread Arab/Muslim resentment of unflinching U.S. support for Israel (not to mention well over a hundred billion dollars in U.S. aid), but he blamed the British for starting the whole chain of events that led to him living in a refugee camp for the past 61 years. Of course, he wasn’t blaming a 22 year-old British woman for a government policy enacted 82 years ago, and he certainly wasn’t hostile. But it just goes to show that there are deep histories and long memories in the Israel/Palestine dispute, and no simple answers.
Enough narrative! Time for pictures:
Shortly after sunset the first weekend of Ramadan, looking west-southwest from the roof of the guest house. You can just make out the Israeli city of Rehovot as a line of lights on the horizon below the center of the frame. Less than 10 miles beyond Rehovot is the Mediterranean.
Hey, remember this billboard from Ram'allah? They've got 'em in Bethlehem, too. This one is on top of an apartment building, just north of the old city.
Another one of the USAID billboards, attached to a building housing, among other things, a bank. About ~500 meters beyond this building is the old city of Bethlehem and Manger Square.
A bit further on, looking back northeast. This billboard is attached to a building that has an honest-to-goodness parking garage (first one I've seen in Palestine).
After leaving Bethlehem to the southeast, looking back towards the old city & Manger Square. This trio of billboards not only trumpets USAID success in training health care workers, but also advertises a radio station(?) and ice cream. I'm guessing on the center billboard, because it says something like "we had for two years the wide 5:00 capacity with...[something I can't figure out]." So it seems to be advertising a TV/radio station having the biggest evening audience for two years. Michael, help?
Leaving Bethlehem behind, going southwest along a highway, I hiked through the Judean Desert (more in a subsequent post). I turned off the highway to follow this road, which had this very fascinating marker denoting an area of Palestinian sovereignty. I find it fascinating that it's against Israeli law for Israelis to go somewhere that (by definition) isn't in Israel. If you ever wonder what political geography is, it's stuff like this...
...And it's also stuff like this. This is the Har Homa settlement, which houses 15-17,000 Israelis on land seized from Palestinians during the 1967 Six-Day War. I have more photos that show more detail that I'll post later, but in the far right side of the frame you can see the construction cranes that are adding onto the settlement. This is part of the "natural growth" of settlements (despite them being illegally-located on Palestinian land in the first place) that the Israeli government refuses to stop. Har Homa, and settlements like it, are the big reason for the Security Barrier, and these settlements are choking off Palestinian communities like Bethlehem. Oh, I should probably mention this photo was taken from the east end of Bethlehem, and the low ground in the frame is the famed "Shepherd's Valley," where according to the Bible, the angels proclaimed the birth of Jesus to shepherds tending their flocks. The settlement, with its multiple schools, shopping centers, and medical clinics, is considered by Israel to be part of Jerusalem.
And that refusal to stop settlement expansion in order to accommodate "natural growth" of the community? Yeah, that concept gets really sticky when you note how nationalist/religious Israelis want to out-breed Palestinians:
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