Spending 2 weeks in the Occupied Territories living with the Palestinian people and experiencing the realities of their daily life has made coming home very difficult.

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My Summer Vacation in the West Bank

It has already been two weeks since my trip to Palestine and yet I'm still having trouble adjusting to the life of privilege and freedom that we enjoy here. Having freedom doesn't mean having the economic means to express ourselves with our purchasing power. Freedom is something far more essential, like the air we breathe, it is indeed something that we can't live without and as such our common humanity longs for freedom no matter what our background or religion or ethnicity, we all long to be free.

Recently we remembered the words of Martin Luther King for his seminal speech in Washington D.C. 40 years ago but today I remember another quote of his that rings true to my experience in Palestine "No-one is free until everyone is free".

I went to the Occupied Territories motivated by a desire to witness the occupation that has lasted now for over 35 years and to see the effects the occupation has on the daily life of Palestinians and to end once and for the academic exercise of the Israeli vs. Palestinian debates. I thought I could help the Palestinians by being an international witness or lend my hand in rebuilding homes or removing roadblocks but as time went on I realized that I was learning more than teaching and being helped more than helping others.

I spent the majority of my two weeks in Qalqilia, a town of over 40K inhabitants, who had been most dramatically effected by the construction of the Wall that encircles the entire city. When I heard this the first time I thought it would be impossible that a city could be entirely surrounded by the Wall that left the Palestinian inhabitants as inmates in an open-air prison. Upon my arrival I realize the graphic truth.

In the media there has been a debate about the terminology surrounding the Wall. Supporters call it a "security fence" and opponents call it an "Apartheid Wall" but the President himself has called it a "Problem" to the plans for the "road map". Regardless of the terminology you want to use the effects are the same. The wall is annexing giant sections of land, unilaterally drafting the outcome of any future land negotiations and at the same time imprisoning the Palestinian populations to even smaller and smaller untenable land areas.

This is what I witnessed in Qalqilia where a large percentage of the economy is dependent on its agricultural income. Qalqilia is surrounded by lush areas of land and is considered a part of the bread basket of the middle-east but now that land lies on the other side of the wall out of the hands of the farmers and restricted to its access by military guard that are supposed to provide access twice a day but during my stay the gates to those lands were locked for several days in a row without notice or warning.

Within the city there is a 70% unemployment rate the effects of which will become terminal by removing the agricultural lifeline to the community. Already many people have chosen to leave Qalqilia in what is referred to as "voluntary transfer" and those that are left behind wonder how they will go on. But Qalqilia wasn't always like this. Before the Wall there was a great influx of Israeli purchasing power and on weekends many Israeli's would leave the suburbs of Tel Aviv to shop the main street of Qalqilia.

Little of those glory days remain today but the main street is still there where some small shops try to compete for the few customers actually shopping. They mostly sell staple goods and household needs and after every 6th or 7th store they seem to repeat again but the only people on the streets are there seem to be the store owners congregating in front of their shops drinking tea and remembering when this was a very different place.

Retracing the path of the main street towards Israel one can find the evidence of this once thriving city where overhead there are illuminated pedestrian crosswalk signs where now only donkeys and a few pedestrians roam alone. Further along the route there are abandoned cafes and an indoor children's playgrounds where you could drop off your kids while tending to your shopping, but now they are littered with debris and just outside them stands the remnants of an Israeli checkpoint with massive cement blocks and a torn up freight container once used as shelter for the Israeli soldiers to the intense midday sun now torn open and graffittied with Palestinian flags.

From here you can see the end of the street where the Wall that encircles Qalqilia creates a new city limit. Here it stands at 26 feet high made of concrete and protected every 1000 meters with a sniper tower. Going further we come to a gate near the tower where a red sign warns in Hebrew, Arabic and English "Mortal Danger; Military Zone, Any person who passes or damages the fence ENDANGERS HIS LIFE".

This is closer to the sniper tower than I feel comfortable in going, although the red sign and the barbed wire were enough from any distance to make you want to leave we decide to return to the city but before we get very far a curious nearby farmer calls us over for tea. His sons prepares a fire and ready the water as we settle down on plastic mats in view of the sniper tower while his grandchildren continue to harvest their crops of Eggplant offering us some cucumbers for refreshment.

Our distinguished host tells us in Arabic that he once could speak English better than any one of us but that with time he has forgotten all of it. We asked when he had last spoken English to which he replied "When the British were here". He used to work in helping to manage the supply chains for the British troops who pulled out in 1948 and left the Israelis and Palestinians to fight it out over this land. His family lost land then and moved to Qalqilia but he was plagued later by the war of 1967 and lost land to the other side of the green line.

As the tea is distributed and we sit just 100 meters from the wall while he looks onward to where his land used to be. At this point the green line is only 100 meters away but many wonder, why if there was the need for a wall, it was not built on Israeli side of the green line instead of snaking into to the West Bank to absorb 2/3rds of the water resources and 40% of the arable land at some points currently reaching as far as 9 km into the West Bank.

Many farmers such as our host are afraid of leaving Qalqilia for fear that they would not be able to return to the city. Some that I met had not left in 2-3 years. The effects of the wall permeate the city and even though from where I was staying I could not see the wall on a daily basis every morning you felt it, you knew you were in a prison and at the end of my stay the weight of this containment weighed heavy on me. As an American I knew that at any point I could leave without much serious trouble but when I finally did leave I felt a certain guilt in knowing that my country where I enjoy so much freedom was supporting the devastating effects of this wall.

Recently I received word that several of the farmers who had lands within 100 meters along the wall were removed and their properties bulldozed to create a security zone. I wonder if my host has lost his land too and where he might go from here. I wonder why the security and freedom of one people should be guaranteed at the expense and imprisonment of another and why America has not learned from the lessons of its great civil rights leaders that "No-one is free until everyone is free".



Terrence Kelleman
New York, New York
August 24th, 2003



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