Just over a year ago in April 2007 a delegation from Brighton visited Upper Fasayil in the Jordan Valley, West Bank, Palestine. They sat down with the villagers and planned to build a school, knowing that the the villagers were prohibited from doing any building, improvements or repairs by the Isreali Civil Military Administration*. To see more photos and Read the rest of this entry »
Woman and her grandchild, in a small Bedouin tent in occupied Palestine.
The soldiers from the nearby Israeli settlement use the crop fields around these tents for live-fire exercises. I spoke to a woman in the next tent who had been shot in the head by a rifle bullet while picking herbs in the middle of the day. She had survived with fifteen stitches.
I asked the woman pictured if she or her family had had a similar experience. ‘The bullets fly over our heads’, she said, ‘but so far, God has been kind.’
J.
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Bedouin children in the West Bank of occupied Palestine.
The children of this valley are put at constant risk by the live-fire exercises that Israeli military conduct in the area. Their mother told me how soldiers would set off explosives of all sorts, from gas bombs to sound grenades, on the hill pictured behind. The ground is then left dangerous, as many explosives remain undetonated.
These children remain strong, and the older brother insisted I try riding his horse - which I did, bareback, for the first time in my life.
To hear some of my thoughts on the occupation, have a look at a recent blog.
Best. J.
Kalim, local councillor, shows me the positions in which he and other inmates of the prison were forced to stand for days on end.
This building was built by the British during the Mandate control of Palestine, and was later used by the Israeli military as a prison. In the late 90’s, the Israeli military pulled out, and most of the buildings have since been renovated. The building is now a community centre for local groups, arts and theatre.
Some of the cells and torture chambers, such as this one, lie hidden behind locked doors. They have been left to fall into disrepair, but significantly not demolished. Graffiti on the wall mimics the ‘agony position’, a sort of half-crouch, which the prisoners - almost all of them incarcerated for political reasons - were forced to endure. Kalim spent seven years, from the mid eighties to the early nineties, mostly in this jail. Read the rest of this entry »
Getting a bit behind on these posts so Ill write a bit about Firoush Beit Dejan and Al Aqaba, continue from where the rest of the delegation left and occasionally write about stuff I did in the first few days.
Al Aqaba is a village that is often referred to as the first Palestinian settlement inside an Israeli military camp. (Take this as a joke, many of their homes are pre-48). This place is a model village, it feels like a haven from the occcupation. (Appearances can be deceptive, the Israeli army uses the local farmers for target practice, they train in the Jordan Valley because it is similar terrain to South Lebanon and this, even more than the fertility of the area, is the reason they are desperate to take it all. Guess people forgot to tell them the Lebanese shoot back.) Read the rest of this entry »
Palestinian and international activists from Ramallah, Budrus, Bil’in, Al-Khader, Um Salamona and Jenin gathered in the village of Al-Aqaba in the Jordan Valley on Saturday to express solidarity with the villagers in their effort to maintain their presence in spite of Israel’s attempt to wipe their village off the face of the map.
Now, we are in a place where the occupiers have really demonstrated the subtlety of their sense of humour. This place has a haze to it. It’s a nice day, but tense. Jeeps filled up with soldiers, taking an inordinate amount of interest in anything that moves, punctuate the day. An old man asks us, “so are you tourists here, or perhaps you are concerned about our situation?” He grins. We are sitting with our backs to a nearby water structure. It’s clearly a good one, because Palestinians are considered too dangerous to use it. It’s surrounded by a high barbed wire fence, it is “for the settlers”. Read the rest of this entry »
Running up to our time to head in to Palestine, I had a quick sniff round the mainstream Israeli media. Typing ‘Israeli news’ into Google rewards me with a paper called Haaretz, which has got a range of opinions ranging from stuff which criticizes the occupation to stuff that is so right wing that it reads like Noel Edmonds has taken over the country using an army of Teletubbies. Read the rest of this entry »
11th April: Fairly tired after four days of listening to tales of life under a belligerent military occupation so this isn’t going to be my best writing but i promised we’d start our blogs today, so…
We started with a tour of the Jordan Valley, the most fertile part of what should be the west bank, occupied Palestine except they only control 6% of their own land, 34% is military land, the rest is controlled by illegal Israeli settlements. 4000 religious zealots in 36 sttlements control all the water supplies in this region. Electricity is only available for five ‘legal’ Palestinian villages which,combined, cover an area of 10 km squared. (Legal according to Israel, a flagrant recidivist when it comes to international law.) Read the rest of this entry »
Our first night was spent in Al Jiftlik, a village with the surreal scenario of being half area B and half area C, meaning half gets electricity and building rights while the other half lives in the 9th Century. (We ate in area B and slept in area C, at least Palestinians still have permission for this.) This is the village reported by previous delegations as having a tent school due to Israel’s refusal to allow the Palestinians to educate themselves. Read the rest of this entry »
