Frontline: Jerusalem...

The following is taken from an e-mail to me from my friend in Jerusalem. He has worked in Gaza on and off for a number of years. He is a highly-experienced and amazingly well-travelled IT/financial consultant, apolitical, and sagacious. His views command respect.

The Israeli settlements are expanding like a viral infection in the West Bank, especially near Jerusalem, which inevitably pisses off the Palestinians, to which the Israelis respond with capricious harassment and occasional violence.  There is a small and old-established town in the West Bank called Taybeh, not far from Ramallah, which in turn is not far from Jerusalem.  It's a nice quiet place with some ancient ruins and - more importantly - a brewery which produces an excellent German-style beer of which I have become rather fond.  Across the valley from Taybeh is an Israeli settlement which is expanding rapidly, and whose inhabitants have acquired the charming habit of turning off the water supply to Taybeh.  I'm not sure whether they feel they deserve  the water more than the locals who have lived there for centuries (but who by (Israeli) definition are all terrorist scum and vermin) or whether they do it to harass the aforementioned locals and force them to move out.  I only know about this particular case because of my love of the Taybeh product which caused us to visit the town on our tour of Palestine in 2010, but you can bet that it's repeated all over the West Bank.

One has to understand that the Israelis have absolute power, even in areas which are nominally under the control of the Palestinian Authority (which, despite what you read, is doing its best to run a good administration), and they exercise this power entirely capriciously.  One day you get waved through the checkpoints, the next day you are held up for hours while kids who are too young to shave (generally Ethiopian or Russian) minutely inspect everyone's papers  And if they find something in your passport - or maybe your taxi-driver's papers - that they don't like the look of, they just turn you away.  One day we visited three checkpoints before I could get back to my hotel in East Jerusalem.  At least one can have a bit of fun saying "spasiba dosvidanya" to any blonde checkpoint goonette.  Mind you they all carry seriously lethal-looking weaponry so one has to be a wee bit circumspect.

And then there's the Wall which runs down the middle of what used to be a dual carriageway in East Jerusalem.  So now on one side of it is the Israeli bit, on  the other the Palestinian.  If someone wants to visit a mate on the other side of the road, they now have to drive some 10-12 kilometres and queue up at a checkpoint - that is, if they have the right papers which most Palestinians are denied.  Some graffiti artist has painted ARBEIT MACHT FREI on the Wall near the main crossing from Jerusalem to Ramallah - a bit cruel perhaps but I can't help sympathising.

And there is not only the Wall, but also the segregated roads leading to settlements.  When a settlement is built, it comes with its own access road which is walled on both sides, which means that the locals can't even cross it to get to their fields, let alone use the road itself.  The upshot is that farmers can spend all day getting to and from their olive groves, pastures or whatever, even if they are only a couple of hundred yards from the village.