videos

I was looking for some more reports about yesterday's news online, and I found these videos on YouTube.

Here is al Jazeera's report on the little boy shot in Na'alin yesterday


Another video of the house in Beit Haninah being blown up. I couldn't find anything on al Jazeera about it.


Here is an al Jazeera report on the court ruling ordering the wall in the village of Jeyyous to be moved, giving the village back some, but far from all, of their agricultural land.


This is an episode of an al Jazeera series called "Street Food." It talks about food in Jerusalem, for both Israelis and Palestinians. It was interesting, but I have to admit that the part I liked best was the video of the markets in the Old City.

A 9 year old boy was killed in an anti wall protest

The village of Na'alin has been in the news lately, at least the news here. They have been protesting the construction of the wall which will cut much of the agricultural land from the village. These protests seem to always have a group of foreign or Israeli activists who are committed to nonviolence, but their protests are often forcefully dispersed. That is where the young man was shot in the foot with a rubber bullet while he was bound and blindfolded. The officer who was holding him has been suspended for 10 days pending an investigation into whether he actually ordered the shooting. And today a 9 year old boy was shot and killed. It is so sad.

more about the destruction of Beit Hanina's olive groves

This is the only other mention I found online of the destruction yesterday in Beit Hanina. I wish there were more pictures, but the article says that the Israelis have declared it a closed military zone to keep people out.

IOA bulldozes thousands of dunums of Palestinian lands

[ 23/06/2008 - 05:04 PM ]

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM, (PIC)-- Israeli occupation authority's bulldozers on Monday morning started destroying thousands of dunums of Palestinian lands in Beit Hanina village in occupied Jerusalem. Saleh Da'ajna, head of the village's municipal council, said that the IOA bulldozers were paving the lands for construction of the separation wall. He pointed out in a statement to the PIC reporter that the destruction was going on in the southern area of the village. Da'ajna said that the Israeli occupation forces were blocking village inhabitants from approaching their lands in the area after it was declared a closed military zone. The municipal council announced that the separation wall seized 2,000 dunums of village lands in the first phase and the new construction would confiscate 5,500 dunums more.

Israeli army uproots 500-year-old olive grove in Beit Hanina near Jerusalem

Source Uploaded by Steph PS on 7 Jun 07, 2.10PM PDT.

A friend called me a couple days ago and told me that the Israelis were going to cut down or remove some groves of olive trees in Beit Hanina to make way for the wall. Some of the trees were her father's. I bought oil from them just last fall. We talked about going over there to take some pictures and I looked around online to see if there was anything about a protest. Unfortunately I just read that they already cut them down this morning. Imagine killing 500 year old trees to put up that horrible wall. Here is the article from Ma'an News Agency.

Jerusalem – Ma'an - Israeli army bulldozers uprooted more than two hundred olive trees in Beit Hanina north of Jerusalem on Monday morning amid resistance by Fatah activists and other national forces.

Spokesman for the leadership of the Fatah movement in the territory of Jerusalem Dimitri Diliani said that Israeli soldiers went into the valley in the southern town of Beit Hanina and razed the 500-year-old olive grove.

He added that Fatah activists in cooperation with other national forces tried to stop them.

He said that the Israeli authorities aim is to confiscate the lands surrounding Beit Hanina as part of their policy to pressure the Arab community of Jerusalem and its surroundings.

Diliani added that a sit in will be staged in Beit Hanina on Monday afternoon in protest at the land confiscation. A peaceful protest is also due to take place on Friday to demonstrate against Israeli practices against the residents of the town.

The secretary of the Fatah movement in Beit Hanina, Muhammad Hamed Matur, said that Israeli forces have used excessive force against citizens who are defending their land.

Hatem Gharably, a member of the Fatah movement, pointed out that the Israeli aithorities have confiscated two-thirds of the town's land and are now trying to take over the remainder.

Gharably added that the townspeople are determined to oppose such Israeli practices. He appealed to the international community to take on its responsibilities in the defense of the citizens and their property.

visiting

I went to visit my sister-in-law a few days ago, and snapped a few pix I wanted to share. She has a pretty view of the local mosque from her front yard.
Behind the house there is a field where they had just harvested grain. I don't know if it was barley or wheat, but I know they grow both in this area. My husband brought me a sack of freshly ground barley last week, which I have been adding to my bread recipe. It makes the bread a bit heavy, brown and flavorful. I wish I could have taken better pictures, but when you are visiting someone, it's not nice to wonder off taking pictures of the neighborhood. If you look carefully, you can see some sheep in the field, eating what was left. The bags are full of grain. There were a couple of horses wandering around too, and even a camel, but they left before I could excuse my self to go take the pictures.
The biggest problem was that it was almost maghrib (sunset) and the area I wanted to shoot was due west.
Maybe I will invite my self over one morning to get a better picture.
The farmer drove his car around after the sun went behind the hill, gathering the grain.
A few days before, I had visited a friend that lives in a neighborhood that has been cut up by the wall.
Can you see the truck with the furniture below? He is selling the furniture as he drives through the neighborhood, calling out over a loudspeaker as he drives along. I don't know who buys their furniture off of the back of a truck. They are often the gaudiest kinds. Some places they sell vegetables that way, and there are trucks that go around picking up empty gas cylinders to refill. There even used to be a man in our neighborhood who sold carpets in the street, but he carried them on his shoulders and walked up and down the hills with them. Now that is a tough job.

Traveling in Beit Hanina

Said Rhateb was born in 1972, five years after Israeli soldiers fought their way through East Jerusalem and claimed his family's dry, rock-strewn plot as part of what the Jewish state proclaimed its "eternal and indivisible capital". The bureaucrats followed in the army's footsteps, registering and measuring Israel's largest annexation of territory since its victory over the Arab armies in the 1948 war of independence. They cast an eye over the Rhateb family's village of Beit Hanina and its lands, a short drive from the biblical city on the hill, and decided the outer limits of this new Jerusalem. The Israelis drew a line on a map - a new city boundary - between Beit Hanina's lands and most of its homes. The olive groves and orchards were to be part of Jerusalem; the village was to remain in the West Bank.

The population was not so neatly divided. Arabs in the area were registered as living in the village - even those, like Rhateb's parents, whose homes were inside what was now defined as Jerusalem. In time, the Israelis gave the Rhatebs identity cards that classified them as residents of the West Bank, under military occupation. When Said Rhateb was born, he too was listed as living outside the city's boundaries. His parents thought little of it as they moved freely across the invisible line drawn by the Israelis, shopping and praying inside the walls of Jerusalem's Old City.

Four decades later, the increasingly complex world of Israel's system of classification deems Said Rhateb to be a resident of the West Bank - somewhere he has never lived - and an illegal alien for living in the home in which he was born, inside the Jerusalem boundary. Jerusalem's council forces Rhateb to pay substantial property taxes on his house but that does not give him the right to live in it, and he is periodically arrested for doing so. Rhateb's children have been thrown out of their Jerusalem school, he cannot register a car in his name - or rather he can, but only one with Palestinian number plates, which means he cannot drive it to his home because only Israeli-registered cars are allowed within Jerusalem - and he needs a pass to visit the centre of the city. The army grants him about four a year.

There is more. If Rhateb is not legally resident in his own home, then he is defined as an "absentee" who has abandoned his property. Under Israeli law, it now belongs to the state or, more particularly, its Jewish citizens. "They sent papers that said we cannot sell the land or develop it because we do not own the land. It belongs to the state," he says. "Any time they want to confiscate it, they can, because they say we are absentees even though we are living in the house. That's what forced my older brother and three sisters to live in the US. They couldn't bear the harassment."

from "Worlds Apart" by Chris McGreal in The Guardian

For years I have thought that someone like the BBC or Al Jazeera should do a piece about the situation of the people who live in Beit Haninah, especially "Beit Haninah al balad," also called "Beit Haninah tahht," Lower Beit Haninah. The village of Beit Hanina was occupied by Israel in 1967. It was outside of the Jerusalem municipal borders while under Jordanian and British Mandate rule, but Israel incorporated part of the land into the much enlarged municipal borders. As the excerpt above mentions, most of the village's land was incorporated into Jerusalem, but the oldest part of the village where most of the people lived was left in the West Bank. But lines on maps were not easily seen on the ground, before this decade at least, and the people of Beit Hanina went on trying to live their lives as normally as possible. The village grew over the years, as villages usually do. Many Hanayyna (people from Beit Hanina) built on their lands that had been annexed to Jerusalem, and "Upper Beit Hanina" became more built up than the older area down the hill. The close, interconnected families of Beit Hanina were spread out on both sides of the border.In the last 10 years, I don't remember precisely when it was completed, the Israelis built a highway that cut through Beit Hanina, between the Upper and Lower neighborhoods. This was one of those roads meant to connect the settlements to Jerusalem, and only Israelis and Jerusalem residents are allowed on it, even though it is in the West Bank. There were a couple overpasses, so that the new highway went over the roads connecting the two halves of the village. Some land was confiscated for the highway, some trees and houses were lost, but mostly life went on as it had before.

(click on the images for larger versions)

After the outbreak of the al Aqsa intifada in September of 2000 and the completion of that road, Israel started cutting off more and more of the roads that connected Jerusalem to the West Bank, so they could control who entered and exited through the checkpoints at the main roads. The old road between lower Beit Haninah and Bir Nabala just to the north was for a while a way to bypass the checkpoint on the main road between Ramallah and northern East Jerusalem. So the Israelis blocked the road to Bir Nabala with a large mound of rocks, earth and garbage scraped up from the land around it. You could walk around it or climb over it, but you couldn't drive through it. There are a lot of people in Bir Nabala who are in the construction business, and occasionally one of them would brave taking a bulldozer and clearing a path through for cars, but the Israelis would just come back and build the earth mound again. I used to feel sorry for the people in the last house on the road just before Bir Nabala, because it was sort of isolated and much closer to Bir Nabala. If they wanted to use a car to bring their grocieries to the house, they would have to go to Beit Haninah even though Bir Nabala was much closer. But I think for the majority of the residents of Lower Beit Haninah life went on without much change, because their "center of life" was very much focused on Jerusalem.

I have used Google Earth to measure the distance between two places in Beit Haninah to illustrate how upper and lower Beit Haninah have been cut off. The distance by road between point A in lower Beit Hanina and point B in Upper Beit Hanina on the map below is 0.48 miles (0.77km).
Then one day, the Israelis removed the earth mound between Bir Nabala and Beit Hanina, and instead blocked the underpasses that connected Upper and Lower Beit Hanina. That created a serious disruption in the Hanayyna's lives. Now, to get from one neighborhood to the other, they had to take a much longer route through Bir Nabala and the Ram checkpoint. What used to be a short drive of only a half a mile became over 4 1/2 miles (7.8km). Sure, 4 1/2 miles might seem short to you, but the road to Bir Nabala was very poor, and the cars had to go very slowly and if 2 cars passed each other, one of them had to drop its wheels off the pavement on one side. Then they had to wait to pass through the checkpoint, which was often crowded and time consuming. That is if they could pass at all. Anyone with a west Bank ID couldn't pass even if they owned land or even lived in the Jerusalem side, like the man in the story above. At first, the barrier was just another earth mound, and you could walk over it. Some people would dig it out a bit to make it easier for the old ladies and children to climb over. There were lots of kids who climbed over, because the Beit Hanina's girls' and boys' schools were on opposite sides! People from lower Beit Haninah were cut off from easy access to their property, jobs, better medical care, worship in their holy places and the city that was at the center of their lives. And of course families had a harder time visiting each other. But as long as the road was only blocked by stones and dirt, they kept going over it, on the lookout for the Israeli soldiers who occasionally sat on the road on the Jerusalem side.

So the Israelis decided they needed a better way to block the road.
And then as a testament to the Palestinian stubborn insistence to be able to live their lives on their own lands, they blocked it even more.
At the same time, walls and fences were built all along the Israelis-only road above. Don't forget, both sides of this barrier are occupied territory according to international law. The road that is blocked was just used for Palestinians from one Palestinian neighborhood to enter another Palestinian neighborhood, trying to maintain the way of life they had for ages.

And then it got worse.

The road between Bir Nabala and Ram was cut off not once, but twice by The Wall. There are pictures of the place the road now dead ends in this post of mine. The Israelis cut a road through a hill north of Bir Nabala to give the people of these encircled villages a route to Ramallah. It is a very nice, smooth road, until you get a bit past the new checkpoint. Then you are forced to drive slowly on a narrow, bumpy road to detour around the northern most point that Israel has added to the Jerusalem boundaries, around the old airport where Israel is considering putting a new settlement for Orthodox Jews. To go from Lower Beit Hanina to Upper Beit Haninah requires driving up the newly repaved road to Bir Nabala and passing through the new checkpoint, driving north of the airport on a road so narrow that 2 cars cannot pass with all their tires on the pavement, twisting and tuning though small roads in a densely populated residential area along the edges of Qalandia refugee camp, until you get to the Qalandia border crossing. Cars with West Bank license plates cannot cross into Jerusalem, so unless you have the right license plates, you have to get out and walk through the Qalandia crossing terminal. See this video to get an idea of what you have to go through there. Then you can get in another car and head south toward Upper Beit Haninah, but you will have to pass one more checkpoint before you get there!

The trip between 2 neighbors less than a half a mile apart is now 10 long, tiresome miles (over 16km) plus 3 checkpoints.

Seriously, could you live like this? What would you do if this was your neighborhood and your family that was separated like this?

All of the pictures in this post are from http://www.beithanina.org 's photo albums . Another good site dedicated to Beit Hanina is http://hanini.org/.

This is a Door

This is a Door, originally uploaded by subterranean_.

"This sewage system is the only means of school children crossing from one side of their town to the other. The school is located on this side of the barrier, and most of the children live on the other side.

The water is filthy, hazardous and utterly disgusting. "

This photo set on Flickr is about the wall. The pictures are well labeled and worth the time. I have been wanting to take a picture of the CTRL + ALT + DELETE graffiti for ages, but I have no other reason to get out of the car in that area. It is right near the Qalandia checkpoint and refugee camp.

Google Earth

Google Earth is the coolest thing that scares me. I love playing around with it, doing a little virtual traveling, since that is the only kind of traveling I can do. Sometimes out of homesickness, I just look at my mom's house, or the places I used to live. Sometimes I wonder who all those rich people are with the big swimming pools north of the pyramids. What scares me is that if these high resolution images are available publicly, what must the government spy satellites be able to see? They must be able to see the color of my socks on the clothes line in the back yard! Anyway, my son pointed out that they have some new images of our area. Now you can see the wall, and the new road the Israelis built out of our village since they closed off all of the old roads. The new pictures are so clear that you can count the trees in my front yard.

Here's the Qalandia check point, although it is now more like an international boarder crossing. It's so huge! The first time I came here, back in the 80's, we used to just breeze through the area on our way from Jerusalem to Ramallah, never slowing down. When I moved here in the 90's , there were only occasionally soldiers there checking people. This is what it looked like in 2003, the day my son moved to Bir Zeit because going back and forth every day was too much hassle. He's just on the other side of the turnstile going toward Ramallah. The people on the left are waiting in line to go toward Jerusalem. About 3 seconds after I took this picture an older man came up to me and told me to stop taking pictures before the soldiers noticed me. I just want to point out that both sides of the checkpoint are land occupied in 1967. This video shows what it is like going through the new terminal.


I have posted a few of my pictures to Panoramio, in hopes that they will get added to the Panoramio layer in Google Earth. For now, you can look at them by going to my page on Panoramio and either looking at them on the regular Google satellite maps or click on a link to find them on Google Earth.

I have also posted a few pictures taken by members of the Christian Peacemakers Teams (a program of Brethren, Quaker and Mennonite Churches and other Christians that support nonviolence) around the village of at-Tuwani South of Hebron (al-Khalil). I had read about at-Tuwani on Joy_in_Palestine's blog. She is one of the CPT memebers living in at-Tuwani to document the harassment the Palestinians face from settlers. Here is my favorite picture from the CPT gallery, because I need something pretty after the depressing stuff.
You can also read about another CPT project on the Orphans Under Threat blog. In February, the Israeli army ordered the closure, eviction and confiscation of 2 orphanages and 3 schools owned by an Islamic charity, along with other facilities, because they say they are "Hamas run." Some members of the CPT have been staying in the orphanages to document what happens. A few days ago, soldiers came and confiscated the sewing machines and fabric from the orphanage's workshop! It is a shocking situation, but seeing sincere, committed Christians and Muslims working together gives me hope.

Need another pretty picture to balance out the ugly realities? Try this wonderful picture of rocky hillsides and olive trees near Silwad. What a wonderful view!

The end of the road

This house is now at the end of the road. The road used to go on to the next town, but the Israelis-only road and wall cut us off. I don't think it was pleasant to live next to it during the construction, and I would hate to have the guard tower over looking my back yard.
The bedu are their neighbors .Are Palestinian kids the only ones that throw old shoes into the wires? During the first intifada they used to make home made Palestinian flags, when it was illegal to display a Palestinian flag, and attach them to the shoes or a stone with a string and tangle them in the electric wires. It was a form of protest. But now the kids just do it for fun.The view at the top of the hill was beautiful. But can you imagine farming in such rocky soil?
A few flowers are ready for spring.

A fallen wall

I know it won't last, but watching the pictures of Palestinians walking over the wall to enter Egypt thrilled me. The situation in Gaza has gotten so dreadful. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said that he would not let the blockade of the Gaza Strip "turn into a humanitarian crisis," but I can't imagine what his definition of a crisis is. How much suffering and death does there need to be before he thinks it is a "crisis?" People are cold, hungry, sitting in the dark and dying for lack of medicines and access to health care, and he doesn't think it is a crisis?

Israelis-only roads

Following a link in Lawrence of Cyberia's post, I read this article about Palestinians suing for the right to use a road built on land confiscated from them. Who is allowed to use which roads is a big issue here. In the years that I have lived here, the Israelis built a highway past our house. They took land that used to be a shallow valley where the bedu lived and grazed their flocks. They turned the valley onto a hill, built a road on top of it, and then placed high walls all around it. It goes right through our neighborhood, but we have no access to it. Most of the people living in this village would not be allowed on it. It was built for the settlers to get from their settlements into Jerusalem without having to drive on the same roads as us.

I took this picture from my front yard last fall, when they were putting up some "prettier" wall outside of the wall that was already around the road. Notice the big red truck in the picture? That's the normal ground level. And it is a big truck, but the hill they built to put the road on is huge.


This system of Israeli-only roads, walls and check points leads to daily stress and frustration for every Palestinian. It is not really something to be lightly joked about, no matter what president Bush thinks.

more walking

Here is that hill I climbed yesterday. I walked along the road on the other side of the highway today. From this side I could finally see East Jerusalem . That's Beit Hanina.There are a lot of walls all over the West Bank, not just the "Apartheid Wall" variety. There are walls around everyone's property, and retaining walls built to create terraces on the hill sides for farming. These walls were in an empty area. It didn't look like anyone had farmed this land in ages. I wonder how long ago they were built? It could have been 50 years, or a couple hundred. Think how much work was involved in carrying each one of those rocks and setting it in place. I kind of have a fascination for the rocks and the rock walls. Well, if you are going to live in Palestine, you may as well like rocks. There certainly are a lot of them!
I promised some prettier pictures yesterday, so I walked to a valley where another group of bedu have settled.
I did not alter the colors in these pictures, the grass is really that brilliant green. We don't have rain here all summer, and once it begins to rain in the fall, the dry land begins to spring to life.
There were 2 donkeys wandering around in the field.Can you see the bedu homes in the back? They sort of blend into the landscape.My other fascination is with the olive trees. I love it when they are old and gnarled. These aren't too old.
While I was looking for the best shot of the olive trees, I suddenly realized that there were camels! I have never seen anyone here actually use a camel for transportation, so I assume these were being raised for the meat. It is expensive. I couldn't get close to get a better picture, and unfortunately, it was also the last picture before my camera's memory was filled.
Obviously I am not working with a high quality camera, and it only holds 11 pictures at it's best resolution. Oh, well. Another day, inshaAllah.

The end of the road

It was bright and sunny today, and much warmer outside than in the house, so I decided to take a walk. The village I live in has been almost completely surrounded by Israel's wall. They cut off every old road out of our area and built a new road to Ramallah for us, and then put a checkpoint on it. So there are just 4 villages in our open air prison, and a couple twenty-something soldiers guard the entrance day and night.

This road used to be the main road out of our area, and then after the intifada started, they blocked all the other roads, so it became the only road out. Now the road dead ends at the wall. The sign over the road says "Bir Nabala Welcomes You," although this was the end of Bir Nabala. The other side says "have a safe trip," or something like that. They put the sign up backwards! No matter, almost no one sees it now. If you walk around the wall to the right, you see what is left of one of the buildings that was in the way of the wall.
I decided to walk along the wall, up the hill, to see if I could still get a glimpse of East Jerusalem.
Many Bedu (beduin) families still live in the open areas between the villages, but they are running out of space. Between the wall and the "Israelis only" highway, They have a lot less room to move around in.
It will be about 40F/4C tonight. I hope they are warm enough. I know the pictures are small, but you can see that this is where they live; you can see the line of laundry. The wall that goes across the picture below is the "Israelis only" road.
This is the view of Bir Nabala from the top of the hill. I had my back against The Wall when I took the picture, and that's the "Israelis only" Road in the valley. It looks kind of pretty from up here.On the other side of this wall, it's considered Jerusalem.

Here is where the "Israelis only" road meets "The Wall." On the other side of The Wall is Atarot, where the Israelis are considering building a new settlement. They are talking about 10,000 flats, for Orthodox Jews, in an area between East Jerusalem and Ramallah, completely surrounded by Palestinian neighborhoods. All the neighborhoods you see in the picture below are Palestinian, and all are on land occupied in 1967. Atarot is currently an industrial zone.
Can you see the tower in the picture above near where the road meets "The Wall?" Here is the same area, so you can see how high the road was built above the neighborhood it runs through. There was a shallow valley there before. Do you think they are trying to tell us they don't want the likes of us on their road?
Thanks for taking a walk with me. Next time I will try to find some prettier pictures.

"Change cast in concrete"

This New York Times article illustrates the situation we are in with the wall. There is a video with the article that even shows our neighborhood. I wish I could embed the video here, but I don't know how to do it when it is from the New York Times.

The video explains that it is all to protect Israel from terrorism. Of course they don't mention that if a strong, able bodied terrorist wanted to get around the barriers, he probably still can. People do it every day, as explained in Lawrence of Cyberia's great post One Thousand, Two Hundred And Seventy-Six People Per Week. (I also have no clue how the "trackback"stuff works. I am such a newb!) But it sure makes life hell for average men, women and children who just want to go to work or school, or even visit with their families. Oh, and they also have a guy from a settlement explaining how they need the wall to protect them because the communities are so close. No mention of how the settlement itself is illegal.

I guess now is an appropriate time to mention that I think that the suicide bombings of buses and shopping malls are immoral, and I am glad they aren't happening anymore. But I seriously don't think that the wall is going to make Israelis any safer in the long run. They might say "Good fences make good neighbors," but not when you build the fence through your neighbor's front lawn!