No way out
Ninety percent unemployment; 1,500 people in need of medical help; two weeks of total blockade during nearly a year under closure; shortages of medicines, water and food; and a civil protest staged by 500 senior citizens in front of an army checkpoint. A report from the besieged town of Beit Furiq, which lies between Itamar and Elon Moreh.
By Gideon Levy
By the middle of last week, they felt that they couldn’t take it any more. For two weeks, they’d been completely cut off, with no one allowed to enter or to leave apart from some tankers delivering water – and that only under constraint and after much pleading, when the situation had become utterly untenable. Then the mayor of Beit Furiq called the council head of the neighboring village of Beit Dajan, on the other side of the hill, and the two debated what to do. They sought the counsel of the village elders and their respective councils, and contemplated staging a demonstration or some kind of civil rebellion, although they were worried that people might be killed. And what kind of protest could the residents of two remote villages put up against the occupying Israelis at the gate – or at the checkpoint, to be more exact – without it leading to more bloodshed? Weren’t the five dead the villages had already suffered – including a man harvesting olives in his orchard and an innocent woman in her car – enough?
In the end, there was a decision to protest by parking cars in front of the roadblock. But, so as not to provoke or alarm the soldiers unnecessarily, it was decided that only the older people from both villages would come out to the checkpoint. Young drivers were more apt to become hotheaded; the senior citizens could be trusted to stay calm and not to go overboard with the protest.
And so, last Wednesday, after two weeks of being totally sealed in, all of the elderly people of Beit Furiq and Beit Dajan drove their cars – or their children’s cars – to the checkpoint that was shutting off and strangulating their villages, and parked in a long line, one after the other, car after car. Not that they had any other use for their private vehicles at this point: Since the blockade on the villages was imposed at the start of the intifada, they have been prohibited from leaving except in service taxis or supply trucks. In the past couple of weeks, those two options were also revoked.
The soldiers at the checkpoint didn’t know what to make of the quiet, elderly protesters. After an hour and a half or so of this peaceful civil rebellion, Officer Itai was summoned. Ataf Hanani, the mayor of Beit Furiq, tried to explain to Itai that Beit Furiq and Beit Dajan have always been dependent on Nablus for everything, and that the residents cannot be prevented from getting to the city. Beit Furiq and Beit Dajan are basically suburbs of Nablus, much closer to the center of the city than Gilo is to downtown Jerusalem.
After some discussion back and forth, Officer Itai announced that the blockade would be lifted the next day. The following day, last Thursday, Hanani set out for Nablus. His passage out of the village – for the first time in two weeks – was amazingly easy. The soldiers at the roadblock quickly allowed him through. But at 11 A.M., when he wished to return home (normally, traveling from Nablus to Beit Furiq takes no more than five minutes), he found about 100 cars stuck at the checkpoint at the entrance of his village. He reached his home at about 3:00 in the afternoon, four hours after he left Nablus. Four hours instead of five minutes, all for the sake of a handful of residents of Itamar and Elon Moreh living on the hill, whose security is the only thing that seems to interest Israel. And to hell with all the rest.
Thus has Beit Furiq been liberated from the siege imposed upon it; now you just have to wait a little while at the checkpoint.
A mayor, beaten
The window of the Palestinian taxi is shattered. Two days ago, settlers hurled rocks at it, near the Tapuah junction. It’s a matter of routine.
The flowers are in bloom all along the way from Qalqilyah to Nablus. Like most West Bank roads these days, this one is deserted, whether due to fear (on the part of both the settlers and the Palestinians) or prohibitions (affecting the Palestinians). All of the roads that spill onto the main highway are blocked with trenches, mounds of dirt and concrete blocks, as are most of the impromptu dirt paths that have sprung up.
It’s a depressing sight. Throughout the trip, the conversation centers on one thing: How to get there? Where is there a roadblock? Whom will the soldiers allow to pass? How long will it take? Which route is blocked?
At the Dir Sharaf checkpoint, a broad roadblock at the hub of a village, the tension rises. A long line of vehicles, including an ambulance, is standing and waiting. Whoever is allowed to pass through will be in Nablus in two minutes; whoever is refused permission will have to spend an hour and a half getting from here to there via extremely makeshift “roads.”
The soot around the windows of the building where the Hamas offices are located, a building where two Hamas leaders were killed in a rocket attack, has already been removed and the place now looks like a tranquil apartment house – as tranquil as an apartment house in Nablus can look these days. The bombed-out police headquarters still stands in ruins; pictures of the Al-Aqsa Mosque, still hanging on the wall, are the only things left intact.
At first glance, the routine of the city seems unchanged, but on closer look, one sees that it appears to be moving in slow gear. There are hardly any private vehicles on the road, only taxis. Amazingly, very few armed men are roaming the streets. Groups of gloomy-looking young men idly wander about, certain to cause any Israeli who might somehow find himself here a shiver of unease.
A poster of intifada casualty Zahi Muzhir adorns the entrance to the Balata refugee camp at the edge of the city. Balata is proud of its son. A picture of Saladin Darwazi is affixed to the ruins of his red car, destroyed in a rocket attack. “Woe to those who have struck at us,” reads the Hamas flyer affixed to the car. “Here is the place where the commander was murdered.”
Nablus already has a good share of such monuments. Dr. Rasan Hamdan leaves the offices of the organization called Medical Relief that he heads. Another doctor from the organization, Dr. Muhammed Zakaki, an expert on first-aid in a city that has been shelled a number of times, calls to say that he is stuck at the Hawara checkpoint and that he hasn’t been able to convince the soldiers to let him through. Salah Hajj Yahya, who is with Israel’s Doctors for Human Rights foundation, tries to come to the doctor’s assistance.
Last week, Dr. Hamdan wrote from Nablus to the Tel Aviv office of Doctors for Human Rights: “The Israeli soldiers are totally preventing the passage of people and goods to Beit Furiq. Water is the only product they allow to be delivered. We urgently request assistance with basic foodstuffs such as rice, sugar, oil, baby food and medicines.”
The “Medical Relief” sign on the front of Hamdan’s car enables us to get past the roadblock at the entrance to Beit Furiq. A water tanker (a gift from the Japanese government to the Palestinian Authority) is being delayed behind us. Did the Japanese know that this is what would become of their truck?
A single house belonging to the Itamar settlement sits atop a high hill overlooking all the village streets, as if to taunt the inhabitants, whose lives would be so different if it weren’t for this settlement situated right over their heads. For some time now, the villagers have been prevented from reaching their olive trees, planted on the lower part of the mountain, due to fear of the settlers who, they say, shoot at anyone who dares to approach the groves.
That’s how one local man, Farid Nasasra, was killed. We visited Nasasra’s home in January of this year, on the day in which soldiers killed Fatma Abu Jish, a clerk at the hospital in Nablus who’d been returning from work and tried to get home by way of the fields, having no other options available. Beit Furiq Mayor Hanani, who is also a farmer, told us then about the beating he had endured at the hands of the soldiers when trying to visit his aunt in Nablus. The soldiers also let the air out of his tires (his car bore an official town seal) – making him apparently the only mayor in the world to receive such treatment.
Staggering unemployment
Practically nothing has changed since then in the town hall: The same tattered black chairs still sit at the entrance; the same old man lies sprawled out on one of them; the town and national flags are displayed, as is a picture of a smiling Arafat in the mayor’s office. Hanani’s official Mitsubishi pickup truck sits in the parking lot. There is one new addition, however: Portraits of the leaders of the Popular Front – George Habash and the assassinated Abu Ali Mustafa – are stuck on the wall by the entrance.
And one other thing: A new Hebrew phrase, “tehakeh batzad” (“Wait on the side”) has been added to the lexicon of the occupation.
“Those were two very difficult weeks,” recalls Hanani. “No one came in and no one went out. After three days, when we appealed to B’Tselem and the International Red Cross, they allowed the water tankers to come in.”
There is no running water in Beit Furiq, so without the water deliveries, the place is as good as dead. Now only 40 tanks per day are allowed to enter. Why not more? Why does someone care how much water gets into the town?
In recent months, the Israel Defense Forces have been busy blocking all the improvised, alternative access roads in the town’s fields. In any case, everyone was afraid to travel on them since the soldiers started shooting at people trying to sneak through to their homes; so once again, the only way out is through the roadblock. This roadblock has also undergone some changes. At first it consisted of an impassable trench and concrete blocks; now it is manned by three soldiers in dusty uniforms who decree who goes out and who comes in – which sometimes is to say, who will live and who will die.
Hanani: “The other thing is the soldiers’ mood. Their moods are fickle. Sometimes, they sit for an hour at the roadblock without signaling to even one car to pass. There are shifts where the soldier decides not to let any car pass through. The hardship just increases. If someone is transporting food products, the soldier can decide to unload everything.
“The queue gets longer and longer. A car with young passengers can be detained for hours for no reason. And all of this mess because of 70 settlers. I understand the matter of security. As far as I’m concerned, they can take all the security measures they want, but without shutting down our lives like this.”
The unemployment rate in Beit Furiq is a staggering 90 percent. The town has 8,500 residents. Half of its labor force used to work in Israel, a third worked in the Nablus quarries, and another 10th in agriculture, as farmers or shepherds. The road to work in Israel is blocked; only a few manage to sneak through, and when they do, they stay away for a week or two, working only in the Arab villages. The stonecutters are also unemployed because of the severe economic crisis in Nablus.
As for the farmers and shepherds, either they cannot reach their lands – because of the settlers – or they cannot reach their markets – because of the soldiers. Not long ago, one chicken farmer from Beit Furiq tried to bring 10,000 live chickens to market in Nablus. Thousands of chickens expired from the heat during the long and winding journey made in order to circumvent the roadblocks.
Social service workers are also often prevented from reaching their jobs in Nablus or the surrounding villages because of the roadblocks. Before the intifada, there were 220 families registered with the town’s welfare office; now 1,000 of the 1,500 families are in need of help.
How do people manage in the face of all this? The answer to this familiar question is always the same: mutual assistance.
“I cannot eat when my neighbor has nothing,” as Hanani puts it. Those who used to eat meat once a week have stopped eating meat altogether. If they used to cook with gas, now they light bonfires. “We’ve gone backward 20 years.”
Would it be possible to visit the home of a poor family? The village officials are reluctant: It could hurt the family’s dignity or their town’s honor.
The medical situation in the virtually closed-off town: Dr. Hamdan says that there is a severe shortage of medicines. There is one clinic whose doctors come from outside. The only doctor who lives in the town works somewhere else. At the beginning of the intifada, no doctors came at all because the road was blocked by the trench.
Last Tuesday, at the height of the full blockade, the Medical Relief organization set up a mobile clinic staffed with nine doctors who had come to Beit Furiq. Some 1,500 patients came to be examined. Hamdan says that most were chronically ill people, who had been unable to receive their regular medical treatment for a long time. There were also children with respiratory infections that had gone untreated, as well as patients with anemia and high blood pressure, and many cases of intestinal illnesses brought on by the poor quality of the water. Some of the residents cannot afford to pay health insurance fees, so they are prevented from going to the regular clinic.
On the first of the month, Abla Mana’a, who suffers from diabetes, found that her supply of insulin had run out. The blockade was in full force, but her husband, Ahmed, came up with a solution: He gave NIS 120 to the driver of a water tanker, asking him to buy the insulin in Nablus and to bring it back on his return trip. And so Abla was saved.
What about dialysis patients? There are no such patients in Beit Furiq itself, but in all of the surrounding area, there are 158 people requiring dialysis treatment who must somehow make their way to Al-Watanati Hospital in Nablus, the only dialysis center for patients from Nablus, Jenin, Tul Karm and Qalqilyah and their environs. Getting there has become increasingly difficult. Newsweek magazine reported on this situation several weeks ago.
Israel Air Force jets are in the air and all eyes are turned to Nablus. This was the day of the three terror attacks and all of the headquarters in Nablus have been evacuated for fear of an Israeli bombing, which is not long in coming. Dr. Hamdan hurried to the city to be ready in case he was called to work in one of the ambulances. In the basement of Beit Furiq’s town hall, a little girl practiced playing an electric organ, alone on the floor of the spacious room. In the next room, a group of housewives in white head scarves awaited the arrival of the doctor who is giving them a course in first aid. They are preparing for every eventuality.
Meanwhile, many more cars have lined up at the roadblock, hoping to enter the village. The drivers are prohibited from approaching the intersection until a soldier signals them to do so and then only one car at a time. The taxi driver from Qalqilyah has fixed his broken window: He found a good deal in Nablus – a used windshield for NIS 800, practically his entire monthly wage.
At the Dir Sharaf checkpoint, a woman stood all upset and perspiring, dejectedly waving a fistful of documents, her face as white as a sheet. She had had surgery at the hospital in Nablus the week before and had the documents to prove it. She had just been released from the hospital and was trying to cross through the checkpoint on foot in order to get back to her home in the village of Bal’a.
“So she’ll wait a little bit. It’s not so terrible,” says the young lieutenant at the roadblock. “First let’s put things in some order here and then we’ll let her pass.”