Visa Battles and Settler Pogroms Part III

As said in part II, after I somehow managed to convince the Israeli officials to give me a new visa, I went home, a little less naive as I came. If I spent too long here in this crazy country, I'm afraid not much of my 'precious' naivety will remain.

The bus to Ramallah was crowded and I had to stand all the way, driving on small bumpy roads. I was tired, after two short nights of sleep, but I was even more tired of Israel and its 'security policies'.

I couldn't wait to go back to 'easy' Nablus, where the worst hassle you get is comments in the street and ridiculous arrangements in the service to sit down all the women together to protect them from 'pervert' men.

In Ramallah the crazy circus began (or continued... depending on how you look at it). The streets were loaded with shopping people, because of the upcoming Eid al Adha holiday. In the service station, all the services were gone. Normally it is filled with yellow and orange vans waiting to take you. Now it was filled with people and lots of bags, waiting to be taken. I was handed a number (No I didn't have to file an application for that, or stand in line for it). I was surprised to find some form of organisation to exist in Palestine. And it actually worked. Whenever a service drove in, a man began calling the numbers that were up and this proved to be able to control the crazy crowd.

When I had finally mounted the service and was able to sit, I almost immediately fell asleep. After around 45 minutes, I woke up to check if we were coming close to Nablus. I didn't recognize the environment and saw us driving down a hill in line with several hundred other cars. In the valley there was a huge traffic jam. I asked the woman sitting next to me what happened and why we weren't driving on the normal road. She told me that she didn't really know, but that the service driver had to take this back road, because the other road was closed down by Israeli army vehicles.

Once we came closer we became aware that the traffic jam wasn't only the result of tons of vehicles trying to get back on the main road again. The main road was covered with army vehicles and when we came even closer I saw hippie-looking girls, with long hair and long skirts, standing on the road: Settlers. That's why the road had been closed by the Israeli army! But why, really why had the army decided to do such a thing? If there's people interfering in the public realm and obstructing the public safety, the state's institutions should in any normal case stop these people. You can't walk on public roads, especially on main roads, and the police will take you away if you do so. Not in this case. Because this involved Israeli settlers, the people weren't taken of the road, the (Palestinian) traffic was redirected instead, to prevent a confrontation with the settlers... Israeli officials prove time and again to be masters in creative solutions.

By then we were still under the impression that it was a small incident. It wasn't until later that we heard on the radio what had caused this trouble. In Hebron the army had finally decided to evict a big group of settlers out of a house in the city center. The Israeli court had ordered the eviction weeks before. This enraged Israeli settlers, not only in Hebron but over the entire West Bank and severe attacks on Palestinians, and to a lesser extent on the Israeli army, were the result.

When it comes to settlers the Israeli army has a long history of not acting against settler agression towards Palestinians. Every year's olive harvest is obstructed by numerous settler attacks on Palestinian farmers with Israeli soldiers standing idly by, in most cases. The Israeli army sees itself in a difficult position: taking sides against people from its 'own kind' or allowing indiscriminate violent attacks on Palestinians which portray a very dark image of Israel abroad.
Slowly the Israeli state has come to understand that the settlers don't really help Israel to sell its story to the rest of the world. The settlers have proven to be very bad PR agents. That's why in Israel the pressure is mounting to crack down on settler violence.

But so far, there's not much reflection of this in real life. In the rare incidences that the Israeli army has acted against the settlers, this has been widely covered in all the (international) media. The cases where the army fails to respond or even support the settlers in their behavior don't get the same amount of coverage.
This is top-level PR! While Zimbabwe is currently doing anything it can to deny the severity of their massive cholera problem, Israel is not even trying to deny the settler violence, because it knows by doing so it would make a complete fool of itself. Credibility is everything in PR and denial kills your credibility.
No-one seriously believes the Zimbabwean claims that there's no cholera crisis, instead it's better to do damage control. To say: yes it's true and then give it a twist you like. In this case: oh this settler agression!! But look how great we are trying to fight it.

If you live it from the inside, you know that this is not really true. Keep in mind that the Israeli government is heavily subsidizing settlers and (thus) stimulating Israeli people to live in settlements in the Palestinian territories. At the same time it is the Israeli state that ALLOWS (as in: gives the right to) every settler to carry a GUN inside the Palestinian territories. A Palestinian friend of mine that has been working and living in Israel for years (and has an Israeli ID!!), can not even take a simple kitchen knife with him in his car, even though he is a cook for profession.

Anyhow, when we slowly approached the settlers the service driver suddenly decided to take a dirt road on the left, driving by fields of crops, eventually leading up to a small village. Many cars were doing the same thing. As we were slowly bumping along the rocky and uneven road, the situation began to sink in: So this is now the main road from Ramallah to Nablus... welcome to Palestinian life, where your ethnic identity determines how you are being treated instead of labels such as 'perpetrator' or 'victim', let alone where you are being treated for your own behavior. What goes around, comes around. But here in Palestine, it takes a damn long time to come around...

The villagers looked quite surprised to see this parade passing by their houses. When we hit the main road again, for quite some time it seemed to be over. But just before Nablus trouble found us again. Right before Huwarra village there was another huge traffic jam. I still thought it had to do with the Eid buzz everywhere and with the previous jam that had just disrupted traffic.

So we waited in line... again. As with the previous jam, the movement was very slow and again cars started taking things into their hands. Palestinians master at creative solutions as well: creating roads where there aren't any. Our service driver proved to be quite an impatient guy and I loved him for that, because I badly wanted to go home. He followed some cars down this field, to reach a small dirt road running parallel to the main road. When we were driving on this road, we saw how long the traffic jam was and I was just relieved that he hadn't decided to wait his turn. Then the road ended and the cars in front of us drove through the fields again to get back to the road. Not our driver though. Whether he was truly creative or truly impatient, or just adventurous I don't know, but in any case the driver had decided to continue. All of a sudden we found ourselves driving through an olive orchard. Ah, Palestinian people... As we say in Holland: "Voor geen gat te vangen"(can't be catched by any hole). Somehow Palestinians always find a way, always manage somehow. Like in Gaza, when being confronted with massive food and medicine shortages they've started digging tunnels to get the stuff through.

When we were back on the main road approaching Huwarra checkpoint (to enter Nablus) another traffic jam was awaiting us. This together with the news on the radio made me realize that this was serious business and things were seriously going wrong.
Army vehicles were all around us and it made me wondering what exactly was happening at Huwarra. This time there was even less progress than in the other jams and we simply had to wait. The bus in front of us stopped and people were getting out of the bus and walking towards the checkpoint, which wasn't that far away anymore and which you have to cross by foot anyway. For some reason the people in our service didn't move, so I didn't as well.. not sitting next to the door and too tired to move anyway.

Thank god I didn't. When we finally approached the checkpoint we saw soldiers everywhere and we heard angry yelling. I realized that there must be something with settlers, but I wasn't able to see any or to understand what was going on. When we came more close soldiers started asked the driver whether we had place in our service. As it turned out every Palestinian at the checkpoint had to be transferred into a vehicle and for one time we could all pass the checkpoint by car. I looked on the right and saw Palestinian people standing, with a lot of soldiers trying to hold them back. But even though the people standing had a 'bring it on' attitude, I didn't see them making attempts to do anything. Then I looked left and I was shocked to see a huge crowd of young Israeli settlers. At their side no soldiers trying to hold them back though. I was quite intimidated by their aggressive looks and was glad I found myself in the car.

Seeing this I knew that all three traffic jams were created by settlers and I became quite upset. The army had the power to send these people away. With peaceful Palestinian demonstrations they show time and again that they are perfectly able to disperse large crowds and force them to leave a particular site. With Palestinians they don't refrain from using teargas, sound bombs, rubber-coated bullets and even live ammunition. Why were they sending away the Palestinian people as if these people were the ones that had come to the checkpoint for violence, while they were mere travellers?

The soldiers were just standing there like puppets, waiting for someone, some higher power to pull their strings. Then we drove through the checkpoint leaving this crazy situation behind and I got even more upset when I saw that the army had completely closed down the checkpoint from the other side. How were people supposed to get home now? Huwarra is a crucial checkpoint for many students studying at the university of Nablus, but living outside of Nablus. Every afternoon it's flooded with students wanting to go home. I was so offended when I thought of these people now not being able to return home, because the Israeli army doesn't want to send a group of aggressive settlers away. Of course a confrontation had to be prevented, but why are the Palestinians punished for it, while the actions were being committed by the settlers?

Later on I heard that my observations were true and worse. Stones had been thrown, cars had been burnt. In Hebron itself, the violence was even much more horrible. Click on this link to read about this: http://haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1043795.html

After two days of battle for a new visa, this was truly what I needed when I got home (and actually I wasn't even home yet...). At that point I had just completely had it with Israel and its people, disgusted. I was incredibly relieved once I was back in Nablus, surrounded by a sense of normalcy and no signs of settler violence. When I finally reached home I was angry, drained, slightly depressed, disappointed and overall very tired. That afternoon when I left Jerusalem I had thought that it was finally over, as I had mistakingly thought several times before. But this time I was also proven to be wrong. It seemed to me that the games they play with you never really stop, but I sincerely hope that this is not true.